CULTURAL SEMIOTICS: TOWARDS A CULTURAL INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ARABIC PATRIMONY “SSAALIK’S POETRY AS A MODEL”

Abstract

The present study aims at showing the importance of cultural semiotics in the study of patrimony, SSAALIK’s poetry as a model, highlighting the semiotic mechanisms that characterize culture and helped in producing this poetry and controlling the perceptions of this poetry. We will also deconstruct the different patterns that this type of poetry expresses.

To achieve these objectives, we suggest working on some cultural-semiotic concepts that belong to the cultural-semiotics such as: the concept of culture as well as semiosphere and the semiotic mechanisms that culture applies. One of these mechanisms is the symbolic and structural modelling of the world, and the mechanism that orients the behaviour culturally. Another mechanism is the function of culture in memory and forgetting. Then the study moves to SSAALIK’s poetry as a case study, working on the signification of SSAALAKA in the Arabic culture which suggests poverty and robbery. Poets of this genre gained a kind of independency, consolidating their existence away from the mental and tribal system that didn’t acknowledge their indifference. Thus, they and their poetry remained in the margin of the semiosphere, while the tribal poets occupied the centre of it. This is why their poetry was erased from the cultural memory, describing it as a no-cultural, non- textual, and a chaotic. However, viewing it from an external perspective, this genre of poetry expresses another system characterized by its own patterns setting it different from tribal poetry.