Bound by topos : civilizations and their semiotopes

Abstract This paper outlines a semiotic approach to the study of civilizations by focusing on topological-existential sign systems that encode a people’s stance to habitation. The notion of civilizational semiotopes is introduced to capture persisting systems of meaning that civilizations deploy toward the environment to form and reflect upon their topoi , both the physical spaces they occupy and the virtual landscapes they imagine and associate themselves with. There is a need to explicate how civilizations deploy such topological systems of representation to encode existential meaning about their world, and what happens to them as both civilizations and environments change. To account for this interrelatedness, the paper provides a semiotic account of the notion of civilization, which is positioned in a sign interrelationship with culture and nature. Civilization functions as the interpretant that enables culture to represent nature. Subsequently, the article proposes the new concept of civilizational semiotopes and describes their signification process along two individual-phenomenological and two collective-social elements as found in existential semiotics.