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The paper edition of the Anthropology of History Yearbook is the definitive version

2014, No. 1 (6), Semiotics of History

Marcin Brocki
The historical process at the ‘bifurcation point’: Yuri Lotman’s theory of cultural change

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Keywords: Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, semiotics of history, Yuri Lotman, cultural change

Abstract:
According to Lotman in the later stage of his work, the historical process consists of periods of stable and predictable turns of events and ‘explosions’ which can change the direction in which culture develops, and the vector of this change is impossible to predict a priori. The theory of ‘explosion’, in which coincidence and the extra-structural (human) factor determine the development of the historical process, is at the heart of his view on the way semiosphere is organised and organises itself. The article confronts such a model of cultural change with empirical material concerning grass-root experiences of the ‘great change’ at the turn of the 80s and 90s.

About Author:
BROCKI MARCIN – ethnologist, anthropologist of culture, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków.

References
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