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ISSN 2084–1418
The paper edition of the Anthropology of History Yearbook is the definitive version

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

Zbigniew Libera
Semiotics of medicine in the early modern times and the ethnosemiotics in the 19th and 20th century ethnomedicine

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Keywords: semiotics of culture, semiotics of medicine, ethnosemiotics, history of medicine, ethnomedicine

Abstract:
The semiotics of the 19th and 20th century ethnomedicine was a continuation of the semiotics of doctrines and medical practices from before the ‘semiotic turning point’ in the middle of the 18th and the early 19th centuries. Ethnomedicine had direct roots in Old Polish medicine. As such, it drew from basic traditions of European medicine, from the oldest branch of the study of signs: medical semiotics. The situation of ethnosemiotics and ethnomedicine documented by ethnographers in the 20th century also corresponds to the history of medicine of the 18th and 19th centuries, where elements of classical semiotics and symptomatology coexisted. I relate the problems of ethnosemiotics to the category of theoretical semiotics, but I am mainly interested in them in the ethnographic and historical context, i.e. I concentrate on the rules, knowledge, and practices according to which countryside ‘physicians’ decided what a sign was as well as classified and used signs, in comparison to practising physicians in the early modern times.

About Author:
LIBERA ZBIGNIEW – ethnologist, anthropologist of culture, Professor in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University, Krakow.

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