Konvertēšanās un semiotiska analīze

The paper is divided into five sections. The first one, ‘The focus of semiotics’, explains what the characteristic rationale of semiotics is in dealing with religious conversion: describing, analyzing, articulating, and interpreting the various signs, texts, discourses, and cultures through which conversion is signified and communicated, thus becoming a perceptible phenomenon for both the converts and for those who surround them. The second section, ‘Conversion among sociality, individuality, and transcendence’, clarifies the position of semiotics as regards two dialectics. On the one hand, the dialectic between sociality and individuality: affirming that conversion always tends to conform with a certain ‘religious style’, with a certain ‘spiritual language’, does not downplay its individual creativity; on the contrary, although following a certain ‘conversion grammar’, converts can find their own personal ways of constructing a new spiritual identity, exactly like using common words does not prevent poets from exploring new linguistic paths of meaning. On the other hand, the dialectics between sociality and transcendence: affirming that conversion always entails a social dimension does not deny its stemming from the experience of an encounter with transcendence; on the opposite, the hypothesis of such encounter can be maintained, although semiotics is academically bound to deal with the social outcomes of this encounter. The third section, ‘Semiotics as a new perspective on conversion’, points out the specificity of the semiotic perspective, describing it not as much as a new methodology as a new point of view on already established methods. The third final sections survey the main trends of semiotic research on conversion with reference to the three main approaches to the study of signification: those of Saussure, Peirce, and Lotman.