Abstract
A review of Marcel Danesi & Paul Perron's Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U Press, 1999) hails this work as a mark of the maturity of the interdisciplinary field of cultural semiotics & examines a series of unresolved problems of cultural analysis in the context of Danesi & Perron's treatment, stressing the importance of preserving the freedom of semiotics from the constraints of traditional disciplines while resisting the temptation to abandon their empirical territory. Particular attention is given to the difficulty of determining the semiotic ideologies underlying semiotic practices of replication & the relationship between anchored semiotic ideology & metasemiotic awareness. Nancy Felson's (2000) analysis of Pindar's Greek ode "Pythian Four" is explicated as an exemplary study of the semiotics of performed verbal art, & the contextuality of semiosis is shown to present a serious challenge to social research. 80 References. J. Hitchcock