Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a reading of classical theoretical texts devoted to (cultural-anthropological) narrative studies on the one hand, and ethnographical research on taboos on the other. The aim is to present a narrative theoretical model based on the dialectic of normativity and its ruptures.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of my contribution is to present theories of taboo - and other and forbidden spaces - as a theory of narratives, vice versa. To put it bluntly: My contribution attempts to read an author like Mary Douglas as a narrative theorist, and an author like Yuri Lotman as a theorist of taboo.

The crucial point is in the culturally productive dialectic of prohibition and transgression, norm and norm-breaching. I want to understand this movement as a fundamental process of world making (N. Goodman). Therefore, world - more preciously `Welt`, in the sense of Husserl - consists of an ensemble of norms/prohibitions that can be broken. Ultimately, this is also what narration consists of: as a concatenation of norm structures or prohibited spaces and their disrupting. And, this concatenation generates the semantic heat on which what we call `culture` is built.

When asked why this dynamic is so, I give answers from two very different fields: From the perspective of structuralist semiotics, it is argued that the dialectic of prohibition and prohibition-breach encodes the basic premise that language consists of: syntagma and paradigm. Anthropologically, on the other hand, I argue that this dialectic translates precisely those two frames that are necessary for the constitution of a self, namely identity and alterity.

Besides a closer understanding of the cultural figuration of prohibitions/broken prohibitions, my lecture aims to stimulate the theoretical dialogue between different cultural anthropological fields, the dialogue between narratological-discursive theories on the one hand and empirical-social on the other.