CULTURE AND VIOLENCE: SELF-DESCRIPTION OF THE CORE OF THE SEMIOSPHERE AND SOCIABLE OPPRESSION
Text topic: Studies
- culture
Text author: Софија М. Кошничар
The topic of this paper spans different aspects of sociable violence in the bordering prose of Ivo Andrić. Such phenomena have been considered in a semiotic key, from the angle of theory on semiosphere with the dominance of inelastic semiospheric cores of cultures. The emphasis has been place on the investigation of violence as a form of self-security mechanism of cultural systems. Thus the torture over the individual and the collective, and its different psycho-physical forms - modus procedendi i.e. the practice of such cultures is, more or less, manifested in all cultural segments. Violence is a significant ruling mechanism in an inelastic semiospheric core and it is performed up the entire hierarchy of social ladder. By analysis of Andrić’s historical prose, and on the topic of suffering in Bosnia in a hiatus of three kingdoms, significant differences have been noticed in self-describing of cultures of the East and the West, as well as their different attitudes towards the nature of violence, torture, harassment and humiliation of the subjects, or those who break the codes of self-description of semiospheric core. When speaking about violence, some indicators have been noticed that modernized Europe has somewhat changed standards of self-description in relation to cultural tradition of the Porta. Namely, even though Europe from the times of the Middle Ages and later, all the way to crucial reforms of the codes of self-description (originated under the influence of a wide wave of enlightenment and later the French bourgeois revolution) had known the cruelty of violence even during legal execution of a legal norm, its significantly changed standards in favour of humanization of legal norm and war ethics in the 19th century – contributed to the fact that remaining practice of cruel violence of the Turkish system in Europe in recent times sees it as a barbarian act and incivility and strives to eliminate this brutal violence from legitimate standards of self-description of the European culture. Just moral opinion, founded on contemporary understanding of the respect for personality, which assumes avoiding of suffering – was the crucial parameter which contributed to humanization of the then legitimate brutal violence, typical of the inelastic semiospheric cores such as those of the Ottoman empire.