In recent years, the attention of semiotics has strongly shifted from a textual focus to an interrogation of social, cultural, and ethnographic phenomena: rituals, collective behaviors, urban dynamics, politics, memory, and lifestyles. This shift has led to a rethinking of semiotic traditions and its analytic tools, with a specific design to create a strong dialogue with other social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and visual studies. In order to clarify what characterizes this recent cultural approach in semiotics, Anna Maria Lorusso reevaluates the work of some of the most...