The Semiotics of Contemporary Territorial Ritual in Airports

Abstract

Despite the desolate perspective presented by Geertz in Los usos de la diversidad (The Uses of Diversity)(1996) regarding the blurring of diversity in the field of anthropology since there are practically no “exotic societies” left to study, what is certain is that many myths and rites from the so-called semi-civilized societies have crept into the contemporary world. These include territorial rituals that occur nowadays in airports and are explained in this work as rites of passage belonging to this non-place (Augé, 2000), from the perspective of the semiotics of culture by Lotman (1996, 1998, 1999). It begins with the scheme proposed by Van Gennep (1984, 2008) for rites of passage and utilizes the ethnographic technique of participant observation from (Mauss, 1947; Guber, 2006; Kottak, 2007), to describe said territorial ritual. Conclusions indicate that airports function as a semiosphere where antique rites of passage from one territory to another are rewritten, a process that starts translation mechanisms seeking to mitigate the natural tension between “profane” worlds (that of the visitor seen by the Other) and “sacred” worlds (that of the one who is visited as seen by him/herself).