Abstract
This study looked into the meanings of objects used in peace ritual, how these objects communicate the intention of parties involved, and how the ritual constitutes ideology on peace among the Obo Manobo people. Particularly, it is a semiotic reading of the Obo Manobo’s ritual for peace which employed Halliday’s social and functional approach to language and Lemke’s semiotic thinking. The peace ritual is found to be a semiotic system that embodies the values, symbols, and ideas of the Obo Manobos as a group. It is a multimodal communicative event that comprises various integrating elements to language, thoughts, feelings and aspirations, dramatizes collective representations, encodes the culture of the Obo Manobos and, therefore, conveys ideologies on peace. As embedded in the ritual, the Obo Manobos believe that peace is consequential effect of how they observe customary laws of the tribe, and disregarding this will result to punishment and chaos.
Highlights
The 4th century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his work Politics, is quoted saying “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human”
This study looked into the meanings of objects used in peace ritual, how these objects communicate the intention of parties involved, and how the ritual constitutes ideology on peace among the Obo Manobo people
This qualitative research employed Halliday’s (1978) social and functional approach to language and semiotics and Lemke’s (2015) distinction between icon, index and symbol which is used by many scholars who are interested in multimodal semiotics to analyze the pomaas atag to kosunayan or peace ritual of the Obo Manobo people
Summary
The 4th century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his work Politics, is quoted saying “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human”. Language use in social interaction is multilayered as it is invariably accompanied by integrating elements such as gaze, facial expressions, color, proxemics and objects (Vigliocco, Perniss & Vinson, 2014). It is increasingly becoming multimodal as men develop different ways and tools (Finol, 1994) to language their thoughts, feelings and aspirations and as discourse participants draw on a wide range of semiotic resources for the projection of meaning (Ademilokun & Olateju, 2015) which paradoxically result to greater challenge to achieve a true sense of real communication and to find meaning in human culture. Understanding messages encompasses unraveling the different modes involved in communication
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