Cultural Semiotics Research Articles

Between the Culture and Barbarians: Semiotic Analysis of the Poem „Venetian Mask...“ by Giedrė Kazlauskaitė

This article presents the semiotic analysis of Giedrė Kazlauskaitė poem Venecijietiška kaukė… The research aims to delve into the structures of the poetic world of Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, which is achieved through executing a detailed semiotic analysis of one poem. Accordingly, this paper follows the semiotic framework of the analytical trajectory, which encompasses the analysis through the means of discursive, narrative, and logical semantic levels. In addition, the study includes Yuri Lotman’s discourse of the concept of the mirror in cultural semiotics. Findings derived from the semiotic analysis suggest that the figures of the mask and the mirror become central representations at the discursive level of the poem, as they exist in a paratopic space - the make-up room. The mask and the mirror appear in Kazlauskaitė’s poetry as an essential tool for shaping one’s own identity. Moreover, the analysis of the poem is supplemented with the expression of the passions of anger and jealousy. Such approach highlights two different forms of anger: destruction arising from jealousy and a creative act. These forms suggest that the passion of anger drives the subject to the act of doing. Furthermore, in this poem, the figure of the poet is not presented as calm or accommodating, but rather as angry and unafraid to show contempt.

Rewriting Girlhood. Ambiguous Bodies in Contemporary American Visual Arts: Sally Mann’s At Twelve

Drawing on cultural studies, gender theories, feminist theories, visual culture and semiotics, the present study investigates the subversive ways in which particular visual representations of teenage bodies introduce the generic transgression of cultural boundaries and limits in order to reflect the process of identity formation. Departing from various theories of corporeality and the semiotics of the body as a cultural entity, this study looks at contemporary American photographer Sally Mann’s collection of photographs, At Twelve, in order to discern the visual mechanisms through which the staged representation of adolescent girls introduces the generous subversion of generic normative categories such as gender, age or social status. Furthermore, the present analysis suggests that trespassing boundaries is a necessary stage in the construction of self-sustainable identities in the aftermath of-postmodernism. Thus, the article tackles gender construction as a cultural edifice in which visual representation plays a significant part. Sally Mann’s photography is eventually viewed as an instance of the contemporary interrogation of norms and boundaries of classical Western culture, as well as an innovative visual documenting of the transgressions, transitions and avoidance of limits that characterize adolescence.

Auto-communicative reconstruction of meaningfulness in musical randomness: reclaiming musical order on Facebook

This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the “old” and “new” orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the “new musical order” that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets.

HAPPINESS AS A DOUBLE GESTURE OF A TRIGGER: BREAKING AND CONCEPTING

The background of the study is an existential psychological analysis of the phenomenon of happiness as a state of radical break with the dominant signifiers of symbolic hegemony and, at the same time, voluntary value filling of the formed vacuum in the symbolic structure of a split subject with new meanings corresponding to his self. Research methods: structural psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, semiotics of culture, hermeneutics, philosophical comparative studies, deconstruction and universal ethics, theological methods of correlation between secular and religious models of thinking. Research results: comparison of the positive ontology of happiness in the Eastern Slavic Christian classical thought and the negative ontology of happiness in the Western post-Lacanian postmodernity; the implementation of the synthesis of images of happiness in the ways of thought of the postmodern West and the modern East on the basis of the dialogue of universalism and particularism, traditionalism and neo-modernism, personalism and collectivism. Conclusions: confirmation of the hypothesis of the double nature of happiness as a unity of metaphysical rupture and dialectical synthesis, manifested through the chronotopes of secular and religious cultures, traditions and innovations.

Cultural antropophagy today: a semiotic approach to Oswald de Andrade’s theory of culture

Close to the centenary of the Modern Art Week, this paper explores the scenario where sign studies in Brazil found its première. It pays attention to relations of some of these pioneers in semiotics with communities not solely of scholars, but also of vanguard artists, critics and other members of the intelligentsia. Oswald de Andrade reclaims some semiotic features of Tupinambás’s martial rituals to develop the notion of Cultural Antropophagy (C. A.). Supported by the methodological framework of C. S. Peirce and elements from semiotics of culture, this study explores the dialogic situation between the national “spirit” [Volkgeist] and the foreign cultures. According to B. Schnaiderman (1979), the development of semiotic studies in Russia do not as expected begins from division of other scientific programs, but from artistic vanguards and literary movements. Peirce (1931-58) in his writings about Philosophy of Science stressed many times about the social character of scientific activity. Probably endorsed by an evolutionary and semiotic criteria Peirce already had pointed out that science can flourish from other kind of cultural phenomena. Indeed, the analysis focuses Andrade’s Modernist ideas as contributions to awake a kind of “semiotic consciousness” in Brazil. I will argue that the developed idea of C. A. not just worked as the poetic motto of Brazilian Modernists but also as a key concept to an original metacultural theory and a strong factor to the development of sign studies at universities in the State of São Paulo.

Kulturoznawcze badanie intertekstualnych gier z kanonem. Propozycje teoretyczno-metodologiczne

The role the canon plays in culture will be discussed in the paper. The canon can be seen as one of the most important media of cultural memory, a kind of cultural grammar or a vital semantic resource which influences a huge amount of new texts. This sort of textual variations on the canon may be considered secondary cultural mnemotechniques; in the same way intertextuality may be interpreted as a tool of active remembering. From the perspective of the semiotics of culture the above-mentioned canon-based hypertexts serve not only as memory-devices but as examples of cultural autocommunication as well. While religion as one of the most crucial „cultural systems” (Geertz) influences a lot of other subsystems of the semiosphere (Lotman), intertextual relations to the canon of religious texts vitalize the hypotext and create the whole set of new meanings, strengthening semiosis and dynamizing culture at the same time.

SOPHIA AS A SYMBOLIC FORMULA OF THE EURASIAN COLLEGIALITY IN RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY

The background of the article is connected with the correlation of the image-concept of Sophia as a symbol of the unity of the world in culture with the idea of Eurasianism as collegiality in Russian religious philosophy of the 19th-20th centuries. The purpose of the study is a comparative analysis of the signature formula «Sophia» in the author's receptions of collegiality in Russian religious and philosophical thought through the prism of the idea of Eurasianism as the archetype of the East Slavic Logos. The archetype of Eurasian collegiality as a structural element of world unity is traced from implicit historical origins in the Old Russian Middle Ages to the explication of this concept in the New Time. Research hypothesis - substantiation of the assumption that the Eurasian idea of collegiality as an idea of synthesis of the West and the East goes back in its cultural and historical roots to the archetype of Sophia and undergoes certain transformations from premodern through modern and postmodern to neo-modern, without losing its theoretical relevance and applied significance as a mechanism for integrating traditionalism, universalism and personalism. Research methods: dialectic method, structural and functional analysis, phenomenological description, hermeneutic interpretation, philosophical comparative studies, universal ethics of dialogue and semiotics of culture. The result of the research is a historical tracing of the evolution of sophiology from the times of Ancient Rus through the Age of Enlightenment to late modernity in the context of collegiality of Eurasianism, symbolically embodied in the image-concept of Sophia in Russian religious philosophy with the typology of its main features (messianism, providentialism, mystery, Westernism vs Slavophilism as a dialectical unity). Conclusions: interpretation of the concept of Eurasianism as a manifestation of the Russian religious and philosophical idea of collegiality, and the interpretation of idea of collegiality as a manifestation of the symbolic phenomenon of Sophia, which removes the contradictions of illusory dichotomies (universalism - particularism, modernism - traditionalism, theism - atheism, etc.) in favor of harmonious unity of the world of the West and the East on the civilizational, social, cultural and mental levels.

Signs of music, intertextuality, and narrative strategy

Abstract The musical culture of modern Europe has produced numerous extra-linguistic elements which constitute a kind of code making transmission of content possible between sender and receiver. These elements also permit a kind of narrative strategy which organizes this communication. One of the codes most important for this field of European culture is musical rhetoric, made up of dozens of signs such as rhetorical figures or the symbolism of musical keys. I demonstrate the functioning of these elements on the example of funeral music, whose topoi, signs, and codes have developed in European culture for several centuries, along with characteristic musical and literary genres, and their mutual interactions. My methodological approach is mainly based on the tools of cultural and musical semiotics, and of narratology combined with analyses of musical rhetoric, supported by elements of literary analysis. I discuss this subject using the example of Karol Kurpiński’s Elegy on the Death of Tadeusz Kościuszko (1818), which perfectly illustrates the signs typical of European culture in the first half of the 19th-century and of nascent Romanticism, with its complex nationalisms and its quest for signs typical of a given nation or region, as well as for individual solutions. All of my analyses point to the power and versatility of cultural semiotics, which allows us to study human creativity in a highly comprehensive manner, exploring areas which are inaccessible to other research methodologies.

The Ecosemiosphere is a Grounded Semiosphere. A Lotmanian Conceptualization of Cultural-Ecological Systems

Growing ecological problems have raised the need for conceptual tools dedicated to studying semiotic processes in cultural-ecological systems. Departing from both ecosemiotics and cultural semiotics, the concept of an ecosemiosphere is proposed to denote the entire complex of semiosis in an ecosystem, including the involvement of human cultural semiosis. More specifically, the ecosemiosphere is a semiotic system comprising all species and their umwelts, alongside the diverse semiotic relations (including humans with their culture) that they have in the given ecosystem, and also the material supporting structures that enable the ecosemiosphere to thrive. Drawing parallels with Juri Lotman’s semiosphere concept, the ecosemiosphere is characterized by its heterogeneity, asymmetry, and boundedness. But unlike Lotman’s concept, the ecosemiosphere is not characterized by an overall boundedness, that is, by the presence of external binary boundaries and the shared identity arising from this unity. The involvement of human culture in the ecosemiosphere manifests in interspecies dialogues and semiotic engagements. We need to scrutinize what affordances and semiotic resources culture could offer to nonhuman species and how culture could, by semiotic means, raise the integrity, stability, and resiliency of the ecosystem. The ecosemiosphere is a grounded semiosphere.

POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, TECHNOLOGY IN THE LIGHT OF CULTUROLOGY: DIALOGUE STRATEGY

In the article, on the interdisciplinary methodological basis of the classical semiotics of culture and cultural comparative studies, supplemented by the developments of Lacanism and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis of the Ljubljana school, information aesthetics and tranzaesthetics, critical theory, French structuralism and poststructuralism, a strategy of dialogue between poetry and philosophy as the phenomena of traditional Logos in postmoderism is developed. ... The main problem of the modern poetic word is the loss of ontological adequations and spiritual implications by the text as a result of the inclusion of artistic creativity in the cyberspace of global digital multicultural capitalism. A comparative analysis of the projects of globalism and anti-globalism has demonstrated the priority of commercial culture as a prestigious social model for the formation of the poet's symbolic capital and network promotion. The orientation of the free market towards the sponsor's occupation of poetic creativity increasingly deprives poetry of the semantic invariants of authentic civilizational memory, which is eroded by trends in branding, advertising, and image, and is transformed into a souvenir, simulacrum, ersatz, and trademark. The only guarantor of the actualization of the basic cultural meanings of poetry is traditionalism, but its often grotesque, ultra-conservative and nostalgic character is not able to maintain the competitiveness of the tradition, its attractiveness for the younger generation and vivid personal subjectivity. A harmonious balance between traditionalism and postmodernism in poetry is possible if new technologies are used as forms of presentation and means of promoting the classical poetic tradition in the modern world, while maintaining the primacy of the goal for poetry, in relation to which the “creativity” of managerial entrepreneurship is a secondary means. We regard poetry as a point of semiotic intersection of a static sign in space (syntagma) and dynamic meaning in time (paradigm). Inside this point, in the zero phoneme, the author resides, regaining integrity, continuity, essence and selfhood instead of gaping, alienation and lack due to the correct correlation of the ontological goals of poetry and its ontic cases. Poetry in this context is a kind of a formula for the harmony of the metonymy of the real-symbolic language of culture and the metaphor of its ideal imaginary meanings. To find harmony between tradition and innovation, metaphysics and dialectics, synchronicity and diachrony, the gene code of culture and a historically labile cultural image is capable of culturology as a science based on philosophy (ontology and axiology), philology (hermeneutics and journalism), social sciences.

Kawaii (Cute) Signs and Symbols as a Means of Maintaining Harmony in Japanese Society

"Kawaii (Cute) Signs and Symbols as a Means of Maintaining Harmony in Japanese Society. This study focuses on the various facets of the Japanese concept of kawaii (“cute”, “adorable”), as resulting from print advertisements. In the last decade it has been intensively studied by different scholars from various research fields aiming to understand the Japanese worldview. The analysis of pop culture elements, of which kawaii is part of, was not an area of interest due to the fact that they were considered inferior to high culture (classical arts and traditions), but the influence of this concept on culture and language, as well as on the way the Japanese communicate and relate is significant. Starting from the idea that the viewer is (often) persuaded through culture-specific signs and symbols, we intend to present the role of kawaii (“cute”, “adorable”) verbal and visual signs in maintaining group harmony (wa), one of Japan’s core values. Hofstede’s (2001, 2003, 2010) cultural dimensions theory was used to identify some of the dominant values in the Japanese society which determine people’s expectations and behavior and signs and symbols used in adverts were analyzed from a cultural semiotics perspective. In order to explain the popularity of cute characters and “sweet talk” (oseji) in advertisements, we conducted a content analysis based on a corpus of over 200 Japanese print advertisements, covering both commercial and social (public interest) advertising, out of which we have selected four to discuss in this paper. Keywords: advertising discourse, cultural semiotics, advertising language, kawaii, cute, cute studies, Japanese, pop culture "

So Manga Pananaroon Sa Ranaw: Reflections of Meranaw Culture and Worldview

This study was undertaken to analyze the Meranaw pananaroon and discover, through the signs incorporated in them, what they express and reveal of the Meranaw people’s worldview, culture, and character. Sample pananaroons were classified and described according to context in the culture, that is, situations for which they are designed or meant to be used, based on appropriateness or fittingness and relevance. They were next subjected to semiotic and intertextual analysis, with cultural semiotics as the approach, focusing on how the signs are utilized for meaning-making, and what these reveal of the Meranaws as individuals and as a socio-cultural group. Focal concerns in the study were the Meranaw worldview, culture, and character. The study established that the pananaroon, the Meranaw word for the English proverb, adage, aphorism, and other gnomic sayings or utterances and homespun generalizations about life, are employed not only for rhetoric but purposes such as emphasis on a central message, conveyance of indirection and subtlety to avoid offense, allusion, self-deprecation or show of humility/self-effacement, irony, scorn (kapangilat), overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement. From the analyses of select pananaroon, through the lenses of the natural and cultural signs that conveyed them, the foundational ideals and overarching worldview that Meranaws value regardless of context and situation were also drawn: patience and prudence, avoidance of acting or deciding on impulse; belief in calculated boldness and arduous journeys; finding procrastination or vacillation as a fault; allowance and forgiveness for falling short of one’s expectations; humility; awareness of one’s station, revealing an ingrained and internalized class system; sensitivity, and; an overarching wish for clearness, harmony, order and peace (rinaw) in all things. The depths that the results this study reached not only strengthens semiotic analysis as a viable approach to proverb and linguistic/folklore studies, but also opens up new avenues or paths for fresh inquiry on Meranaw pananaroon, oral tradition, and folklore, and culture in general.

Capa de disco de rock

Neste artigo, pretendo refletir sobre três aspectos que caracterizam as capas de disco, em especial as do rock britânico e brasileiro entre final dos anos 1960 e início dos 1970: como mídia – em suas imagens e representações e na própria materialidade de objeto; como texto cultural – que articula dimensões semióticas em vários níveis; e como objeto de memória – por traduzir elementos do passado para o presente e seus respectivos processos comunicacionais. Por meio de tais aspectos, busco compreender essa embalagem, cuja função básica é a mediação entre artista, sua música, a gravadora e o ouvinte, sempre atravessado pelas marcas do consumo. Como bases teóricas, serão usadas a semiótica da cultura, a teoria das materialidades na comunicação e os estudos de memória.

Multisensory learning environments. Research project Education on Screen

The unity of heterogeneous sensory channels plays an essential role in our learning and development. The multisensory approaches to learning imply a simultaneous use of visual, auditory, kinesthetic-tactile and other possible modalities. The paper analyses the affordances of multisensory learning via the framework of semiotics of culture and contemporary research in education, as well as explores the relations between multisensory perception of environment and multimodality of representation in learning. The multimodal nature of human communication became explicit in the age of the Internet and audiovisual media. The development of digital technology also made it possible to consider the multiplicity of representational modes in learning. Whereas multisensory learning practices usually emerge in vernacular contexts, the recent developments in education and semiotics of culture offer unprecedented means for supporting such practices both in formal and non-formal education. Also, the multisensory learning practices are inherent to the development of the new literacies necessary for meaning-making in the contemporary media environment. The theoretical discussion is followed by the analysis of a practical example – digital educational platform Education on Screen. The platform aims to facilitate a meaningful dialogue with the cultural heritage by means of multimodal and multisensory learning.

Universalism and traditionalism in a post-globalist perspective: ways of dialogue

The article focusses on the comparative analysis of the leading socio-cultural projects of contemporary society development in culturological discourse: globalism, alter-globalism and anti-globalism. The research aims to reveal the ways of civilized dialogue of universalism as an attitude to the search for universal values and traditionalism as an attitude to the preservation of civilizational, national, ethnic, regional and local codes of culture. The methodological principles of the study are: culturological comparative studies, structural psychoanalysis, semiotics of culture and critical theory. Research methods are: cross-cultural, phenomenological, historical, hermeneutic and structural-functional ones. The scientific novelty of the study is that the author compares the project of regionalism inherent in globalism as a manifestation of glocalization and the civilizational approach inherent in traditionalism, and classifies regionalism as a postmodern post-globalization strategy and the civilizational approach as a premodern pre-globalization strategy both of which are conditionally opposed to classical modern globalism. Globalism is seen as a vicious circle of self-reproduction through the appropriation of surpluses. The way out of the vicious circle is seen in the removal from control of the total repressiveness of universalist (socio-ethical) and traditionalist (cultural-anthropological) ideas in the discourse of free (excessive) alter-globalism and anti-globalism. In conclusion, the author emphasizes the implementation of the principle of unity through diversity on the basis of the universal potential of tradition and specific historical forms of realization of universal meanings of mankind to be an effective mechanism for dialogue between universalism and traditionalism.

Современная европейская философия символических форм религиозного и художественного сознания

The article deals with the philosophical issues in the field of religious art. The re­vision of the theories of secularization in the late 20th – early 21st centuries al­lowed philosophers speak not only about the autonomy of art in relation to reli­gion, but also about the dialogue between these two “symbolic forms of consciousness” (according to E. Cassirer) and the fields of culture. The aim of this article is to offer an analysis of the corpus of selected texts of both Russian and foreign specialists of the last quarter of the 20th – early 21st centuries who worked in related fields (iconology, spatialization, semiotics of culture and art, philosophy of culture, and theology). The subject matters of the article is the philosophical, religious, cultural, art history, semiotic, theological, and anthropo­logical theories of authors whose works were in the representative sample of this study. The literature can be divided into several categories: 1) publications that discuss the relationship between the “secular” and “sacred” in modern culture; 2) publications that describe the essential features of modern temple construction and give a broad interpretation of the concept of “sacred spaces”; 3) publications that describe and analyse specific manifestations of the dialogue between art and religion. The main methods are the method of description and the method of com­plex philosophical and religiological analysis. The originality of the research lies in the attempt to systematize various points of view on the place and role of reli­gion and art in a post-secular society. The goal is to offer a wide panorama of modern theories of the interaction of religion, architecture, and fine art. Tthe main tasks are complex analysis, classification and qualification of research approaches of the authors under consideration.

Platfospheres and sociocultural explosion of Web 2.0: The commercial centre of the digital semiosphere

This paper explores digital culture with the tools of cultural semiotics in general, and then employing the semiosphere model in particular. Web 2.0 platforms are taken as the major cultural dispositive of our time, as the most representative way in which the internet shapes digital culture. Most of the global population is currently immersed in digital culture. In the first part of the paper the striking similarities between Web 2.0 platforms and the semiosphere are explored and equivalences between the elements of the classic (Lotman’s) semiotic model and these platforms, or platfospheres, are identified. The second part explores the fundamental difference between the “genetic code” at the centre of the semiosphere (as conceived by Lotman), and the computer code and commercial algorithms at the core of the platfospheres that are responsible for their cultural operation. Then the parallels are examined that arise between the past cultural reality, in which the intellectual elite and academics were the driving force of culture, and the contemporary proactive (or even aggressive) core of the platfospheres, in which secret and patent-protected algorithms shape a cultural reality exclusively motivated by the logic of commercial success.

Estudio semiótico de culturemas quechuas de la región Ayacucho

Es un estudio cualitativo que se enmarca dentro de la semiótica cultural. Los culturemas lingüísticos quechuas son construcciones relacionadas con las peculiaridades históricas, sociales, medioambientales, éticas, axiológicas, didácticas y artísticas de Ayacucho, antes denominada Huamanga, de la urbe y de los barrios tradicionales circundantes, desde 1940 hasta 1980. Para este fin, se tuvo en cuenta la cosmovisión andina y occidental, como sistemas de interpretación cultural. Asimismo, los culturemas lingüísticos quechuas son elementos vivos y constantes que se alimentan de la sabiduría popular, para permanecer en la memoria colectiva, fortaleciendo así la identidad cultural de la región.

Cultural Dimension of Black Representation of Ammatoa Community: Study of Cultural Semiotics

One of the community groups in South Sulawesi Province, to be precise in Benteng Hamlet, Tana Toa Village, Kajang District, Bulukumba Regency is known as the Ammatoa community. This community is unique compared to other community groups in Bulukumba Regency, which always appears in black traditional clothes. Of course, this phenomenon raises academic questions as to why the Ammatoa community always appears in traditional black clothes. In fact, apart from always appearing in black, the Ammatoa community also has a white identity color, especially in “pacaka pute” (knee-length pants). However, this paper only focuses on black representations. This paper aims to examine the hidden dimension behind the black representation of the Ammatoa community in Bulukumba Regency, South Sulawesi. To analyze the cultural dimension in question, the semiotic theory of culture is used. Data were collected by means of participatory observation and interviews. The participatory observation method is carried out by directly observing the attitudes and patterns of daily life actions of the Ammatoa community. The interview method was carried out by interviewing the customary leader and several other community members about the cultural system or cultural value that underlies the appearance of the all-black clothing. Both methods are accompanied by audiovisual recording and note-taking techniques. Data were analyzed qualitatively - interpretatively. The results showed that the representation of black in the traditional clothing of the Ammatoa community has a symbolic meaning: (1) human life eventually becomes 'dark'; (2) the attitude of “sabbarak” (patient) , “gattang” (firm), “lambusuk” (honest), and “pisona” (surrender); (3) “tallasak kamase-mase ri lino” ('living unpretentiously in the world) and “kalumannyang kalupepeang allo ri boko” (rich in the afterlife), “inne lino pammari-mariangji” (this world is just a stopover), “akherak pammantang karakkang” (afterlife is an eternal place) . This concept is embedded in the oral folklore “pasang ri Kajang” 'messages (rules / norms) for the Kajang community'. In addition, there are pairs of signs of opposition (binnery opposotion), namely “pute”' (white) x “lekleng” (black / dark); “ammumba” (rising) x “sakra” (setting); “kamase-mase” (unpretentious) x “kalumannyang” (rich); “singarak” (light) x “sassang” (dark); “lino” ('world) 'x “akherak” (afterlife); “tallasak” (alive) x “mate” (dead).

Symbolic Meaning in Traditional Badudus Pangantin Banjar

This research examines the cultural symbols used in the badudus pangantin Banjar custom. The approach used is a cultural semiotics approach. namely studies that emphasize the symbols of a culture. The method used is descriptive analysis method. The primary data source was obtained from four resource persons in the Peat District, aged 60-75 years. Data collection techniques are in the form of (1) observation, (2) interviews, (3) recording, (4) recording. The data analysis technique used is descriptive qualitative. The results of this study show that the symbolic meanings of the Banjar bridal shower custom are as follows: a. symbol of baras longitude, banana, spray three times, tapih, mayang, banyu prayer, candle, carmin, bamantra oil, white porridge, black porridge and pupur with the meaning of a blessed life bride, b. palm symbol, starting with the right, and kambang malati, meaning good behavior. c. symbol of baras lakatan, habang sugar and hintalu with the meaning of living together.