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This little example shows that a theme understood as a knowledge space or
indeed in the phenomenological sense as a typical schema , always has an indexical
function. This means that it always depends on a historical, social and cultural
context. It may be more or less familiar to a social actor, more or less controversial,
specialized, formalized, etc. Again, we refer here to Schütz's excellent explanations
[SCH 03] on the subject of the thematic structure of the social world (explanations
taken up again by Habermas [HAB 81] in his theory of the communicative action).
The explicitation of a theme (which can always be revised) is, in this sense, a
question of cultural semiotics* , or semioticanthropology , after C. Geertz [GEE 86].
Understood thus, a theme is very similar to a model of description* . Indeed, the
(English) expression “village”, used to denote our intuitive understanding of spatial
agglomerations of the type [Village], is rather an abbreviation for the more
appropriate linguistic expression “Historical village in continental Europe”. The
abridged expression “village” is indeed useful, but dangerous: it implies a sort of
pretension to universality of our implicit and culturally indexed definition of the
term “village”, and thus, like so many other linguistic expressions we use on a daily
basis, constitutes the potential forum for an attitude with could be classified as
culture-centrist.
The conceptual term [Village] in its implicit acceptance as “historical village in
Europe” is organized - so to speak - by a set of interactions between different
conceptual terms which denote the historical and geographical context relevant for
our understanding of the object “village”, of its architecture, its topographical
structure, its socio-demographic size, etc. Depending on individual preferences or
dominant stereotypical visions, some of these elements may become more important
than others; the schema itself may be adapted and integrate new elements enabling
account to be taken of the evolutions of historical villages which, for instance, are
located near to the huge metropolises.
What we can take away from this little example, again referring to Schütz and to
Greimas' work in lexical semantics [GRE 66], is that a theme in the sense of a space
of knowledge (and recognition) should be apprehended in reference to a thematic
configuration expressed by a selection and grouping of conceptual terms, rather than
in reference to a single conceptual term taken individually (on this topic, see our
remarks in Chapter 6, section 6.3). In other words, a single conceptual term only
acquires a meaning in relation to other conceptual terms, with which it expresses a
theme, a notion.
Thus, the metalanguage of description should not be reduced merely to the
taxonomically-organized vocabulary of conceptual terms. On the contrary, as has
already been shown with a whole series of examples, it relies upon the fundamental
concept of the configuration (a concept which is also central in Greimas'
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