Abstract

The aim of this article is to propose a semiotic systematization of the concept of "practice". The discussion persistently relates the semiotic approach with other disciplines in order to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue about this complex and multifaceted object. The semiotic approach allows to examine the generation and circulation of sense in and by the practice and thus offers an important point of view to the contemporary study of these kind of embodied social processes. The first task of this paper is to distinguish the practice as a semiotic object different than the text and to discuss the methodological problems it arises to the discipline. It then moves to state the epistemological bases that every semiotic study of practice should take into consideration. The systematization proposed characterizes the practice by four principal dimensions: the corporeal dimension, the deictic dimension, the procedural dimension and the action dimension. The systematization suggested is innovative because it articulates and explains these dimensions (some of which have been pointed out also in other disciplines) from a new semiotic perspective. The article concludes with the application of the model to the study a performative practice.