Thus Lotman (1998) borrowing from Illya Prigogine’s ideas, pointed out the existence of 2 types of dynamic processes in culture: on the one hand, there are processes that occur in equilibrium, and on the other hand there are processes that take place in imbalanced situations. The former ones function as “replies” to the laws of linear causality (reversible and symmetrical, as well as totally predictable). The latter are asymmetrical, imbalanced, appearing at bifurcation points; these spots are defined as explosive moments. In such a way, explosion presupposes a sudden, unpredictable and irreversible change in the event’s direction that deals with several explicit issues within the dynamics of culture. Cultural explosions are produced thanks to the introduction of texts, persons, or a small number of people, and only them can unleash a general change within the system. I propose to consider migratory processes as cultural explosions since they are produced by means of the introduction of people within new cultural systems.
Explosions present 2 moments: 1) the moment of explosion, where unpredictability appears, the moment of open possibilities, and 2) the moment after explosion, where communicative and autocommunication processes reach complementarity, producing cultural self-descriptions and inherent self-understanding. However, there is a preliminary moment that has place when immigrants decide to migrate, either looking for a better future, or just to open the window of their dreams. This moment is explicit, the moment of both the open possibilities and decision-making. It comes out when people choose to hide beneath load trucks, or into caravans that would take them, by ferry, to the Iberian Peninsula waiting to find their own way to the European coasts. In this moment, both consciousness and perception are separated. The migration event is seen as an unpredictable situation that will provoke “a retrospective reflection” (in the lotmanian terminology) in the second moment of the explosion. The exchange of information that has place between people with different cultural backgrounds (autochthonous and immigrants) produce new meanings; the latter start to assimilate new texts by means of subsequent acts of translation. The second moment, concerning to the new duplication of the event in the structure of memory, takes place with the “passage of time”, and according to Peeter Torop (2009) by means of the self-descriptions: “[…] through the suppression of the explosion, after which the post-explosive moment, that is the moment for describing the explosion, will be actualized. The chaos and diversity of communicative processes will become ordered in auto-communicative self-description” (p. 37). I will delve into this moment below when I will discuss the processes of autocommunication and self-descriptions.
Bidimensional approaches: the own and the other
People can experience acculturation only in a new foreign environment and under certain specific conditions. Concrete groups who carry out certain activities in new host societies usually experience it. Acculturation is carried out in a bidimensional way i.e., both the host culture and the group of immigrants experience acculturation in multiple and different ways.
An alternative to start with this issue is to take a glance at every group by portraying their particular context. This task might be achieved through particular narratives clarified in light of an ethnographic choice. Along the years there has been a long debate within the anthropological paradigm, since several researchers have warned us about some basic requirements that ethnography must fulfill (see Geertz, 2000; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Portis-Winner, 1990; Agar, 2006). For instance ethnography might be: reflexive[i] (Herzfeld, 1983; Goddall, 2000), but also has to clarify the type of subjectivity described in the general theory. Regardless the type of ethnography chosen we have to focus on the general methodology applied in our particular context.
This matter takes us to the field of cultural anthropology, which will help us to generate a transdiciplinary language ofdescription for our object of study. Hence, I consider unnecessary to mention the manifold contributions that cultural anthropology has provided to cultural semiotics[ii], and will also not discuss the crucial role it has played in culture studies towards the analysis of sign systems as “cognitive social systems” (Randviir, 2004). Nonetheless I would like to assert that the interaction of cultural anthropology with cultural semiotics is a must if we have to cope with acculturation. In this research, anthropology and cultural semiotics converge as two culture-studying sciences that complement each other.