Semiótica e interculturalidade:

primeiras aproximações

Abstract

Abstract: The subject of immigration poses a number of challenges for the sciences of meaning. These include understanding how elements of the culture brought by immigrants are accepted or rejected by the receiving society. To investigate the semiotic processes involved in this relationship, the field of gastronomy can be an interesting space in which conflicts and agreements occur in relation to national taste. In order to observe this movement, this work selected two profiles of Peruvian restaurants in the city of São Paulo to make up its corpus. The aim of this work is to examine how restaurants belonging to minority immigrant groups, such as those from Latin America, construct their meanings in relation to the culture of origin in order to insert themselves into the culture of reception. To do this, we discuss the notion of culture through the lens of discursive and tensive semiotics and then propose an initial concept of interculturality. Through enunciative praxis, we observed different ways of actualizing the meanings of Peruvian culture in the two selected establishments. Thus, on the one hand, there is an effort to create a simulacrum of Peruvian culture, but based on plastic stereotypes and conventional dishes, and on the other, a reinterpretation of these same elements, but from the perspective of globalized haute cuisine. Finally, to a greater or lesser extent, the role of the stereotype (national or global) in the construction of the identities of both establishments is discussed.