Food,Meaning, and the Law: Confessions of a Vegan Semiotician

The essay that follows combines several genres along an unconventional path. It departs from the psycho-semiotic analysis of a personal turning point: the author’s ‘conversion’ to veganism. After exposing the rationale for this change in semiotic terms, however, the essay extends its theorization to the social level, inquiring about the intersection between vegan conviction and commensality. In a world where different food ideologies co-occur, converge, conflict, and sometimes clash, what is the role of the law in establishing value priorities and strike a balance among different sociocultural and political trends? The essay concludes with a synthetic definition, in semiotic terms, of the perspective on food, meaning, and law promoted by the author: a vegan liberalism that is tolerant of food pluralism but simultaneously militates for the evolution of culture and society toward the accomplishment of a utopia, that of a world immune from the exploitation of animal suffering.     

Holy Mountains and Anti-Cult Ecology: The Campaign Against the Aumist Religion in France

After the homicides and suicides of the Solar Temple (1994–1995), anti-cult movements received an unprecedented degree of public support in France, and a moral panic against cults was generated, eventually producing two parliamentary reports and the establishment of a governmental Mission to Fight Cults. The Aumist Religion, headquartered at the Holy City of the Mandarom, in the French Alps, although comparatively small, became one of the most visible targets and was perceived by anti-cultists, the media, and the government as the epitome of the dangerous cult. The paper examines the history of the Madaron controversies, especially the involvement of government-financed anti-cult organizations and representatives of the ecology movement, and argues that the Aumists' greatest sin is their very visibility.     

Foreign affairs in the Italian party congresses; the PCI

Incentives are capable of creating favourable environments in which peace processes can make progress. This is especially true for mega incentives, which can assist in overcoming political and socio-psychological barriers to peace. In Israeli–Arab peacemaking, incentives have not yet proven efficient. To date, they have been used in a limited and inefficient manner. In 2010, the US offered Israel incentives in return for an extension of Israel's settlement freeze. This move failed due to unfavourable political conditions and scepticism regarding its ability to bring about a major breakthrough. Nevertheless, it signaled that incentives are now an integral tool in US diplomacy and could serve as a step towards crafting a multi-national mega incentive package for Middle East peace.     

The semiotics of religious space in Second Life®

Scholarly research on the religious dimension of Second Life® can be conducted with reference to several elements: ties between the religious dimension of Second Life and that of the “First Life” (an approach privileged by the sociology and the psychology of religion); the transcendent value inherent in the creation of an alternative reality (an approach favored by the philosophy of religion); the enunciation of a “virtual” religious dimension through the digital artifacts of Second Life (an approach promoted by aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics); and so forth. Adopting the point of view of cultural semiotics, the paper summarizes the results of a “virtual” ethno-semiotic participant observation conducted over six months in portions of the digital “metaverse” of Second Life where a religious dimension is predominant. The consequent analysis of digital places of worship singles out five main characteristics of their aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics: isolation, prototypicality, didacticism, anarchy, and parasitism.     

Long swings in the growth of government expenditure: an international historical perspective

Public Choice - Adopting an international historical perspective, this study aims to identify the main empirical regularities in the long-run growth pattern of government expenditure. The...