Strah kao agens kulture u svjetlu teorije o semiosferi
Fear as Cultural Agency in the Light of the Theory of Semiosphere

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on fear as an elementary emotion which plays a role of moulding of culture, as well as fear as a recurrent element in culture within the framework of the theory of semiosphere. Culture can surely produce fear by itself. This fear is then a consequence of either harnessing human nature through the rules of selfdescription, or of the application of the mechanisms of violence due to the lack of respect for self-description of the semiospheric core in question. This is a reversible effect. A man is moulded by his/her culture, and fear is an important part of this. These are mostly fears created by a type of culture which forces a natural way of life into appropriate cultural moulds. The process of cultivation, as an inevitable taming of human nature, by using the norms of self-descriptions of the cultural core, during which an individual is ‘introduced’ into the identity of the culture in question, also manipulates original emotions, even that of natural existential fear. It reshapes it into new forms of fear, such as fear of punishment and other phenomena which are used to frustrate authentic human nature, natural needs and behaviour. Culturised fears, therefore, begin with the culture that has shaped them. Culture develops them through the mechanisms of self-descriptions which are based on the causality of the negative consequences of disregard for the established norms of self-description. These very mechanisms are a breeding ground for culturised fears. This is the framework in which some current types of fear—culturised existential fear and interaction of existential fear with religion and sexual orientation (homosexuality)—are critically analysed in the corpus consisting of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty- Four, Annie Proulx’s short story »Brokeback Mountain« and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. All these fears testify that culturised fear is an important and traumatic moulding mechanism of cultivating natural human nature into human nature with the identity of the culture in question.

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