Култура и страх
Culture and Fear

Self-description of the Core of the Semiosphere and Cultured Fear

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on fear as an elementary emotion which plays a role in the way a culture is moulded, as well as fear as a recurrent element in culture within the framework of the theory of semiosphere. If culture is created in fear, as Róheimclaims, culture can surely produce fear by itself. This fear is then a consequence of either harnessing human nature through the rules of the self-description, or of the application of the mechanisms of violence due to a lack of respect for the self-description of the semiosphere core in question. This is a reversible effect. A man is moulded by his culture, and fear is an important part of this. These are mostly fears which are 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 use of 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 a fear of punishment and other phenomena which are used to frustrate authentic human nature, natural needs and behaviour. Cultured fears,therefore, begin with the culture that 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 cultured fears. This is the framework in which some current types of fear–cultured existential fear and interaction of existential fear with religion and sexual orientation (homosexuality)–are critically analysed in a corpus consisting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, 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 cultured fear is an important and traumatic moulding mechanism of cultivating natural human nature into human nature withthe identity of the culture in question.

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