Signos em Transe; uma Fortuna Crítica sobre a Semiótica de Lícia Soares de Souza

“Signs in Trance: A Critical Collection on the Semiotics of Lícia Soares de Souza” was written in five languages and is considered the most important ethnographic and semiotic study of Bahia in the past five decades, coauthored with leading scholars from seven different countries. More than a personal tribute, Signos em Transe articulates biographical and ethnographic elements, highlighting not only the honoree's career but also the institutional, cultural, and epistemological impacts of her academic work at universities such as Uneb, Ufba, Uefs, Uesb, and international institutions like Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Université Laval, University of Kassel, and Saarland University. Curated, organized, and presented by the thinker Taurino Araújo, Signs in Trance engages in dialogue with the tradition of the philosophia perennis by investigating the universality of meaning across diverse cultures, languages, and historical contexts. Through a transdisciplinary approach—one that weaves symbolic analysis, hermeneutics, and aesthetics into lived cultural experience—while ethnographically examining the intellectual legacy of Lícia Soares de Souza within a broad epistemological horizon, the work reveals the contours of a philosophy of life committed to ethical interpretation, existential reflection, and the integration of knowledge in a perpetual interplay between tradition and innovation, reason and intuition, text and world. Contributions from Prominent Figures in the Humanities Among the authors who contribute critical texts are renowned researchers such as Winfried Nöth, Eurídice Figueiredo, Berthold Zilly, Cyro de Mattos, Taurino Araújo, Zilá Bernd, Rita Olivieri-Godet, Luiz Eudes, Bernard Andrès, Claire Varin, Ricardo Justo, Jean-François Côté, Emiliano José, Louise Duprè, Calmon Teixeira, and Suênio Lucena. 'Signs in Trance' was launched at the Academia de Letras da Bahia- ALB (Bahian Academy of Letters), in a ceremony presided over by the esteemed Academician Aleilton Fonseca, with institutional support from Uneb and CNPq. The essays in Signos em Transe cover everything from the fundamentals of semiotics to contemporary applications, establishing connections between semiotics and fields such as literature, linguistics, communication, language teaching, Francophonie, cultural criticism, art, and history in a domain marked by challenges and complexities. "From 1 - Semiotics/Semiology to 6 - Social Communication, the reader will also find relevant approaches to 2 - French language teaching and Canadian studies; 3 - French-speaking Canadian poetry; 4 - Brazilian literature and cinema and its 5 - Geopoetics and literature of the Canudos cycle around the foundational core of Euclides da Cunha."