Parent Roger
Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Australas Psychiatry. 2007;15 Suppl 1:S68-74. doi: 10.1080/10398560701701239.
The current challenges of cultural diversity necessitate effective methods for training professionals in health, as well as other sectors, to work with the phenomenon of culture. This paper presents an overview of a semiotic-based approach to training in this regard.
Recent publications by Anti Randviir in semiotics on the textual nature of cultural phenomena and by Annabel Levesque on the healthcare issues of Western, French-speaking Canadians provide the methodological frame and basic cultural reference for the overview.
The anthropological definition of culture as a 'semiotic', or universe of meaning, offers interdisciplinary common ground for designing practical approaches to cultural analysis, intercultural communication and creativity training. This definition is consistent with convergent findings and research practice in social and cognitive psychology, administrative science, philosophy, ethnography, linguistics and semiotics.
Cultural performances such as narrative constitute an effective methodological tool for interdisciplinary data gathering and for analysis of all kinds of cultures: organizational, family, ethnic, regional, transborder, etc. When combined with a functionalist and systemic approach to the study of culture, semiotic approaches to narrative analysis provide useful principles for decoding cultural modes of communication and for designing meaningful change based on cultural specificity.
文化多样性带来的当前挑战需要有效的方法来培训卫生及其他领域的专业人员应对文化现象。本文概述了一种基于符号学的相关培训方法。
安蒂·兰德维尔近期关于文化现象文本性质的符号学出版物以及安娜贝尔·勒维克关于加拿大西部法语区医疗保健问题的出版物为该概述提供了方法框架和基本文化参考。
将文化人类学定义为“符号学”或意义世界，为设计文化分析、跨文化交流和创造力培训的实用方法提供了跨学科的共同基础。这一定义与社会和认知心理学、行政科学、哲学、民族志、语言学和符号学中的趋同研究结果及研究实践相一致。
诸如叙事等文化表现形式构成了跨学科数据收集以及各类文化（组织文化、家庭文化、民族文化、区域文化、跨境文化等）分析的有效方法工具。当与功能主义和系统论的文化研究方法相结合时，叙事分析的符号学方法为解读文化交流模式以及基于文化特异性设计有意义的变革提供了有用的原则。
