Semiotics is the study of people and their culture by evaluating
             the signs and symbols which the culture holds as important. If it is
             possible to conceive of science that studies the role of signs as part
             of social life, and interprets the meaning of those symbols to the life of
             the community or culture itself, then semiotics is that course of study.
             Much like the process of interpreting paintings on cave walls in order to
             understand pre-historic man, semiotics looks at the cave paintings of a
             modern society and interprets some of the underlying thoughts, beliefs and
             Semiotics is derived from part of social psychology, and hence of
             general psychology. From the Greek semeon, 'sign', semiotics investigates
             the nature of signs of a culture, and the laws governing them. Linguistics
             is one branch of this general science that contributes to semiotics, as
             does sociology, history, and cultural psychology. The laws that semiotics
             will discover will be laws applicable in these other fields; these fields
             will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human
             knowledge (Saussure 1983, 15-16; Saussure 1974, 16).
             Structuralism is an analytical method that has been employed by many
             semioticians and which is based on Saussure's linguistic model.
             Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization of sign systems as
             'languages.' They engage in a search for 'deep structures' underlying the
             'surface features' of phenomena. However, contemporary social semiotics has
             moved beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts
             within a self-contained system, seeking to explore the use of signs in
             specific social situations. The modern semiotic theory is also sometimes allied
             with a Marxist approach which stresses the role of ideology in the course
             This paper investigates the roles of Lebanese food, clothing, and
             other objects through a semiotic lens in an attempt to ...