Call for papers | Signs, Traces, Clues: Carlo Ginzburg’s Contribution to Humanities

Signs, Traces, Clues: Carlo Ginzburg’s Contribution to Humanities

Editors:

Fabiana Giovani (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC- Brasil)

Luciano Ponzio (University of Salento – Lecce - Italy)

 

_{The exercise of knowing stems from the ability to look in order to see; however, seeing requires more than merely looking. As in archaeology, it involves searching within signs for the traces of a history. (Maria Emília Caixeta de Castro Lima)}

 

Research on language constitutes a field of particular interest for Humanities. In this field, the role of the human being is central, since the study of language entails recognition of the expressive and speaking subject who produces and uses it. From this perspective, the subject of research is inexhaustible in its meanings and interpretive possibilities.

When conducting research in the humanities that involves language, the researcher engages with the evidential paradigm – whose origins are extremely ancient: hunting, divination, empirical medicine –, which points to a form of inferential knowledge based on clues. This form of knowledge does not necessarily coincide with exactness or with definitive truth, but rather with conjectural modes of interpretation. Although the sciences tend to seek what remains stable through change, they deal with subjects who actively participate in the process of knowledge, which prevents such knowledge from being reduced to the categories proper to material objects.

“We could compare the threads that make up this research” – writes Carlo Ginzburg in Myths, Emblems, Clues – “to the threads of a carpet […]; we see them forming a dense and homogeneous pattern […]. The carpet is the paradigm that we have called, depending on the context, venatory, divinatory, evidential, or semiotic.” From this perspective, the evidential paradigm refers to an epistemological model shared by different practices and disciplines, united by the use of inferential methods and the borrowing of conceptual tools. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the emergence of the humanities, this constellation of forms of knowledge underwent profound transformation, gradually leading to the consolidation of the evidential paradigm.

In this context, the evidential paradigm has acquired increasing relevance in language studies. Developed by Carlo Ginzburg, it is now used not only by historians but also by philosophers, anthropologists, semioticians, linguists, and scholars of education. It constitutes a fruitful paradigm for the analysis of human action through traces, clues, and forms of non-deductive inference.

 

Through an open call, 12 articles will be selected (6 in Portuguese and 6 in an additional language—English, Italian, French, or Spanish) addressing one of the following thematic areas.

Thematic Areas for Submission

 

• Language Studies (Linguistics and Literature)
• Historical Semiotics
• Education
• Arts
• History

 

Submission Period: December 1, 2026 – March 2, 2027

Expected Publication: December 2027