Between Center and Periphery: A Pedagogy of the Boundary Framed by Lotman’s Semiotic Theory

Glaucio Aranha

In Chapter 9 of *Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture*, entitled “The Notion of Boundary,” Yuri Lotman develops one of the most original and fertile ideas of his theory: that every culture depends, for its existence and organization, on the presence of boundaries. Published in 1990, this work consolidates decades of reflection by the author and the Tartu-Moscow School on the semiotic processes that constitute cultural systems. Lotman starts from the premise that culture is neither homogeneous nor static, but rather a dynamic field of signs in constant motion—a semiosphere—which only becomes intelligible and functional thanks to the existence of limits that separate the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.

This text aims to make Lotman’s fundamental concepts more accessible, revealing how the notion of boundary surpasses its geographic connotation to become a key category for the analysis of cultural identities, educational processes, discursive practices, and symbolic mediations. Throughout this reflection, we explore how this notion acts as an organizational mechanism of culture, a space of translation and creation, a device of identity differentiation, and a strategic zone for symbolic renewal. In doing so, we propose Lotman’s idea of the boundary as a lens for interpreting contemporary practices in education, health, media, and museology—contexts in which boundaries, far from being obstacles, emerge as sensitive zones of articulation, conflict, and invention.

When we speak of a boundary, the first image that usually comes to mind is a line separating two territories: Brazil and Uruguay, for example. But for Yuri Lotman, a major thinker of cultural semiotics, this idea goes far beyond geography. He invites us to imagine culture as a large semiotic space—the semiosphere—in which the boundary plays a vital role: it organizes, separates, protects, and simultaneously enables exchange.

In Lotman’s view, there is no culture without boundaries. Every culture needs to delimit what is its own and what is not. That is, it draws limits between what it considers familiar and strange, acceptable and unacceptable, ours and theirs. These boundaries may be symbolic, linguistic, social, or even affective. Just as our body has skin that protects and defines us as individuals, culture also has its ‘skin’: the boundary.

This boundary is not just a wall that excludes; it is also a gate. It selects and filters what comes from the outside. Therefore, it is more productive to think of it as a permeable membrane. Culture, in this sense, is not a closed system: it lives in relation to the outside but needs a boundary for that relationship to be intelligible and productive. Without boundaries, there would be no translation, no transformation, no growth.

Lotman emphasizes that the center of culture is organized starting from the boundary. In other words, it is not the center that gives rise to the periphery, but the opposite: it is the recognition of what is ‘outside’ that gives meaning to what is ‘inside’. This is especially important for thinking about cultural identities, discursive boundaries, and dynamics of exclusion or appropriation.

Cultural boundaries are not only geographic or political demarcations—they are also semiotic. They regulate meanings, determine what can or cannot be said, felt, or done. More importantly, they are always in motion.

One of Lotman’s most sophisticated contributions is the idea that the boundary does not merely separate but enables culture to say ‘I’. That is, the boundary allows culture to recognize itself as a unique, distinct, and living entity. Without a boundary, there would be no ‘inside’—and thus no ‘I’.

We can think of this in everyday terms: for me to recognize myself as ‘Glaucio’, I must recognize that there is a ‘not-Glaucio’. The same applies to cultural groups: they affirm themselves by differentiating from others. The boundary is where that difference is perceived, negotiated, and often symbolically reinforced.

Lotman shows us that, within the semiosphere (this vast space where signs circulate and make sense), the boundary is the point where culture self-describes. It is there that it constructs narratives about who it is, who it was, and who it wants to be. Think, for example, of how nations build their historical narratives or how a school defines its ‘educational mission’: they almost always do so by contrasting with what they are not. The ‘other’—whether the foreigner, the barbarian, the marginal, or the error—is essential for the ‘I’ to affirm itself.

In the health field, Western allopathic medicine often affirms itself by differentiating from popular or traditional practices. Or in digital contexts, how a virtual science museum positions itself as a ‘learning space’ by distancing from content it deems outside its scientific scope. In these cases, what is at stake is not just content but discursive positioning, marked by symbolic boundaries.

Understanding the role of boundaries helps us read cultural discourses as individuation processes: culture creates its identities and differentiations through these symbolic barriers that define what is ‘ours’ and what is ‘theirs’. The boundary is thus much more than a limit—it is the mirror where culture sees itself, and the lens through which it sees the other.

Returning to the metaphor of the boundary as the skin of culture—thus treating culture as a living organism—we can understand that it protects but also breathes. Lotman offers another powerful metaphor: the cultural boundary is not a wall, but a semiotic membrane. This means that while it separates, it also translates, adapts, and transforms what comes from the outside to make it intelligible and assimilable on the inside.

It is important to remember that every culture is in contact with others—whether through travel, migration, technology, media, or other means. But for an external idea to make sense within a new cultural system, it must be translated. And it is exactly at the boundary that this process takes place. Translation here does not simply mean exchanging words from one language to another, but transposing meanings from one symbolic universe to another.

A concrete example can be found in the multilingual clinical video simulations developed and analyzed in our research group. For instance, when a Bolivian patient speaks Spanish with a Brazilian physician who speaks Portuguese, much more is at stake than just language: there are gestures, cultural expressions, expectations of care, and ways of narrating suffering. The boundary—in this case, both linguistic and cultural—is also the space where meanings must be negotiated. The success of the encounter depends on the ability to translate worlds, and not just words.

The same applies to virtual museums. When a neuroscience museum, for example, presents technical content to a lay audience, it must translate academic knowledge into sensitive, visual, and affective experiences. The boundary between scientific and everyday knowledge should not be seen as an obstacle, but as a space of mediation and reinvention. In this sense, curatorship acts as a boundary translator, reworking knowledge so that it becomes experiential.

Lotman teaches us that this liminal zone is the most fertile for creativity and for the emergence of new forms of meaning. Because it is a space of intersection between different codes, it demands the invention of semiotic strategies: metaphors, analogies, new languages, new sign arrangements. Therefore, thinking of the boundary as a place of translation and transformation means valuing cultural crossings, encounters between alterities, and hybrid processes that make teaching, art, science, and communication more complex—and more alive.

One of Lotman’s most powerful assumptions is that the boundary is simultaneously a place of tension and of creation—therefore, ambivalent by nature, operating in two simultaneous directions: it separates and unites, distances and connects, protects and transforms. This ambiguity is not a flaw in the cultural system, but its main source of vitality.

Many times, a dominant culture seeks to suffocate these spaces with norms, labels, and exclusions. But as Lotman reminds us, it is from the peripheries—and not from the center—that the new emerges explosively. The margin, the deviation, the threshold: all these terms designate zones of instability where language is remade, where the subject expands, where culture denatures itself to become something else. Thus, instead of fearing the ambivalence of the boundary, we should embrace it as part of the formative process—not only of knowledge, but of subjectivity itself.

Lotman also observes that cultural systems tend to organize themselves according to spatial patterns—not limited to symbolic spaces. This means that ways of signifying and ways of inhabiting share similar structures. This phenomenon, which he calls the isomorphism between spatial organization and semiotic organization, helps us understand why cultures distribute their signs much like they organize their cities: with centers, peripheries, walls, and margins.

If we think of a medieval city, for example, we will see a sacred and normative center (the cathedral, the castle, the square) surrounded by successive layers of less regulated zones, reaching the peripheries—the space of foreigners, heretics, merchants, and itinerant artists. Lotman invites us to see this logic as a model of cultural organization: the center represents the ‘authorized discourse,’ the dominant language, the canon; while the periphery hosts deviations, innovations, and excesses—but also possibilities of rupture.

This model applies to many contemporary contexts. In education, for example, it is common for certain forms of knowledge (like biomedical sciences) to occupy the ‘legitimate center’ of curricula, while others (like spirituality, arts, or traditional knowledge) are relegated to a peripheral position, if not excluded altogether. This spatial arrangement reflects a semiotic hierarchy—that is, a structure of value attributed to different modes of saying and knowing.

Let us consider this model using science museums. Frequently, these spaces prioritize technical and scientifically method-driven knowledge as the center around which curatorship is organized, while affective, cultural, or subjective aspects of cognition remain in the ‘suburbs’ of the exhibition (approach strategies, transitions, aesthetic engagement, etc.). In this sense, curatorship can be seen as a political act of semiotic ordering of space: what is placed at the center? What is pushed to the edge? And what is not included at all?

This isomorphism also helps us analyze digital platforms, where certain discourses go viral, while others remain hidden in niches or are filtered out by algorithms. The Instagram ‘feed,’ for instance, is an architecture of center and periphery that shapes what is seen, repeated, and remembered—and what is forgotten.

Lotman invites us to abandon the image of a monolithic, stable, self-contained culture to instead think of boundaries as places of tension and renewal. For him, the edges of the semiosphere—those zones where different codes touch and estrange each other—are not system leftovers, but its most fertile points. It is there that culture opens to the new, is traversed by the other, and is forced to translate, adapt, resist, and recreate.

Michel de Certeau, in his work *The Practice of Everyday Life*, deepens this view by distinguishing between strategies and tactics. While strategies are the modes of power’s operation—those that organize space, determine what can be said, and regulate flows—tactics are the cunning practices of those who occupy places that do not rightfully belong to them, who deviate from the intended use of structures and reinvent culture from within its cracks. Certeau calls this the ‘art of the weak,’ not as passivity, but as creative force emerging from limitation, improvisation, and the margins. Lotman and Certeau, though through different paths, converge here: boundaries are not zones of exclusion, but of invention. And more than that, zones of conflict—between the established and the emergent, the canonical and the popular, the prescribed and the lived.

We see this clearly in education. Imagine a public school in a peripheral area where students begin using marginal poetry as a form of expression. The school, as a strategy, may not immediately recognize that type of textual production as ‘curricular content.’ But the students, acting tactically, appropriate the available resources to create another type of discourse—poetic, political, insurgent. This is border pedagogy in action: a cultural practice that does not emerge from the center, but from the margin, and that forces the center to reorganize in response to the new.

The same occurs when Indigenous patients reconfigure biomedical protocols based on their cosmologies; or when Black women appropriate digital platforms to dispute the field of social representation. These are acts that Lotman would describe as semiotic ruptures from the periphery—disruptions that destabilize the system and force it to reconfigure itself.

In this context, the boundary reveals itself as a space of liminality, as Victor Turner would say: neither fully outside nor entirely inside. It is an in-between space, where the subject is in transit, in suspension, but also in creation. A space where the norm may be disobeyed, but also re-signified.

To educate at the boundaries—or from them—is thus a political and aesthetic gesture: it means recognizing that knowledge is not the property of the center, but circulates at the edges, infiltrates the interstices, and reinvents itself in deviation. It is a pedagogy that accepts the risk of tension because it bets on the potential of renewal.

Another powerful metaphor used by Lotman is that of the ‘barbarian’—understood here as a symbolic figure produced by culture itself to recognize its limits and affirm its center. Thus, it does not represent a fact, but a construction. It is the ‘necessary other,’ the inverted mirror in which culture sees itself both in fear and in desire. For Lotman, this construction is inevitable: without the other, there is no cultural identity, since it is through contrast that we recognize ourselves.

This mechanism is present in educational institutions, scientific discourses, health systems, school curricula, and museological practices. For example, when Indigenous peoples are portrayed as ‘backward’ or ‘pre-modern,’ the narrative acts as a center projecting the image of the barbarian to reaffirm its civilizing model. Similarly, when hegemonic medicine delegitimizes traditional practices as ‘superstition’ or ‘folk healing,’ it reaffirms its authority through the symbolic exclusion of other knowledge.

Lotman offers here an essential insight for cultural criticism: a culture that claims to be total, homogeneous, and univocal must manufacture its alterity to maintain the illusion of cohesion—and it does so through stigmatization, caricature, and the hierarchization of languages, bodies, and territories. However, border pedagogy proposes the opposite: it does not eliminate the barbarian, but listens to them; it does not silence, but translates. It recognizes that the other is not a threat, but an interpretive challenge—and, therefore, an opportunity for expansion of consciousness.

Inspired by this Lotmanian reading, we may propose an ethical and epistemological reconfiguration of the figure of the other in the formation processes within health, education, and culture. This implies shifting the gaze: ceasing to see the other as ‘backward’ or ‘incapable’ and starting to see them as a producer of meaning—someone who also organizes the world through their own signs. In this new framework, the figure of the barbarian does not disappear—it is re-signified.

In times of exclusionary discourses and affective polarization, this perspective becomes even more relevant. After all, in constructing the barbarian, culture reveals much more about itself than about the one it names as barbarian. Perhaps this is Lotman’s greatest lesson for us: that cultural boundaries not only tell us where the other ends, but also where the work of reconstructing ourselves begins.

More than a technical concept, Lotman’s notion of boundary offers us a tool to read the present and imagine futures. In times marked by intense flows, cultural displacements, epistemological crossings, and symbolic disputes, thinking of the boundary not as a barrier but as a device for listening, invention, and reinvention becomes an ethical and political gesture. The responsibility that falls especially on educators, researchers, and curators is to inhabit these liminal zones with sensitivity and courage—recognizing that it is in the tension between codes, languages, practices, and worlds that the true possibility for transformation lies.

References:

Lotman, Y. M. (1990). *The Notion of Boundary*. In: *Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture* (A. Shukman, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Certeau, M. de (1994). *The Practice of Everyday Life* (L. A. Azevedo, Trans.). Petrópolis: Vozes.

Turner, V. (1974). *Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society*. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Santaella, L. (2000). *A teoria geral dos signos: Semiose e autopoiese*. São Paulo: Paulus.