Taiwan’s Modern Festivals And City Imagery Transmission In The Context Of Semiotics

The "Festival" spreads across the decades up to the present with us, no matter it is an ancient civil blessing ceremony, a collective carnival celebration during the Middle Ages, or an exhibition which could be seen everywhere now. Durkheim found the social significance that was included in totem of religion festivals; Bakhtin’s interpretation of social reality is the festive carnival that makes people escape from shackles of everyday life. Both of them tried to find out the method which can help us clearly distinguish the social outlook, from the deep narrative of festival ceremony. Festival ceremony is a performance of social relations, providing us the source to have a deep insight into the social life. People aggregate together in festival ceremonies, with a series of symbols and symbolic actions, to understand the relationship between people to people.In Taiwan, this modern festival boom began in the nineties. Compared to traditional folk festivals and political festivals in the days of martial law, the emergence of modern festivals brings Taiwan a wonderful cultural landscape as " an island of festival". In order to have a deep insight into the phenomenon of Taiwan festivals penetrating people’s life and reproducing local features, this paper attempts to reveal the characteristics of Taiwan modern festivals, from the historical context of time and space, compared with the transmutation of traditional folk festivals and political festivals in days of martial law. Moreover, this paper has a brief sketch of the basic characteristics and initial type of Taiwan modern festivals in space and time, with the collected data. This paper takes the Kaohsiung as an example, using Symbol Theory of Roland Barthes’popular myth symbol theory, in an exploring path of symbolic sociological jurisprudence. We find Kaohsiung spread its city imagery:a fusion with traditional folk and modern industry, through two major festivals. This imagery is the inevitable result of precipitation from historical origins and industrial development of Kaohsiung.Cities in Taiwan construct the unique discourse system and myth system that belong to these cities, through symbolic expression of festive symbols. Them also spread out the cities’characters. In a word, symbols not only present the theme and content of the festivals, but also contain multi-cultural significances. Festivals, is not only the carrier of culture, but also the imagery surface of the city.