Cosmopolitan Civil REFEREED PAPER Societies: an Bishnuprasad Rabha as Cultural Icon of Interdisciplinary Journal Assam: The Process of Meaning Making Vol.9, No.1 Parismita Hazarika 2017 Tezpur University Debarshi Prasad Nath Tezpur University Corresponding author: Parismita Hazarika, Department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University, Napaam, Sonitpur, Assam-784 028, INDIA.
[email protected] DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v9i1.5241 ©2017 Parismita Hazarika and Debarshi Prasad Nath. This is an ABSTRACT Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative The term ‘cultural icon’ is generally used to refer to individuals or Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported images, objects, visual sign, monuments, space and so on. In semiotics (CCBY4.0) License the term ‘icon’ is used to refer to a sign that bears close resemblance to (https://creativecommons.org/licens the object that it stands for. Icons are particularly influential signifiers es/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to because they are immediately identifiable and carry complex cultural copy and redistribute the material in codes in a compact image. In this paper the understanding of ‘cultural any medium or form at and to icon’ is not limited to semiotics. Following Keyan Tomaselli and David remix, transform, and build upon Scott in Cultural Icons (2009), we believe that cultural icons are the material for any purpose, even purposive constructions. An attempt has been made in this paper to commercially ,provided the original analyze the association of ‘desirable’ meanings to a cultural icon (while work is properly cited and states its license. dropping ‘undesirable’ ones); thus, it is imperative that we look at the changing socio-political contexts behind such purposive constructions.