This study attempts to analyze the social and cultural meanings of the ethnic groups to which different types of shamans belong in Siberia from the appearance characteristics in terms of clothing through Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory. The research method here is to analyze three types of shaman costume classified by Holmberg, which are bird-type, deer-type, and bear-type, through theoretical research and to investigate the analysis process of Roland Barthes’s semiotics theory. Roland Barthes’s approach to semiotics presents an analysis model that can explore the sociocultural meaning of the Siberian shaman costume. The research results are as follows. In the first type, to be closer to the god of the upperworld, shamans transform themselves into birds by decorating their costumes with the characteristic elements of birds such as feathers and wings. In the second type, the shamans’ costumes are made of deerskin, and the headdress is shown in the shape of antlers to make it easier to receive messages from the upperworld and run fast in the underworld. In the third type, the shaman’s costume is made of bearskin, the head is covered with bearskin, and the body is decorated with bear pendants. Through the power of the bear, the shaman is sent to the underworld to defeat evil gods and remove diseases. Shamans can show their particularity of being a demigod and non-binary gender through clothing. They use this to reflect their authority as a medium of communication between man and god.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) has been a leading French semiotician, philosopher and cultural critics, along with Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Barthes began his academic career as a freelance-writer for Comba during the late 1940s and for Le Lettres nouvelles during the early 1950s in Paris. His early writings on various topics, based on his existentialism and Marxist critique, were collected in Mythologies (1957) and the publication of the book was the beginning of Barthes'semiological research. His early semiology in Mythologies exposes the process of ideological distortions in the meaning of the sign. He calls the distorted sign as "myth." All kinds of sign in modern capitalistic society became "myth" through the process of "a tri-dimensional pattern" in the interaction of the signifier, the signified and the sign. A newly-defined meaning of the sign becomes to function as a new signifier. When this new signifier is interrelated with the signified of the sign tautologically, it produces another "sign" which is called "myth." From the process of "a tri-dimensional pattern" in myth-making, we missiologists may learn some important semiological lessons from Barthes' scholarship. Missionary translators have the similar task in mission field when they want to translate the terms and concepts of Christian faith into the local languages. When they translate the Christian term, they experience the same process of myth-making: the newly-translated term becomes a new sign, to which new religious meanings are accumulating. The sign becomes a new signifier after missionaries' translation of the term. But the most important aspect that we may learn from Roland Barthes's semiology is that it is local people who relate or accumulate new religious meanings into the newly translated terms. Through their acceptance and/or rejection of the term as their religious term, the newly-translated term, i.e., a new Christian sign, begins to possess new Christian meanings.