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.

본 논문은 소비자의 브랜드 수용 및 확산에 신화의 속성을 내포한 브랜드 내러티브(brand narrative)가 가지는 의미의 연관성 규명과 함께 그동안 연구되어온 신화적 원형(mythological archetypes)을 브랜드 내러티브의 구축에 실제적으로 적용하기 위한 개념적 과정의 논의를 목적으로 한다. 이를 위해 원형으로서의 신화가 브랜드 내러티브와 결합하였을 때 적합한 의미 생성 경로로서 작용하는지에 대해 알아보고, 브랜드의 상징체계(symbol system) 구축에 관한 신화적 상징 재목적화(repurposing)의 매개 작용을 규명해보고자 한다. 아울러 Barthes의 기호학 체계를 통하여 신화의 의미 해석에 대해 탐구하고 브랜드 내러티브의 구축을 위한 원형 신화의 함축적 상징체계로서 적용 가능성을 분석함으로써 이를 통한 결론과 시사점을 도출하고자 한다. 본 연구는 신화와 제품 혹은 브랜드 간의 연관성 규명을 위해 부분적으로 활용해 온 기존의 이론들을 하나의 흐름으로 연결, 정립하여 연구 분석의 소재 및 방법을 확장시켰다는 점에서 의의가 있다.