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Indiana Jones and the Illicit Trafficking and Repatriation… 155

Guatemala, the article describes the individual who attempted to smuggle the
artifact into the United States in violation of the Convention on Cultural
Property Implementation Act, as ―no Indiana Jones‖ [United States
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 1 October 2007].
It would be profitable to extend audience and ethnographic research into
reception of these films – something this paper will not attempt – to trace
instances of more significant and motivating effects on individual and
collective audiences, especially in Third World countries. Have the films, for
instance, assisted in setting political and legal agendas for repatriation of
specific objects? We can hypothesise that to some extent this must be the case:
that the subject matter of films can help set and assist the agenda for media,
political and legal debate on key issues, especially in international law.

SEMIOTICS AND THE INDIANA JONES TRILOGY:
REFLECTING THE REALITIES AND LEGAL RESEARCH OF
THE ILLICIT TRAFFICKING AND REPATRIATION OF
CULTURAL OBJECTS

Semiotics refers to an examination of signs within society which carry
meaning for someone. Developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, traditionally
semiotics involved the study of linguistic signs (i.e. words) and how these
signs carry meanings. Specifically, signs or representations within semiotics
are something physical (X) standing for something else (Y) material or
conceptual in some particular way (X=Y) [Danesi, p. 23]. Saussure viewed
linguistics as only one part of semiology and envisioned that all sorts of other
things which communicate meanings could be studied according to the same
method of semiotic analysis [Bignell, p. 5]. Indeed, semiotics has been
employed beyond its traditional remit to encompass almost every system
where something [i.e. the sign] carries meaning for someone. Media proves no
exception. In 1957, Roland Barthes first applied semiotics to all kinds of
media in his book Mythologies. Barthes‘ use of the term myth here does not
refer to its common understanding of traditional stories but rather to ways of
thinking about how ideas, peoples and places are constructed to send messages
to the reader or the viewer of the text [Barthes].
In doing so, he focused attention and critical scrutiny on aspects of
everyday life that previously had been reserved for the study of high culture
such as literature, painting and classical music [Bignell, p. 18] with the goal of