تحلیل نمادهای داستان فولکلور عاشیق‌قریب و شاه‌صنم با رویکرد نشانه‌شناسی و اسطوره‌شناسی و بازآفرینی آن‌ها در طراحی زیورآلات

Background: Folk narratives and oral literature, beyond their literary value, are primary sources for representing cultural identity, collective memory, and symbolic systems. Through characters, objects, events, and symbolic actions, they convey cultural and mythological concepts, ensuring the continuity of communal values. Despite numerous recent studies on folk narratives from literary and anthropological perspectives, their symbolic potential for creative re-creation in design—particularly jewelry design—has been underexplored. Conversely, jewelry design research largely draws from historical motifs and traditional arts, rarely utilizing folk narratives for ideation. Thus, the intersection of folk narrative semiotics and contemporary design remains a notable gap. Examination of primary Ashiq sources reveals that while many later studies record the narrative as Ashiq Qarib, the authoritative primary source, Azarbaijan Ashiq Dastanlari by Ashiq Hossein Sa'i, uses Ashiq Gharib. To preserve authenticity, this article adopts Ashiq Gharib. Azerbaijani Ashiq literature, a vital branch of Iran's folk heritage, comprises romantic, epic, and moral narratives orally transmitted by ashiqs for centuries, forming a core part of the region's cultural identity. Among them, the story of Ashiq Gharib and Shah Sanam is one of the most influential, representing love, fidelity, migration, trial, hope, guidance, and union through symbolic narrative actions. These elements carry multiple layers of meaning rooted in Azerbaijani cosmology, making them suitable for semiotic and mythological analysis. This study employs two theoretical frameworks: Roland Barthes' cultural semiotics to analyze signs at denotative and connotative levels, and Joseph Campbell's mythological approach, using the Hero's Journey monomyth to reveal the symbolic structure. Alongside these, a design-oriented approach is adopted, where symbol analysis is not the end goal but a foundation for ideation and creative re-creation in jewelry design. Cultural concepts are translated into contemporary jewelry forms through abstraction, simplification, and transformation into visual elements. Ultimately, this study establishes an interdisciplinary bridge among folk literature, semiotics, and design, offering a model for utilizing intangible cultural heritage in contemporary artistic creation.
Objectives: The aim of this research is to analyze the symbols of the story of Ashiq Gharib and Shah Sanam based on Roland Barthes' semiotics and Joseph Campbell's mythological approach, and to examine their potential for re-creation in jewelry design. To achieve this aim, the study seeks to answer the following question: how do the symbols of the story of Ashiq Gharib and Shah Sanam acquire meaning throughout the various stages of the narrative, in accordance with the theoretical frameworks of Roland Barthes and Joseph Campbell, and how can these meanings be translated into the constituent components of jewelry design?
Method: The research methodologhy is descriptive-analytical. The data have been collected through library research, and the data analysis is qualitative, conducted with a symbol-oriented and design-oriented approach. In this study, the symbolic elements present in the narrative are first identified, and then analyzed based on the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes' semiotics and Joseph Campbell's mythological approach. Subsequently, the capacity of these elements for re-creation and transformation into visual components in jewelry design is examined. The unit of analysis in this research is the "stages of the narrative," rather than isolated individual symbols. At each stage, the symbols present are identified, then analyzed according to Roland Barthes' semiotics and Joseph Campbell's mythological approach, and finally, their potential for re-creation in jewelry design is investigated.
Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that the capacity of the symbols in the story of Ashiq Gharib and Shah Sanam for jewelry design is not confined to their visual or formal attributes, but is rooted in the meaning and function that each symbol fulfills within the narrative context. Accordingly, adopting the "stages of the narrative" as the unit of analysis provided a framework for coherently and consistently elucidating the interconnectedness among the story, its meaning, and the design process. In response to the primary research question, it can be argued that the symbols of the story acquire meaning within Roland Barthes' semiotic framework through denotative, connotative, and mythological significations, while within Joseph Campbell's mythological framework, they find their respective positions along the hero's journey and in advancing the narrative. The integration of these two approaches enabled the extraction of the semantic and visual components of each symbol, and demonstrated that these components, following an abstraction process, can be translated into elements of jewelry design without losing their connection to the cultural identity and core concepts of the story. Accordingly, the present research offers a model for translating folk narratives into contemporary design, which can also be applied to the re-creation of other indigenous narratives and oral literature of Iran. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the simultaneous employment of narrative analysis, semiotics, mythology, and a design-oriented approach can facilitate the creation of works that, in addition to their aesthetic value, embody cultural and semantic identity.