I read Clifford Geertz's article "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." This is an example of how semiotics is useful. It isn't really a set of tools; it's an attitude, or a set of things to look for. Geertz concludes that the "purpose" of Balinese cockfights parallels the purpose of literature in Western society: it's a representation of their most-important and most-threatening social dynamics. It symbolizes status conflicts, but it doesn't relieve their tension, or have any directly understood functional role except entertainment. But not shallow entertainment, like a cockfight in England would have been; entertainment the way literature entertains, by letting the Balinese look at a representation of themselves and the best and the worst that can happen, without any actual risk.

Geertz arrives at this conclusion because he is asking himself, when he sees the Balinese acting in ways he doesn't understand, "What story are they telling / enacting?" rather than assuming the activity is what it looks like (Western cockfighting), or that it must have a (non-artistic) social function.

It seems to me, though, that a structuralist approach could arrive at the same conclusion as easily.