The major outlines of enregisterment as a metasemiotic process are well understood in linguistic anthropology, so we can turn to its further systematic implications. The article explores three “moments” in enregisterment, positing that practices and value projects create registers that act as clasps, relays, and graftings, each producing interdiscursivity and thus circulation. They connect arenas of social action in different ways. The connections are rightly called social organizations of interdiscursivity, since they link and organize not only discourses and registers but also the societal arrangements—NGOs, nonprofits, welfare offices, political platforms, academic circles—that are constituted around registers and through which registers have their powerful effects of connection (and separation) in specific historical moments. The examples, mostly from the politics of Hungary, surely have parallels elsewhere.

“Linguistic ideology,” a field of inquiry opened by Michael Silverstein, has become a major topic in semiotically oriented disciplines. This article focuses on an important aspect of ideology (linguistic or otherwise): its connection with social positioning, point of view, and differentiation. Two sets of examples, mainly from fieldwork in Senegal, are drawn upon to illustrate that connection. One set concerns people living in the same community but differing in the ideologized values and projects through which they interpret linguistic practices. The other set concerns people who are relative strangers, speaking languages that are not their native tongues—in ways that can reveal Whorfian effects from the native language that rests in the background. Although these two sets of examples are initially drawn upon to emphasize different points, the article argues that they differ more in degree than in kind. Both illustrate how social positioning is tied to differences in ideologized interpretation and, more generally, that where there is ideology, there is differentiation.

Ancient ideas about the limits of what can be put into words demonstrate the popularity of the notion that language is a guide to truth, even if that truth is defined by the limits of language. Two ancient and one modern example all locate truth in a reality that can be tracked both by the possibility of and the inherent failure of definition. Ancient exegetes started with the basic concept that words were both names for objects and the best formal representations of divinity. Yet names were not capable of fully defining ineffable divinity. These two ideologies—that names formally represent divinity and yet fail to completely describe divinity—coexisted in a delicate balance. The theme of divine ineffability, first articulated as part of a theology emphasizing the complete power of the deity over matter, has been adopted by modern scholars and converted to a theory to locate reality in hard-to-define personal experiences. The ineffable as what cannot be spoken about shifts focus from divinity to the self (the locus of modern experience).

This article reviews the concept of semiotic ideology and its implications. Semiotic ideology refers to people’s underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce. Those assumptions vary across social and historical contexts. But semiotic ideology as such is not a kind of false consciousness, nor is it something that some people have and others do not. Rather, semiotic ideology manifests the reflexivity that is inherent to the general human sign-using capacity. It ties general semiotic processes to specific judgments of ethical and political value: to take a sign a certain way is to take seriously the world it presupposes and, often, the life that that world recommends. Two examples show how attention to semiotic ideologies sheds light on the articulation of general semiotic processes with particular social, cultural, and political ones. The analysis of social class helps show some political implications of semiotic ideologies. Clashes over the status of religious signs reveal the ontological and ethical entailments of semiotic ideologies, in which the very existence of a sign’s object may be in dispute. Such ongoing semiotic processes help endow social existence with much of its constructive, uncertain, and conflictual character.

This article compares “official” college representations of race as diversity with narratives by students of color about racialized experience, with particular attention to the metasemiotic principles governing the first and the discursive organization of the second. Colleges and universities (like other contemporary organizations) represent race as a set of equally weighted, equally ordered demographic categories not explicitly differing in markedness, presented as if universal and deployed in accounts of institutional progress. Students of color (racially marked) talk about their experiences of race in relation to whiteness (unmarkedness). Colleges and universities rely on these students to provide the numbers for representations of progress but too often ignore the conditions that make their experiences so difficult, as those are also the conditions that match the habitus of the elite white students who constitute the school’s primary market.

The commonplace division of labor between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and sociology and social anthropology, on the other, is predicated on a nominalist error, the belief that institutionally embedded and named fields denote discrete phenomena. An influential and much-cited twentieth-century bellwether of this division was Susanne Langer’s distinction between “discursive” and “presentational” form, a polythetic distinction that tacitly constructed a metaphysic. An examination of social interaction in its most elementary form suggests that no such distinction is warranted and that, instead, a systematic account of social interaction transcends the boundaries of these and several additional “preliminary disciplines.”

Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for discursive interaction. In domains of sociocultural life where persuasion is self-consciously instrumentalized, the poetics of manual gesture can assume additional significance. In the mass mediatized debates and speeches of presidential campaign politics, poetically dimensionalized manual gesture is not only pronounced but has become a basis for enregisterment, for constituting political gesture as a distinct mode of persuasive, embodied communication: the “political” in political gesture is constituted in part by a reflexive, aesthetico-pragmatic sourcing of poetics as a (if not the) measure of rhetorical “effectiveness” and “eloquence.”

The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw the meteoric rise to power of Donald J. Trump, unprecedented perhaps in the history of American politics not only for its style but also for its unswerving “address” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) to a “base” that was large enough to give Trump an electoral college victory. This talk was connected most distinctively (though of course not exclusively) to the social media platform Twitter. This article provides what is arguably the first anthropological linguistic analysis of Twitter, while also interrogating for the first time Trump’s use of Twitter as a speech practice. It is no doubt too soon to tell, but it is suggested here that rather than the broad-spectrum address of the message that has heretofore characterized much of the history of presidential campaigns, Trump’s social-media address to a base may mark a shift in the rise of presidential talk to come.

Among the most highly esteemed verbal artists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society were preachers, some of whom attained a remarkable degree of celebrity. As Bakhtin has reminded us, however, ritual forms like the sermon are prime targets for carnivalesque rekeying. Sermon parodies were abundant in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular culture from the Jacksonian period onward. As the producers of early commercial sound recordings in the United States (ca. mid-1890s–1920) sought to build their market with expressive forms that would be attractive to consumers, they included sermon parodies in their catalogs. The most common sermon parodies in the early commercial record catalogs had a special edge. They were burlesque performances, drawn from the minstrel-show tradition, in which performers in blackface animated popular stereotypes of the traditional African-American preacher. In this essay, I examine a sampling of these parodies of the African-American oral sermon to suggest what we can learn from them about the popular entertainments of the day, the emergent culture of commercial sound recording, and the racial politics of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

Focusing on Michael Silverstein’s account of relationships between “microcontexts of interaction” and the “macrosociological,” this article takes up his suggestion that news reporting provides particularly clear examples of such links. Examining a mundane ABC World News report on changing recommendations for vitamin intake, it analyzes how leading physician-journalist Richard Besser constructs a ritual center of medical semiosis, projects it as inaccessible to laypersons, and models a circulatory process that requires highly constrained forms of communication. Ethnography in newsrooms, clinical spaces, public health offices, and elsewhere suggests how notions of (1) a ritual center that produces medical knowledge, (2) a primordial space of doctor-patient interaction that affords limited, highly regulated access to laypersons, and (3) what are construed as processes of communication require the continual making of communicable models that attempt to separate projected first and second indexical orders and, just as importantly, generate indexical disorders that create anxiety and seem to require assistance from physician-journalist guides.

The anthropology of finance has been dominated by ethnographic field research and the performativity thesis advanced by Donald Mackenzie and Michel Callon. This essay takes a different tack and proposes a semiotic framework to look at the central concept in derivative finance, that of volatility. Volatility has also been increasingly important in our contemporary culture and politics of volatility, suggesting that the implications of the concept touch upon far more than just finance. I trace the development of the Black-Scholes model for pricing options from its initial use as a foundation for a “physics of finance” to its current use to calculate the “implied volatility” of trillions of dollars of derivative contracts on a daily basis. At the same time, the use of Black-Scholes to calculate implied volatility violates one of the fundamental presuppositions of the model, and I argue that instead of being part of a “physics of finance,” Black-Scholes now functions more like the discourse-indexical component of a “leaky grammar of prices.”

Exploring interactions among the forces (inertia, entropy, interest, and metaculture) that affect the motion of culture generally, this article focuses on metapragmatic indexicals as well as denotationally explicit metapragmatic signs, whose effects Silverstein dubbed “metaforce.” Pitch raising, as a metapragmatic indexical employed in narration, builds excitement in relationship to an unfolding stretch of mythic discourse, thereby contributing to the interest in that discourse that also impels its future replication. The interest in learning something new that drives the processes of replication underlying ordinary conversation can be aided by questions, as explicit metapragmatic formulations projecting the discourse shape of the desired response, just as explicit metapragmatic statements can be used to block expected replication processes in the flow of conversation, exerting a resistance. Interest can also be channeled from one discursive arena (such as wine talk) to another (such as coffee talk) through the process Silverstein calls “emanation,” based on similarities in the discourse form and content, a kind of metapragmatic iconicity. The article concludes by suggesting that similar processes are at work in disciplinary arenas, where Silverstein’s term “metapragmatics” itself has come to shape the entire field of linguistic anthropology and to be widely replicated elsewhere.

Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality’s implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, language in culture—has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality’s ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality’s ongoing utility to both.