Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.

The Madonna of Humility has been a subject of great interest in the twentieth century. Scholars such as Millard Meiss and H. W. van Os have long dwelled on the origin and dissemination of this emblematic iconography. Nevertheless, scholars have said little regarding its role and possible reverberation on women of the late Middle Ages. The need to domesticate the female gender inspired great orators like Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), who used humility as a means to control society. Not only could humility, if perceived as a virtue, keep women within their limited social spaces, it would have allowed them—by following a specific fabricated way of life—to spiritually lead their households, gaining the possibility of eternal salvation. This article explores the faith-based concept of humility to unlock the forces that pushed toward the diffusion of a religious iconography, capable of imposing a modest way of life that was more in keeping with the Catholic teachings of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento. Several portrayals of the Madonna of Humility are proposed to investigate the role these paintings might have played in Italy in exalting humility as a noble virtue.

Over the last few decades there has been a miniature industrial revolution in the buying and selling of securities on capital and derivatives markets. Whereas most trading once happened in open outcry pits or over the phone, trading now occurs primarly via electronic limit order books. Whereas once traders could have little education and find work as a consequence of membership in a local insular network, new financial hires are now the most talented graduates of PhD and master’s programs in the hard sciences and mathematics. Even though these circumstances are well attested, knowing is not enough for some to become this new kind of trader. I suggest that the theory of semiotic ideologies—that is, what grounding assumptions people bring to the process of interpreting signs—can be used to illustrate boundary cases of social change in which people are simply unable to learn enough to adapt to new circumstances in their lives. I will show that even though traders can adopt the appropriate semiotic ideology of markets that their times demand, some of them will never be skilled enough to fully participate. This, in turn, has to do with the nature of change in a capitalist economic system.

The article looks at role socialization during a six-week community theater project for young adults lead by professional artists in Helsinki (2015–16). Using ethnographic data, the article examines the participants’ experimentation with photography-based and videography-based techniques, which are used to source materials from the participants’ own worlds of experience for the group’s collective creative project. The article suggests that such tasks, along with their instructional discussions, serve to introduce the participants to role-specific forms of “professional perception.” It is also argued that professional perception in the role of Artist functions in a distinctive “midgrounded” mode processing input from ongoing everyday experiences and activities in light of specific professional epistemologies. The process, then, involves significant changes in how the participants relate to their own identities and social environments.

This article considers the properly spatial aspects of communicative practices among speakers of Śħerēt, a Modern South Arabian language, living in Dhofar, Oman. I argue that participants in face-to-face interactions (particularly the domestic hospitality that dominates daily activity) move, speak, and position themselves in ways that attenuate interactional contact itself. This drawing out of contact is a site of normative practice across modalities including body posture, gaze, movement, and seating position in participation frameworks. Not simply creating distance or imposing categorical bounds on relationality, these signs attenuate the intensity of contact as the spatial extent of possible or actual encounters with others by complicating the accessibility of participants. As such, I constitute attenuation as an analytic that registers distortions of contact as manipulations of social space in a way that runs alongside (not counter to) other semiotic functions of gradation and categorization. The role of space as the medium of contact with others and its attenuation points to Dhofari concerns about accessibility that locally structure both interactional performance and understandings of sociality as such. This article in turn indicates new ways we can describe the nonneutrality of the spaces of social life.

This article is about machine learning as it relates to classic concerns in anthropology and the social sciences, regarding meaning, value, and culture, as well as agency, power and performativity. It focuses on the role of machine learning, with its peculiar manner of modeling phenomena, in mediating: (i) the sensibilities and assumptions agents have (qua interpretive grounds and algorithmic models) insofar as these mediate their actions, inferences, and affects; and (ii) the actions, inferences, and affects of agents (qua computational processes and interpretive practices) insofar as these drive their sensibilities and assumptions. More generally, it offers a model of the process of modeling per se, so far as this process unfolds in contexts of machine learning and beyond. In this respect, the metamodel offered is meant to capture some of the key dynamics of the tense and mutually transformative relations linking objects (of analysis), data (drawn from those objects), models (of such objects, as informed by such data), and actions (grounded in such models, and often transformative of such objects). It foregrounds the wily, epistemic, performative, and often violent dynamics of such processes when the objects being modeled are themselves agents capable of modeling.

The practice of attaching inventive labels for things with a wide spectrum of selections to choose from is a widespread marketing practice. This article examines how unusual “fancy” color names are used in the South Korean cosmetics industry. Selecting and comparing the semiotic composition of color names of four companies operating within a single cosmetics corporation, this article reveals how fancy color term formations ideologically constructed in order to represent color function so as to lay the ground for social semiosis. Color terms in contemporary mediatized interactional settings work to mark and distinguish shades but, further, to provide basis for the characterization of commodities. What is shown is that commodity color terms for female cosmetics entail a scaling of femininity and that this scaling also relates a rescaling of those who can purchase such verbalizable colors.