Blood gains many distinct meanings from different modes of classification, some of which are calibrated by the representational capacities of sacrifice. The Priestly source from Hebrew scriptures and the early Jewish text Second Maccabees both reread ancient sacrifice traditions, articulating new meanings for blood as part of the transformation from a temple-based locative system of animal sacrifice to a utopian decentered model of human self-sacrifice. The Priestly writers created a new semiosis of blood as the purifying essence of temple sacrifice. Second Maccabees offers a temple-replacement ideology with one foot in the locative notion of temple, and the other in suffering and martyrdom—displaced animal sacrifice—as the path to an individual afterlife. Its new meanings for blood are stimulated by conflict over two competing locative systems (foreign and native) and the need to, even while renewing, ultimately replace the temple cult.

This paper problematizes the feature of being barefoot that appears to be an idiosyncratic feature found in Rubens’s depictions of (milk)maids, mythical and biblical female figures. To appreciate oddities Rubens created, the paper starts with a discussion that enlarges on the merits that we may gain from contemplating allegories set against pleasant-looking landscapes. It then scrutinizes the heated debates over the validity of iconic signs, which enables us to recognize our application of certain laws and principles as the essential condition in carrying out semiotic cum hermeneutic inquiries. We, therefore, become empowered on the one hand to perceive oddities as manifestations of freedom and play and, on the other, to unify different approaches the painter adopted on the same horizons of judging. All in all, this paper argues for the urgency of our developing morally creative conditions in justifying and interpreting strange and deviant forms.

In this article I examine the practice of Bible translation and the underlying sets of Christian ideologies regarding the commensurability of linguistic forms. Based on ethnographic research conducted at a biannual Bible translation workshop in Mindoro, Philippines, in 2013, during which the Bible was translated into three Mangyan languages, I argue that the degree to which the actual linguistic forms in the scriptures are divinely inspired often exists as an irresolvable semiotic problem for Bible translators. To this end, I discuss the means through which the Holy Spirit is taken as an essential mediator between the fallible work of Christian translators and the Bible as a language-instantiated form of God’s presence. I show how the employment of “generic” language by Christian translators enables them to mirror and circulate the divine universality of scriptural meaning in earthly form. I propose that generic language can be viewed as a site in which multiple and often conflicting claims of language universality and purity are present.

Pindar’s epinikia challenge their original audiences to play the role of the “savvy interpreters” of these complex choral praise poems. Their interpretive skillfulness enables them to overcome obstacles purposively set by the poet. The ideal interpretation, an “entextualized” and overarching “metapragmatic interpretant,” is not static since these odes invite their hearers to vicariously travel alongside the deictically calibrated narrative ego and, equipped with insight drawn from interwoven exemplary myths and gnomic maxims, to insure that momentary praise for victors leads to their widespread if not immortal “glory” (kleos). The central argument of the article is that the odes develop an extended analogy between athletic prowess/victory and poetic excellence/performance that links the generation of kleos with the potential for recontextualized reperformances. This semiotically mediated “pragmatic” process is originally modelled by the poetic ego and then sequentially constructed and enacted/performed by savvy interpreters, including later readers.

This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called “slang” or “argot” in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called “slang” has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either (a) the reflexive processes through which samples of the thing come to be differentiated from other discursive behaviors or (b) the social-interpersonal processes through which slang expressions undergo change in form and significance for different members of a language community. This article examines these reflexive social processes by considering examples from a large number of languages and historical periods. It offers a comparative framework for studying the forms of social life that such discursive behaviors enable or displace.

Mainland Japanese middle-school teachers working on Chichijima Island encounter an address pattern they describe as unusual. While students address teachers using last name and honorific title, teachers call students by their first names only. Some of the teachers experience the indexical relationship between the exchanged forms as a nonreciprocal disjuncture, describing it as “too hierarchical;” others experience it as a reciprocal disjuncture, saying it creates a “too close” atmosphere in the school. Many who do not fall back on the culture-internal stereotype are teachers who struggle to maintain authority in the classroom. Here, these teachers’ “misreading” of the indexical meanings associated with the address forms invokes a trope of misunderstanding where a theoretical repair is summoned as a means to fix a problem. Silverstein’s model of indexical orders provides a means to understand the metapragmatic dissonance that characterizes teachers’ discourse.