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 essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this has consequences for their material form and their pragmatics. Finally, the essay turns to the recalcitrance of events of semiosis to being cited, in particular, to taboo speech. Taboo speech presents a case of speech that seemingly cannot be bracketed, where performative effect necessarily and always attains. As such cases show, citation brackets and suspends, but perhaps never totally.

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.

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.

Where can we find “culture” in relation to humans’ experience of it in by-degrees normatively appropriate and socially effective semiotic interactions? By analyzing several examples of such semiotic material, we can develop the idea that “culture” is a socio-historically contingent wave phenomenon immanent in social practice dimensionalized by semiotic characteristics I here term signification—circulation—emanation.

Qualia—sensory experiences of abstract qualities such as heat, texture, color, sound, stink, hardness, and so on—focus attention on prototypically “material” entities. But how is the ontological category of materiality constituted by conventional qualities, or qualisigns? For instance, how does the sound made by knuckles knocking on a table come to be an exemplary experience of, and a conventional sign for, “materiality”? What ontologies might undermine the seeming naturalness of this category, and to what effect? This issue contributes to the growing literature on semiotic approaches to materiality by arguing that attention to qualia, as sensorial and somatic experiences mediated by cultural qualisigns of value (Munn 1986), offers a useful analytic approach to the dialectics of matter (substrate, affordance) and nonmatter (idea, concept, category). The articles in this issue describe how modes of being and becoming are represented in and organized by discourses on qualia and demonstrate the crucial role of qualia and qualisigns in “ontological politics” (Mol 1999).

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.

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.

This article analyzes the forms of metasemiotic regimentation that are inherent to any nation-branding project and examines their implications for the organization of publics and governance. Focusing on a state-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in the Republic of Macedonia, the article argues that nation-branding strategies are best understood as interventions within and across public spheres. As illustrated in the article, the nation-branding project that developed around Skopje 2014—a spectacular urban renovation plan that transformed Macedonia’s capital—included both a public relations effort that targeted several external publics and also a campaign to shape how Macedonia was represented internal to the Macedonian public sphere. This inward-facing aspect of nation branding in Macedonia manifested through metapragmatic discourses that ascribed meaning to public speech and conduct based on their imagined impact on the nation-branding project. In analyzing how government-produced media sought to interpellate Macedonians as responsible for “living the brand,” the article interrogates how logics of nation branding can organize new demands on how and to whom one performs national identity and argues that such coordinated efforts to regulate public communication constitute a wider program of economic and social governance that can be glossed as a “nation brand regime.”

Hilary Putnam (1975) proposes that a “natural kind” term relies on a division of linguistic labor in which experts discern what is or is not a member of a kind. Centering on a Philippine-elite social kind term, this essay examines how self-appointed experts develop and share “scientific” instruments, or tests, that discern whether someone is a “real” or “fake” elite. These tests report about signs of realness and fakeness by assigning “gentle” and “rough” qualities to speech and body of differentiated social types. This essay demonstrates that such qualia are central to shaping ontologies of social types; that the discerning subject, who speaks from an elevated social position as reflexive expert, is critical to this process; and that the discerner shares expertise by developing tests that rest on different ontologies of emblem. The essay argues that discerning Philippine elite types and their aspiring subtypes and countertypes presupposes an overarching ontology of fake that already renders real elites as fakes.

Liberal arts education has become highly commodified, but what is the nature of the object commodified? I argue that that objectification is brought together through the branding process in the form of the Good Student, an unambiguously positive image of the product of higher education. Drawing from Peircian concepts and from recent works on branding as semiotic process, I show how college marketers produce this construction. I also argue that the Good Student is particularly suited to objectifying liberal arts education because of the peculiar qualities of liberal arts education: it does not train students for particular jobs, it is notoriously diffuse in academic content, and it is largely about class reproduction. The Good Student stands in as the ideal neoliberal middle-class product of such education: intelligent, flexible, self-controlled, productive, and socially safe.

In the present essay the author sets out to reflect on the notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, pursuing the research beyond what is directly given in Peirce’s writings. For the purpose, Peircean phenomenology is considered to be a special variety of the Husserlian kind, because it restricts possible phenomena to threesomes and also attributes special contents to the three categories. The first restriction means that Peirce’s theory is a kind of structuralism, although a triadic one, whereas the second restriction implies that it is not merely formal. In the present essay, specific, primitive meanings are assigned to each of the categories, and they are seen to be similar in form to the dyads and triads of social psychology. At the end, signs are considered to be special kinds of Thirds, and an attempt is made to elucidate what hypo-icons owe to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

This article investigates the rhetoric of the photographic object in the context of the 3.11 disasters in Japan, where this particular object became essential for both commemorating the loss and communicating to future generations about the danger of a large-scale disaster. Through ethnography of the two different subcultures of photographic laboratory, the article documents various sign processes of the disaster-related photograph and argues that in the context of a sudden disaster, both the duty to remember the past and the hope for alternative trajectories for the future are grounded in the same regimented meaning of a particular object which nonetheless can be used to express different subjectivities. As a free-floating object, the photograph is by its nature antisemiotic in that it resists interpretation unless its visual persuasion is domesticated by “ethnometapragmatics,” that is, the highly coded cultural talk about the sociocultural, political, and historical significance of the image or a set of images.

Prehistoric archaeologists generally treat early body ornaments, such as the Blombos shell beads, as inherently symbolic artefacts that were created by symbolically capable brains. Essentially, they treat material signs in strictly linguistic terms and view them as the epiphenomenal products of internal representations that were used as templates. Yet material signification is neither inherently symbolic, nor the a priori product of innate neural structures. We must thus opt for a pragmatic semiotic theory that can describe the physical qualities and relations of material signs, and an enactive theory of cognition that can explain the anchoring of novel concepts to the material world. In synergistically fusing these strands, this article puts forth a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics. By applying this evolutionary epistemology to the case of early body ornamentation, this study traces the prehistoric process of semiotic scaffolding that eventually led to development of symbolic artefacts and practices.

Porcelain is, today, a familiar material of dishes, figurines, vases, and tiles. As commodities, they are enregistered social indexicals, so that the aphorism fits: you are what you drink, eat, or in this case eat on—or know how to admire as collector or connoisseur. This does not yet tell us, however, what qualities are picked out as shared by object and user, on what axis of social distinction. I argue that this everyday material, exactly because of the varied qualities it has been presumed to embody, has been swept up in changing regimes of knowledge, in economic strategies, and in making political and ethical discourses persuasive. In European history over the last few centuries, it has been embedded in diverse axes of differentiation, enlisted and changed not only as sign but also as material in strikingly different ontological projects.

This essay is about the relation between meaning and materiality. It offers careful and coherent, albeit noncanonical, readings of particular themes in Aristotle, Marx, Heidegger, and Peirce. And it does this in order to draw together some classic understandings of value: use value, in particular, but also exchange value, truth value, and moral value (and much else besides). Originating as a series of lecture notes offered to students interested in theoretical archeology, it culminates in a theory of embedded interpretants (as opposed to enminded, embodied, or entextualized interpretants), with an emphasis on semiotic grounds (as opposed to semiotic processes). It is meant to offer a relatively accessible summary, synthesis, and extension of four seemingly disparate, and often quite difficult, theorists.

Many living history reenactors speak of “touching the past” in their performances. In nearly all instances, these profound experiences of intimate traffic with previous epochs and persons are brought about not through physical contact with historical artifacts but through deployments of replicas and props, including recently produced adornment, weaponry, vehicles, and tools. This essay explores the roles and functions of material reproductions or substitutes of historic artifacts in reenactment performances, and how these object-oriented practices often bring about powerful sensations of historic authenticity on the part of reenactors and their audiences. I give particular attention to the use of physical objects by those who seek to reenact traumatic events and experiences related to American histories of racial injustice, including experiences of slavery and Jim Crow racial violence.

What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is intimately linked to varied forms of discursive semiosis through which distinct forms of money are created and endowed with distinct use characteristics; that specific forms of money are readily linked to (or appropriated by) group-specific interests or ideologies; and that differences in types of money conduct readily differentiate social roles and relationships among persons and groups in social history. Yet the role of discursive semiosis in the existence and use of money is not well understood, a lacuna that links most descriptions of “money” to voicing structures (or discursive positionalities) that are not grasped for what they are by those who offer such descriptions (e.g., “speaking like the State” without knowing it). This article clarifies the role of discursive semiosis in the social life of money. It shows that such clarification is a prerequisite on ethnographic answers to the questions listed at the beginning of this abstract. It presents a comparative framework for reasoning about forms of money in forms of life.

This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When brand fractions like trademarks are taken up in distinct social practices around the world, their significance is routinely reanalyzed through locale-specific metasemiotic frameworks, which formulate varied forms of life in societies around the world.

The double function of representation as “standing for” and “making present again” is explored in two case studies of ancient Egyptian cult statues and medieval Christian eucharistic transubstantiation. The experience of the “real presence” of the transcendent accomplished by ritual action is, in both cases, mediated by regimenting metasemiotic texts that proclaim and justify sacramental ontologies of transcendent realities that provide, in turn, models for their very representability in perceptible semiotic mediators. The concept of the “circle of semiosis” is proposed as a counter to scholarly efforts to anchor the variability of solutions to the paradox of representing the nonrepresentable in terms of their positioning relative to an “axial breakthrough” or to analyze metasemiotic texts as being primarily post hoc interpretations of universal psychological tendencies to see beyond the here and now.