In this essay I examine gold’s semiotic claims in the context of perceptions of gold in global financial markets, beginning with an intriguing parallel drawn by my informants between gold and Bitcoin. I make several interrelated arguments: (1) that in a variety of cultural contexts, gold has become a site for a very particular semiotic claim—that of not signifying at all; (2) that in the contemporary instance of physical gold in relation to other assets based on gold, this is expressed in an attention to gold’s material, tactile qualities (represented both iconically and indexically), and its extrasocial character; (3) that similar claims are made for Bitcoin, often drawing on a “digital metallism,” and idiom of gold; and (4) that the self-reflexive semiotic properties of gold have a long and diverse cultural history. In concluding, I speculate on how gold’s particular semiotic stance reflects one possible articulation of nature and convention as sources of meaning.

This article develops a Peircean conceptualization of qualia as “facts of firstness” by examining the pedagogical pragmatics of a voice lesson in which an intersubjective orientation to vocal sound via listening becomes a subjective orientation to voice production via bodily feeling. I focus specifically on various attempts by a teacher and a student collaboratively to repair and cultivate the student’s voice by generating and isolating qualia across proprioceptive and introspective dimensions. By tracing the sensuous semiotic modes through which qualia become crucial pragmatic signals in the process of “opening” the student’s throat, I demonstrate how these facts of firstness function as cultural emergents that are produced by and accessible through communicative, interactional, intersubjective conduct.

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.”

Memorial tablets (ihai) and memorial portraiture (iei) are important parts of Japanese funerary ritual, serving as focal points during the wake, funeral, and subsequent ritual observances. Far more than static material representations of the deceased or the social relationships they inhabited, these memorial objects display a complex and complementary relationship with the deceased and serve to ground the persistent spirit of the departed (known as hotoke), which is simultaneously of this world and transcendent to it. Furthermore, I demonstrate how both everyday and ritual interactions with ihai and iei reveal a dynamic and decades-long semiotic process that guides this entity through its transformation from a living human being through a “lifetime” as a hotoke and, ultimately, into a household ancestor.

Using ethnographic field notes on the media circulation and uptake of two specific government orders in Hyderabad, India, I propose a semiotic approach to looking at how emblems of citizenship are not simply products of state ideologies, but rather products of a dialogic relationship (sometimes contentious, often ordinary) between “state” and “citizens,” and always with reference to a history of communicative events between the two. I argue that citizenship should be understood as a communicative effect that is mediated not solely by sovereign power and strident collective movements, but more often through everyday processes by which emblems of citizenship are entextualized and the discursive interactions through which substantive claims are mobilized, negotiated, and contested. Such an approach can add both epistemological and methodological specificity to political anthropology and push it beyond the limitations of an anthropology of the state.

The missionary encounter between the London Missionary Society and Sotho-Tswana communities of southern Africa has been explored by Jean and John Comaroff as work that took place at the level of both signs and practices. In this article, I consider what a Peircean semeiotic might offer to this narrative. I argue that it provides ways to disrupt the sometimes binary relationship of signs and practices while also providing opportunities for productive interdisciplinary conversations about the affective, material, and processual nature of changes in belief and practice.

Theories of culture based on signs and systems are found across the interdisciplinary spectrum. There seems to be a growing consensus across disciplines that the forms of culture (linguistic, material, aesthetic, ritualistic, etc.) are connected to each other in some way. With the advent of conceptual metaphor theory, this article claims that the cognitive mechanism (metaphor) connecting the forms can be found in this theoretical framework. It also puts forward the notion of metaform as a nonverbal counterpart to a conceptual metaphor. In this way, it is possible to link signs and systems to each other into a network of distributed meanings that constitute a culture.

This article examines the effects of commercial digital language technologies on the regimentation of language. Language technologies based on the exploitation of large data sets—from machine translation and automatic text generation to digital voice assistants—are a particular form of human-made sign practice in which traditional language norms interact with the affordances of digital devices and the capitalist interests of those who design them. Such sociotechnological practices construct language hierarchies within the realm of commercially based language technology and can shape both dominant discourses about language in society and epistemologies of language in linguistics. The article focuses on interrelationships between digital language technology and metasemiotic interpretations of language that pertain to multilingualism, language variation, and language prestige. It examines languages as discursive constructs and reviews the role of media technology in shaping language ideology, showing that writing and print have had a crucial impact on modern language concepts. It draws on expert discourse and qualitative interviews with programmers and users and examines ideological effects of digital language technology and the potential epistemological reconfigurations of concepts of language that may emerge as a result.

This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the “Superstar” Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini’s onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke reflection on indexicality—defined by Charles Sanders Peirce as a semiotic ground based on “real connection” or “existential relation,” such as copresence, contiguity, or causality—for at issue with Rajini’s fingers is precisely the question of his auratic being and presence. Instead of analyzing performative acts of presencing through appeal to the analytic of indexicality, then, what if we interrogate those ethnographic particularities of existence and presence that constitute the ground for indexical relations and effects as such? Such an inquiry would refuse to leave indexicality as a self-evident, pregiven analytic, but instead pose it as an open ethnographic question. Opening up the question of existence and presence, as I show, allows us to unearth other semiotic “grounds” of indexicality and representation beyond those that we all too often take for granted.

The poetics of openness, as formulated by Umberto Eco in his pre-semiotic work The Open Work (1962), has already been useful and applicable to cultural studies and textual analysis. I propose that this poetics of openness be applied to critical educational practices as well. In this article, I argue that a poetics of openness when coupled with active ‘on the ground’ “critical public pedagogics” can provide a flexible framework for approaching the education of interpretation. Through this framework, a text or sign system is understood as ‘closed’ if it elicits univocal meanings: expecting a predetermined response from a generic/average reader. A text is ‘open’ when it fosters a plurality of interpretative possibilities that actively engage the “existential credentials” of the interpreter. Aesthetic openness is part of adopting a semiotic perspective toward educational processes. A theory of model reader pedagogically helps protect against the kind of radical constructivism this interpretative approach can seem to foster. Openness is not presented as a system or methodology of education, but as a pedagogical value: encouraging both educators and students to bring a perspective of critical openness to all the sign systems and discourses they engage with.

For the past thirty years, the Chinese state has focused on raising the quality (suzhi) of rural Chinese, who are seen as particularly lacking. This article shows how local bureaucrats undertake this project through distinguishing the stereotyped figure of the tuhao “rural rich,” who represents the façade of modernity without its substance, from the truly modern high-quality citizen. These oppositional figures are defined and identified through a dialectic process of rhematization and dicentization, which ties together and locates the qualities of coarseness, carelessness, and ruralness in the tuhao, and qualities of fineness, meticulousness, and carefulness in the high-quality bureaucrat. These qualia, which organize preexisting cultural logics of difference, are thereby subsumed to the state project of quality-raising. Through this process of identification, local bureaucrats commensurate local forms of valorization with those of the Chinese state and devalue nongovernmental local elites as tuhao.

Romantic notions that the advancement of archaeological knowledge depends on the thrill of unanticipated discoveries departs from the standard practice of interpreting data according to impartial research designs. However, the unexpected find commonly stymies the deductive testing of hypothesis, and the material traces (signs) upon which research relies often disrupt the course of archaeological investigations. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that the distinct semiotic affordances of material remains can significantly affect archaeological interpretations. The undertheorized epistemological problems of revelation in archaeology are brought to bear through an examination of the spectral quality of graffiti etched onto the walls of the Moche ceremonial site of Huaca Colorada in northern Peru (CE 650–850). An interpretation of the graffiti in relationship to rituals of human sacrifice and architectural renovation demonstrates that the power of the monument was founded on its semiotic density; the complex layering of signs—that continually spawned new signs—created a place of limitless discovery and affect that profoundly shaped perceptions of the huaca for both Moche visitors and later archaeologists alike. Ultimately, the graffiti provide a rare data set that permits a consideration of the effects of signs as “intepretants” in the tradition of Peirce.

The Quyllurit’i (Shining Snow) pilgrimage is the most important of the Southern Peruvian Andes. The shrine is located at the bottom of a glacier and currently attracts all the sociocultural diversity present in the regional society of Cuzco. During the main days of the pilgrimage this usually quiet place is inundated by innumerable groups of musicians and dancers and by tens of thousands of pilgrims. These particularities also attract foreign New Age pilgrims, as well as researchers and film crews. I claim, discussing Durkheim’s elaboration on “collective effervescence,” that the strong emotional experiences of the pilgrimage are functional to the reproduction of coexisting heterogeneous ways to experience and understand the pilgrimage. Most pilgrims are vocal in expressing their experience of transcendence in Quyllurit’i, though they have different ideas about who the transcendent agents addressed by the rituals are, what their relation to the materiality of the shrine is, and how to recognize their agency. The article analyzes the different ways in which New Age pilgrims, Catholic priests, and pilgrims of a highland Quechua community frame and experience the pilgrimage through different assumptions about the nature of society and how signs function in the world.

This article documents the debates surrounding the policing of the brand “Switzerland.” It demonstrates that debating nation brands—particularly within the framework of a state policy of economic expansion—seems to be about who gets to produce and consume the desires that nations are imagined to stand for as much as about who gets to capitalize on the imagined value that these nations seem to have in specific markets. I also argue that if brands effectively seem to be precious sources of added value that can be exchanged with other forms of capital, not everybody is considered to have equal access to this capital. Because of their capability to produce and naturalize hierarchies between commodities, nation brands—and the entire institutional apparatus within which they are anchored and regulated—have also to be understood as key technologies of a state infrastructure governing the distribution of capital under current capitalistic conditions.

This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil’s favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants’ ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the “crossfire,” that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the “world of crime” in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the “convoluted” language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a “direct” and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world’s most unequal countries.

The practices involved in forensic investigation center on a search for physical clues and traces that may be used to reconstruct past events. The forensic corpse is therefore involved in a materially grounded semiotics, which provides the basis for making claims about the past. Using the examples of forensic pattern matching (such as craniofacial mapping and fingerprints) and forensic entomology, I explore the different life worlds that emerge after a person’s death and how they are mobilized by forensic investigators. In this form of inquiry, claims to the real are articulated through the signs that different beings—whether human, insect, or microbe—perceive inhering in the corpse. Such forms of forensic investigation offer a productive site for thinking about the ontological status of fact and of the corpse in the context of posthumanism. Forensic signs stretch across our divided categories of the living and the dead, human and animal, nature and culture, providing alternate ways to conceptualize the relationships at play in such assemblages.

This thirteen-year ethnography investigates how two Wall Street banks instantiated dualism in practice and what the evolving consequences were for bankers and the organizations that they joined after their careers at the banks. The banks dualistically split visible controls that targeted the mind, such as autonomy and work-life balance narratives, from unobtrusive controls that targeted the body, bypassed the mind, and intensified the pace of work in ways that bankers experienced as self-chosen. These practices caused evolving forms of dualistic embodiment. During the first four years, bankers identified with their minds and treated their bodies as unproblematic objects. Starting with year 4, body breakdowns occurred; the body imposed itself as an antagonist. Desperate to perform, bankers pushed harder, which caused more severe breakdowns that eventually forced some to treat the body as a knowledgeable subject that can direct action. The bankers implemented the banks’ practices in the organizations they joined subsequently, intending to enhance autonomy, but unintentionally replicating indiscriminate overwork for all participants. As they experienced more severe breakdowns, some bankers followed their bodies’ guidance into new ways of living. Dualism thus followed a dialectic pattern, first intensifying the body repression until breakdowns turned passive bodies into revolutionary forces.

This article draws upon two concepts deployed by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his semiotic writings that have so far received little attention in studies of materiality and agency in archaeology, those of the “Interpretant” and “habit.” The emphasis of both of these concepts on the interpretive side of semiotic functioning suggests that some of the problems with current theories of material agency may be due to their focus on the production of meaning rather than the recursive nature of meaning-making that requires consideration of the consumption side of meaningful communication acts as well. Using an example of pottery-making practices from the Early Bronze Age Black Sea region, this article argues that we should instead rethink agency as an “archaeology of self” in which identity and meaning of signs—whether words, people, or things—are distributed across and emergent from social networks and communities of interpreters.

In 2007, Belfast City Council contracted with a London-based branding consultancy to develop a new brand identity for the city. The result was a new logo (a heart-shaped letter B), a bespoke typeface, and a set of brand guidelines designed to reflect “Belfast’s coming of age, the turning of a new page and the new shared enthusiasm which is palpable to all those who experience the city.” A key element of the rebranding was an official palette of sixteen colors to be deployed in association with the logo. Nonprimary hues with low saturation predominate in the new color scheme, which is overlaid upon a complex preexisting system of vivid sectarian color contrasts that mark, among other things, the partitioning of space in a “divided city.” Drawing on recent work in the semiotic anthropology of branding, the article shows that the rebranding of Belfast is part of a larger effort to frame recent histories of ethno-sectarian conflict in terms of “cultural” diversity.

After pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae, a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works through a theoretical analysis of the human anthropology of wrapping. After indicating some possible directions for further analysis (in order to deepen the typological and comparative knowledge of reliquaries), I conclude the essay by focusing on a case study of a pragmatically felicitous instance of a reliquary: the semiotic “open work” of Francis Xavier’s seventeenth-century reliquary in Goa.