Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.

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.”

In the eras of both film-based and digital photography, and to differing degrees and with differing consequences in documentary and art photography, the role of indexicality in establishing the veracity of the image has been paramount in photo theory. There is a need, however, for expanding the ways we think about indexicality in photography. In addition to the familiar concepts of the trace, citation, reference, social diacritics, interactional cues, and artists’ intentions, the indexicality of photography may be better understood through appeal to less direct, or more densely mediated, modalities of indexicality. These include qualia (hypostatically abstracted -nesses), dicentization (the upshifting of icons into indexes of contiguity), and propositionality (the assertion of messages subject to truth claims).

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.

Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.

Taking as a point of departure the description and depiction of the anima ragionevole e beata (sensible and blessed soul) in Ripa’s Iconologia, this essay inquires, from a semiotic point of view, into the labyrinthine development of the Christian imaginary of the soul, considered one of the sources of the cultural semiotics of modern and contemporary subjectivities. Placed between the Greek model of visual representations of psyché, incarnated by countless fleeting but visible beings (sirens, birds, butterflies, snakes, etc.), and the Jewish model of a vital breath that, having to resemble the divine one, must shun any iconic rendering, the Christian imaginary of the soul develops—in parallel with the Christian theology of the soul—paradoxically, seeking to combine its depiction and, simultaneously, the denial of it.

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.”

This article explores the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic signs in enregisterment processes (Agha 2007) through the analysis of multimodal images of racial otherness in YouTube videos. It aims to show the role of images in indexing social meaning and performing hegemonic Whiteness among metropolitan Cameroonian-French elites living in Paris, through the use of a specific semiotic register indexing an “Afropolitan” persona – an elite, socially mobile and transnational type of Blackness. By focusing on the poiesis of “image-texts” (Nakassis 2019), this article will contribute to understanding the “total semiotic fact” of racial and social differentiation. It will also demonstrate that these images constitute a counter-discourse and are political acts that negotiate agency and contest power relations.

Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic changes in education and coaching services. By considering combinations of language and script as partly constitutive of the voice of an institution, this article accounts for the changing possibilities for the articulation of institutional distinctions and the ways institutional voices commoditize aspects of personae during the last twenty-five years or so in northern India.

The multimodal video meme of the ice-bucket challenge raises a “bucketful” of questions for media and cultural studies. This article focuses narrowly on unearthing who speaks in this message and what is ultimately communicated. By unpeeling the multiple layers of message structuration with view to discerning the formal structure of the concerned multimodal message, the analysis proceeds with an exploration of the function of the message in the context of a cultural predicament where networking and connectivity constitute overarching cultural values. The argumentative thrust deploys against the background of the assumption that the ice-bucket challenge constitutes a meme as minimal unit of cultural reproduction that functions on both ontic and ontological levels. The offered analysis aims at demonstrating that the enunciator of this unit is the meme itself that summons hosts or enunciatees to legitimate the prereflective memetic mode of cultural reproduction and propagation as overarching mode of communication.

The regional government of Alsace, France, first commissioned the development of a regional brand in 2010 with the hopes of enhancing the region’s presence in the European and international market. Yet drawing on contentious histories and communities in a region historically beset by perceived linguistic, national, and cultural difference, the brand became a platform through which to resolve and promote particular versions of historical conflict. This article traces the semiotic labor involved in one such production of ambivalent identity, which took the form of the so-called Alsatian oxymoron. Through the Alsatian oxymoron, meant to signify historical Alsatian duality, consumers, tourists, and even Alsatian citizens themselves were invited to reencounter Alsace as a place of attractive ambiguity, exotic difference, and irreducible complexity. This essay tracks this brand labor, seeking to reveal the semiotic strategies involved in such production. Particularly, I rely on Susan Gal’s (2012) formulation of axes of differentiation to elucidate the ways in which the Alsatian oxymoron both draws on and reconfigures historical processes of differentiation in Alsace.

This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, “Why Chinese?” we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as “cultural omnivores.” Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language.

This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold resources. Analyzing these strategies is important to not naturalize the dominant meaning that is inscribed in the built environment. As a case study, we analyze spatial design in the city of Forlì, Italy, during the Fascist regime (1922–43). Through the case study, we delineate two complimentary design strategies: typification and environmental propaganda. Typification establishes and uses familiar types of buildings to channel individual interpretations; environmental propaganda spreads cultural artifacts and enacts political rituals about the built environment. Both of these strategies try to steer users’ interpretations of the built environment in everyday life. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of a particular built form in Forlì—the headquarters of the Opera Nazionale Balilla—showing how these strategies were deployed for this particular building.

This article explores the mediatized nature of the circulation of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by focusing on psychoanalytic talk and listening practices, inside and outside the clinical setting. It shows that mediatization processes, which link institutional practices to processes of communication and commoditization (Agha 2011a), are key for understanding how psychoanalytic knowledge (including its lexical register) and its therapeutic practice get reproduced in fractionally congruent forms within everyday interactions across Buenos Aires. Specific emphasis is placed on the many uptake formulations of psychoanalytic practice that are observed today, on the scale-changing effects of mediatization, and on changes in the propinquity of interactants in psychoanalytic encounters.

Country-of-origin appeals create national identities for brands, thereby exploiting positive country-specific expertise. As a result of such marketing discourses, which utilize essentialized territory-language linkages, such practices become enregistered for consumers, and these linguistic fetishes are available as semiotic resources for the national identity branding of products. Contemporary consumers can play a role in creating, maintaining, and possibly challenging the national identity branding of products. This article reports on a recent campaign by brewer Stella Artois that used French to emphasize the brand’s Belgian origins and on consumers’ disputing this usage in a discussion of the campaign on YouTube. The case illustrates the stability of the semiotic resources of national identity branding and who is and is not allowed to use them and for which purposes. This becomes apparent when transgressing these unwritten rules is sanctioned by the audience for the ad, who seek restoration of predictability and stability in relation to borders and branding.

Balance is a socially valorized quality in the United States, and yoga a social practice widely claimed to provide it. In this article, I investigate the semiotic logics of this widespread quality and theorize its relationship to the social practice of yoga and to political projects of neoliberalism and second-wave feminism in the United States. Analyzing ethnographic interviews that I conducted with white female yoga instructors in New York City in the summer of 2016, I show that balance is invoked by speakers as a guide to repurpose chronotopically anchored models of yoga to their contemporary lives. Balance provides speakers a sense that the chronotopic contrasts in these models correspond and are compatible with one another. Identifying three linked semiotic relationships upon which balance’s logics rely—contrast, correspondence, and compatibility—I argue that speakers’ interpretation of these logics is mediated by their social positioning as middle-class white women within a neoliberal political economy in the United States.

This article analyzes how under conditions of crisis certain social actors shift the metasemiotic frames through which minority languages may be approached in order to suit place-branding purposes and to make them more widely accessible for business usage. In the cases we investigate in Shetland and Western Ireland, the new meanings associated with language are connected with how crises are framed and constructed in discourse. We thus examine two types of crises in which certain social actors view language as part of the solution to ward off specific trouble: economic recession (Ireland) and depopulation (Shetland). With the branding potential of these languages then positioned as part of the solutions to “crises,” new indexical alignments exemplify the neoliberal metasemiotic framework through which all elements of social and cultural life may be strategically made marketable—in this case on the intra- and international markets on which people themselves are vied for.

A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.

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.

This article focuses on how Facebook users understand and adapt to or resist recently increasing intensity in Facebook content-curating practices in pages organized around geopolitical satire memes generally known as “Countryball comics.” Participants attach a ludic, nonserious discursive and communal ethos to potentially offensive memes, by which they create a type of sociality that faces punitive actions from Facebook (content deletion and publishing suspensions). Following meta-level discussions about correctness, appropriateness, and acceptability, participants feel compelled to adjust their communicative behavior in ways ranging from self-censorship to altering communicative practices native to such meme pages. Moreover, participants construe Facebook as a composite human (Facebook users and content moderators) and algorithm-driven nonhuman (automated content recognition tools and filters) entity actively involved and embedded in everyday communication. Drawing on posthumanist sociolinguistics and applied linguistics (Pennycook 2016, 2018), the article revisits the traditional notion of “communicative competence” to account for the dynamic interplay between dispersed, disembodied, and (non-)human interactants, environment, and artifacts.