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.

Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of “space-time,” or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti ‘the turning over of space-time’, to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution.

Based on the cultural and linguistic analysis of a sample of posts written on Facebook by twenty Italian mothers-to-be, this article discusses the practice of online posting as a form of storytelling, this being considered one of the privileged human ways of processing and assigning a meaning to experiences by weaving them into plots and formulas. Facebook is defined as a narrative device that promotes not only the production of user-generated content but also its framing according to typical narrative patterns. Pregnancy is a beloved theme on Facebook because it lends itself to a reiterated formulation in the form of a personal story. Developed against the specific background of the Italian sociocultural context, a narratological consideration of the sample identifies the most recurrent plots through which pregnant women shape and share the phases of their experience, stressing both their similarities to, and differences from, offline stories of pregnancy. A closer look at the semiotic and rhetorical dimension of the posts finally allows us to explore the continuous interplay between verbal and visual codes and the semantic fields exploited to tell about pregnancy on Facebook. The combination of these two analytical perspectives in the study of online pregnancy narratives constitutes the theoretical and methodological purpose of this article.

This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring idea that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, “accidents” caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly “threaten” the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former.

This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a Malian Islamist found guilty of the 2012 destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. We examine how the prosecution and defense reflexively formulate the hearing as part of a wider text trajectory and how they align personae across participation frameworks by locating the current courtroom event into a wider dialogical field. A careful inspection of these metapragmatic devices reveals how trial participants navigate the multiple tensions facing this emergent, amalgamated form of criminal adjudication, which lacks a coercive apparatus of its own and still bears the traces of the political act of its institution.

This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.

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.

Bakhtin’s concept of addressivity affords an investigation of why my students and I were frustrated by the seeming lack of a connection between our participation in a self-tutorial in preparation for a digital literacy initiative, on the one hand, and the benefits of the acquisition of digital literacy, on the other hand. More than one structure of addressivity emerged from the tutorial, such that my students and I found the one that provided clues to the benefits of digital literacy utterly irrelevant to the completion of the self-tutorial and future tutorials. Structures of addressivity identified herein demonstrate that the individuals involved in the self-tutorial are not poised to benefit from interdiscursive ties beyond the self-tutorial and future tutorials. Such benefits are relegated to organizations. This article thus locates what has been identified as neoliberal agency within the addressivity structures that underpin a digital literacy initiative.

This article compares “official” college representations of race as diversity with narratives by students of color about racialized experience, with particular attention to the metasemiotic principles governing the first and the discursive organization of the second. Colleges and universities (like other contemporary organizations) represent race as a set of equally weighted, equally ordered demographic categories not explicitly differing in markedness, presented as if universal and deployed in accounts of institutional progress. Students of color (racially marked) talk about their experiences of race in relation to whiteness (unmarkedness). Colleges and universities rely on these students to provide the numbers for representations of progress but too often ignore the conditions that make their experiences so difficult, as those are also the conditions that match the habitus of the elite white students who constitute the school’s primary market.

“Linguistic ideology,” a field of inquiry opened by Michael Silverstein, has become a major topic in semiotically oriented disciplines. This article focuses on an important aspect of ideology (linguistic or otherwise): its connection with social positioning, point of view, and differentiation. Two sets of examples, mainly from fieldwork in Senegal, are drawn upon to illustrate that connection. One set concerns people living in the same community but differing in the ideologized values and projects through which they interpret linguistic practices. The other set concerns people who are relative strangers, speaking languages that are not their native tongues—in ways that can reveal Whorfian effects from the native language that rests in the background. Although these two sets of examples are initially drawn upon to emphasize different points, the article argues that they differ more in degree than in kind. Both illustrate how social positioning is tied to differences in ideologized interpretation and, more generally, that where there is ideology, there is differentiation.

This article examines how a discourse of nationhood has developed and evolved in Acadie since the nineteenth century. It describes the important role played by language ideologies in the construction of competing discourses in the Francophone world. The discursive changes that have occurred since the 1960s in relation to the distribution of material and symbolic resources will be explored, with a specific focus on the resemioticization of French vernaculars in artistic creation and tourism. Finally, the authors will illustrate how the Acadians have transformed a discourse of stigmatization into a discourse of differentiation by rejecting the standard language ideology that has traditionally defined the Franco-Canadian community. The examples of artistic production and tourism will be used to illustrate how Acadians have profited from the adoption of this discourse in national and international markets.

Concerns of appropriate housing may arise in older adulthood. Some older adults may make life work in the place we call home; others take steps to voluntarily relocate in anticipation of health and other needs. While moving at any age can be challenging, moving from one's home in later life also represents multiple reflections: past, present, and future selves, control of one's space and relinquishing the care of one's space to another person or corporation, family support and family fissures, and the body's capacities and limitations. Moving is examined as a moment where regimes of value are negotiated through competing semiotic ideologies and at times social roles are transformed. Ethnographic fieldwork occurred from January 2009 to May 2012 in the Midwest United States. This paper presents experiences of relocation of material and social role transformation as older adults make this housing and, writ large, life transition.

Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.

Perceptions of boundaries between communicative codes and the modalities through which they are produced and perceived are mediated by social actors’ particular communicative repertoires and histories. I focus in particular on how the affordances of SignWriting (SW), a writing system for sign languages that has been adapted in Germany to additionally inscribe the physical movements by which spoken languages are produced, reveal and affect users’ diverse interpretations of the relationship between German Sign Language (DGS) and German. I examine the production and interpretation of DGS SW texts on two different scales: a classroom in Germany and a transnational, multilingual online network of SignWriters with whom classroom participants engage.

A condensation symbol is a complex and relatively discrete bundle of icons, indices, and symbols, in the Peircean sense, that calls up affect and directs that affect toward social ends. This article analyzes a corporate motivational video produced by Harley-Davidson, Inc., an American motorcycle manufacturing company, as a condensation symbol. In addition to analyzing the formal features of the video, the article furnishes evidence, in the form of interview data, that the symbol is capable of influencing the orientations of individuals who view it. The “symbolic force” of the video is the force of interest that causes the orientation to the company carried by the symbol to be transmitted to its viewers. In this sense, the video resembles the dominant ritual symbols described by Turner. The present research also suggests, however, that the video summons distinct kinds of affect in different individuals, exerting a differentiating effect within social space.

The designation of Catalan culture as guest of honor at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair raised controversy over whether Catalan culture is expressed in one language or two. This was an opportunity for elites to promote Catalan industry internationally but also to compete over visions of Catalonia for domestic political purposes. An analysis of media texts from the controversy shows that national branding emerged as a key trope in the official defense of emphasizing Catalan over Castilian-medium literature. As a discourse sanctioned in the global political economy, branding was strategically revoiced by Catalan officials to parry Castilian critics’ free-marketeer accusations of illiberal essentialist protectionism. This analysis uses Silverstein’s concept of indexical order to argue that branding functioned not only as a sign of Catalonia’s distinctiveness in the global marketplace but also at a higher order as a brand in itself to index the Catalan administration’s cosmopolitan, contemporary, and rationalist character.

This article examines the shifting semiotics and politics of visibility in Brazilian Candomblé activism in the late 2000s in the city of Salvador. It analyses how the use of publicly salient discourses and signs of peace and antiviolence activism by activists from the African diasporic religion Candomblé reconfigured the religion’s practitioners public image from that of politically passive practitioners of “black magic” and self-sacrificing “black mothers” to that of politically active peace and antiviolence activists. I argue that this transformation was effected by a realignment of the general public’s chronotopic orientation toward the religion and its practitioners from a chronotope of concealment to one of political visibility. This shift in chronotopic orientation not only aligned Candomblé practitioners with the social persona of the politically engaged peace activist but also produced a new social persona of a religiously motivated “black mother of peace.”

This article analyzes moral registers about and within one of the world’s largest food corporations. Based on fieldwork at a French multinational corporation, I trace how speech registers surrounding food circulate across institutional arenas, reconfiguring material connections between the company and consumers. I examine the emergence of a “Big Food” register, critical of the food industry, and analyze the discourses it has triggered within one corporation, comparing talk of ethics and economics among employees in Paris and Johannesburg. Corporate efforts to produce value through food result from struggles between value projects of diverse employees who are positioned differently relative to corporate hierarchies and global inequalities. I argue that moral language in and around the food industry can elucidate current transformations in global capitalism, revealing multinationals’ struggles to credibly voice registers aligned with consumers’ values in their search for competitive advantage.

Perched at the edge of California, Tijuana occupies a strategic location for capitalist mobilities of all sorts. This essay examines how the violence of drug trafficking and the speed of the transnational assembly plants came into resonance during a period often known locally as the racha, or streak, of violence, when Mexico’s so-called war on drug trafficking was perceived by many to be at its worst. The semiotic underpinnings of the racha, I argue, lie in the qualia of speed and slowness as these are valorized in supply-chain provisioning of the assembly plants and then calqued onto automotive traffic in the city. Speed and slowness here, though, are bound up with a highly equivocal sense of individual agency. By tracking these qualia across spheres of practice and, finally, into narratives of violence, I show how the racha took shape as a public crisis in the ability to assign individual agency securely.

The knife, a synecdoche of slaughtering, is an important culinary tool that is charged with the power of religious speech acts and that has a significant semiotic function in Christian-Muslim encounters in Ethiopia. The slaughtering rituals not only transform the neutral natural animal into a sacred cultural food but also invest the meat with an intense aura of disgust among followers of the other faith. The slaughtering narratives continue to manifest themselves in other public signs, namely, in the Cross and the Crescent, on butcheries, and restaurants, for example. These two universal signs are the corollaries of an anterior sign, in other words, the knife that, in the discursive realm of food and religious identity in Ethiopia, implicates the different slaughtering rituals of Orthodox Christians and Muslims.