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.

This paper discusses how a Hawaiian corporation planned to redevelop an existing town by using a community-based approach to urban design. It examines how local residents were enlisted into the corporate work procedures in the capacity of authors and how their ideas and beliefs expressed were semiotically transformed and inscribed into design renderings of the future town. Analyses focus on how the corporation discursively positions itself as a person relative to the locals, and how various ideas expressed linguistically regarding the town are used to visually draw specific town design features. What is shown is that in taking into account and synthesizing the views of both the corporation and the local residents (i.e., customers), a design of the future town emerges as representation of a corporate brand community. It is argued that developed in this manner, the town as a commodity is one in which it is prefigured as a sign of the corporate status and social role within the community, and also that which has the capacity to yield future returns to the corporation in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.

Linguistic anthropologists have shown that the way a person reports speech or represents discourse—for example, whether they ‘put on an accent’ or merely repeat attributed words—is crucial for understanding what social action that person is undertaking. And yet, our tools for talking about the form of represented discourse are still crude. This paper offers a new tool in the notion of figure composition, defined as the formal semiotic elements that comprise a given voice. Reflecting on figure composition, alongside Agha’s (2005) notion of figure transparency, invites us to shift from asking what kind of represented discourse any given stretch of represented discourse is to asking (1) What elements of represented discourse appear to be coming from the quoted figure(s)? and (2) How are these elements used to produce interactional effects?

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.

This article follows four years of ethnographic research in Beijing and investigates tropes of “third world solidarity” (termed disanshijie datuanjie 第三世界大团结) and “cosmopolitanism” as they are pragmatically recruited or intersubjectively evoked in urban Afro-Chinese interactions. In it, I demonstrate how historical tensions between cosmopolitanism and “third worldism” are mediated through the translation of the intersubjective cultural concepts guanxi (关系) and Ubuntu. I ask: How do semiotic horizons of “history” and “culture” become pragmatically indispensable activities through which contemporary Chinese and African subjects establish historical or culturally intelligible grounds for a “novel” interaction under current conditions of South-South educational migrancy? Drawing on a genealogy of pragmatist semiotics and symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1983; Agha 2007; Carr 2011), read through a critical theoretical lens (Fanon 1965; Lukács 2010), I reveal a dialectics of interaction at play in the mediation of historical and cultural dynamics in Afro-Chinese encounters in Beijing. In doing so, this article explores a tension that emerges at the juxtaposition of third world solidarity and cosmopolitan aspiration, one—as I will show—that certainly informs what will come to be among the most pivotal interactions of the twenty-first century: that between China and Africa.

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary—“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself—were first given fleshly and ghostly form in the spiritualist séance, which early on was likened to a “spiritual telegraph.” Throughout this period, newfangled ghosts and communication infrastructures (including the telegraph, but also the equally novel postal service) developed in tandem. This article explores three such boundary genres of communication between the living and the dead: how the séance converted the “spectral aphasia” of haunted houses into the domestic séance; how ghosts of loved ones dying far away across the “phantasmal empire” turned the ghost from an actor to a message, working in tandem with telegrams and letters in the “psychical ghost story”; and lastly, how the American spiritualist press created “spirit post offices” to publish communications from the dead alongside ordinary postal “correspondence” from the living.

This article argues that a late-night television infomercial displays the structure of a ritual rite of passage. It tracks how the infomercial creates a state of ideological liminality that is redressed by a series of poetic (linguistic) parallelisms. This culminates in a trope of incorporation that transforms the social identity of the viewer from “unsuccessful” to “successful.” Ritual in form yet electronic in medium, the conclusion relates the ritual merging of consumer and new product type in processes of commodification to the ways in which cultural analogy, ideological and otherwise, moves certain kinds of social meanings into new arenas of practice.

This article examines a South Korean cultural chronotope from the perspective of Korea’s world-renowned digital gaming culture, including its professional electronic sports (e-sports) scene and the experiences of amateur gamers in online gaming cafés (PC bang). My analysis centers on two of Korean digital gaming culture’s recognizable social types and the spatiotemporal qualities of their play: professional gamers and the quickness embodied in their e-sports performances; and a specific kind of amateur PC bang gamer who is more socially isolated and whose engagement with games is slow and repetitive. I argue that through their performances in digital games’ virtual and actual-world participation frameworks, gamers orient to these social types in ways that differentially construe their relationships to semiotic depictions of places, times, and personhoods. Thinking through these orientations and their spatial, temporal, and social qualities is critical to understanding chronotopic representations of contemporary Korea.

This article explores how the affordances of pictorial representations of sign language forms (as enacted by illustrated signers) impact institutional processes of enskillment to sign language use. First, I attend to the participation framework roles such images inhabit in processes through which deaf teachers work to socialize novice signers to control the viewpoint reversals fundamental to local signing practices. I then explore how novice signers’ participant roles in relation to these images shift as they transition from animating the pictorially represented signs to performing them in ways aimed at yielding identification with the portrayed figures of personhood. Finally, through an analysis of a pictorially illustrated Nepali Sign Language version of Nepal’s new national anthem, I show how the particulars of such figures have shifted in response to dramatic political changes following Nepal’s Maoist Civil War.

The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that animate graphic artifacts and potentially lead to new encounters between francophone Tamils. Thus, transliterations into Tamil, French, or English recalibrate the chronotopes of francophone Tamil settlements. Embodying the present, Paris provides the grounds for reproducing the linguistic community through adherence to International French, despite its paucity of transliterations. Montreal’s transliterations embody the diaspora’s future, emphasizing vibrant entrepreneurial activities in grassroots literacy, whereas signs in Puducherry featuring ornamental displays of French offer opportunities to connect with a past in which Tamil and French once coexisted in colonial handbooks and streets.

The article looks at role socialization during a six-week community theater project for young adults lead by professional artists in Helsinki (2015–16). Using ethnographic data, the article examines the participants’ experimentation with photography-based and videography-based techniques, which are used to source materials from the participants’ own worlds of experience for the group’s collective creative project. The article suggests that such tasks, along with their instructional discussions, serve to introduce the participants to role-specific forms of “professional perception.” It is also argued that professional perception in the role of Artist functions in a distinctive “midgrounded” mode processing input from ongoing everyday experiences and activities in light of specific professional epistemologies. The process, then, involves significant changes in how the participants relate to their own identities and social environments.

Societies should be analyzed not only from the point of view of what they talk about but also from the point of view of what they are quiet about. Areas of silence in the semiosphere vary across cultures and history and stem from a complex interaction of historical circumstances and social agencies. Implicit norms of taciturnity are often codified into explicit legal frameworks, whose enforcement, though, substantially relies on state and government propaganda. Citizens must interiorize as a second nature the ideology of taciturnity that leads them not to share any content about certain topics. This mechanism of hegemonic silencing is macroscopically visible in times of war, when national interests solidify into specific rhetorics of taciturnity. This article is a comparative analysis of World War II silence propaganda. However, in times of relative peace both autocratic regimes and democratic states also need areas of silence and secrecy to pattern public discourse. Understanding how the creation of collective silence takes place is essential in an increasingly interconnected and global society in which limits to free disclosure and communication often give rise to tensions and conflicts.

Advancing a raciosemiotics (Smalls 2020) of appropriation, this article examines what happens when raciolinguistically charged signs circulate and are taken up in a context different to their production. Based on face-to-face and digital ethnography of K-pop fans in Mexico, this study presents a multimodal semiotic analysis of fans’ metapragmatic discourses and social media practices. I show how fans orient to the female K-pop idol, a mediatized figure of personhood (Agha 2005; Hiramoto and Kang 2017) indexical of hegemonic cosmopolitan femininity but simultaneously an exotic racialized Other in many non-Korean contexts. My examination of fan discourses and performance on social media treats the characterological figure of the female K-pop idol as a desirable, aspirational racial other for Mexican fans, while attending to the sociohistorical specificities of Asian racialization in the context of Mexico. The characterological figure is shaped by, and must interact with, local racial ideologies. My analysis suggests that such performances allow fans to differentiate themselves from other Mexican youth by demonstrating their knowledge of intra-Asian differences. Moreover, they are able to fashion neoliberal and queer subjectivities, albeit conditionally, through their indexical approximation of K-pop idols.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken throughout eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It is currently written in multiple scripts, including a Roman script devised by missionaries in the late nineteenth century, various Indic scripts, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. Each of these script systems entails different sound-to-script relationships, especially for phones such as the word-final glottalized consonants, which are not present in the dominant Indo-European vernaculars. This article traces the historical transformations of sound-to-script relations in the various scripts of Santali and tracks in particular a Romanized Santali transcription orthography that developed as a way to mediate between different scripts. The Romanized Santali form assumed a particular importance as Santali speakers started using Santali in digital and online spaces due to software limitations. However, the differing use of variants within the script to represent sounds such as word-final glottal consonants shows that what appears to be a novel orthography is in fact a “trans-script,” rhematizing the historical and ideological trajectories of the various script systems already in use in nondigital domains. The article claims that the Romanized “trans-script,” though internally diverse, has been deployed to further the standardization project and cultural politics associated with the Ol-Chiki script.

“Register” has become an essential tool in analyzing languages as sociocultural artifacts. Used in tandem with the concept of language ideology, scholars have elucidated the central role of linguistic work in defining African language and dialect boundaries as we know them today. The role of such ideas in current activist efforts to remake languages and society, however, remains obscure. Here, I focus on the N’ko movement of West Africa, which promotes a non-Latin-, non-Arabic script invented in 1949 for mother-tongue education. Today, through a language register known as kángbɛ ‘clear language’, N’ko activists are altering conceptions of Manding varieties as distinct entities into a single language spoken by tens of millions across West Africa. Such a shift is in part made possible by the compelling sociohistorical linguistic analysis laid out pedagogically in N’ko grammar books and classrooms. Equally important, however, is kángbɛ as a means to discursively cultivate oneself into a new kind of citizen; one that is savvy, hard-working, and just—the opposite of West African elites, who are seen as failing their people. Register is therefore not just an analytic tool but also a resource for cultivating empowering language ideologies to forge new educational opportunities and societal possibilities.

This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own “structural oblivion”—that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.

English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then analyzes a crowdsourced self-help column, “English as It Is Broken,” and participant observation at a Singlish awareness class. I argue that the figure of the native-English-speaking foreigner (by default white and, increasingly, American) continues to anchor what counts as “Good English” and rescales intersectional self- and other evaluations of Singaporeans’ linguistic deficiency. Good English thus invites aspirational investments in whiteness-as-position (a superordinate position in global, racializing hierarchies) but remains a target that Singaporeans are cast as forever failing to meet due to their nonwhite identities (not “being” white).

This article analyzes the semiotic links between embodied, linguistic, and nonlinguistic signs found in a Bikram yoga studio in Oslo, Norway, and on its website, which are informed by other hegemonic sites of yoga circulation on a more global level, which include the Bikram franchise and Lululemon. Drawing on (digital) ethnographic data, I employ the analytical concepts of enregisterment (Agha 2007) and mediatization (Agha 2011), in order to trace these interlocking processes within three institutional sites that disseminate and transmit a (Bikram) yoga register through the analysis of multimodal images both offline and online. The mediated messages of flexible, embodied, and highly commodified practices that attain high cultural and social value are dialectally embedded in physical, material, and technological environments contributing to posthumanist theorization on how we understand language in relation to people, objects, and place with the aim of broadening our understanding of communication to relocate where social semiotics occurs (Pennycook 2018b).

In focusing on “semiosis,” or sign process, the journal Signs and Society was established to advance through multidisciplinary research the theoretical work of Peirce, the founder of “semiotics,” and Saussure, the founder of “semiology.” This essay provides a brief “representation” of the history of the collaborative relationship between the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University, a relationship that is itself a kind of “symbol” entextualized in the pages of Signs and Society.

Like Peirce, recognized as the “father-founder” of modern semiotics, Welby too, although just recently (despite her influence on important contemporary scholars), is acclaimed as the “mother-founder,” thus entering the pantheon of the “fathers” of language and sign sciences. These great figures share a common approach to sign and language as exponents of what today is recognized as the major tradition in semiotic studies, “interpretation semiotics.” Meaning, understanding, signs, signifiers, utterers, and listeners are described as evolving in live communication, as part of signifying processes in becoming. Signs develop in ongoing interpretive/ translative processes with other signs, signifiers, and signifying processes. Signs are interrelated with values, consequently sense and significance emerge as major investigation areas for studies on meaning. Moreover, both Welby and Peirce evidence the public, social, and intersubjective dimensions of signifying and understanding, and hence also the importance of intercorporeality, dialogism, otherness, ambiguity for healthy communication, and interpersonal relations.