This article considers the multimodal enregisterment of an ancestral time-space in indigenous-language media production. Beginning from the insight that chronotopes engage semiotically mediated, subjective experiences of time, space, and social personhood (Wirtz 2016; Hartikainen 2017), I use ethnographic evidence from lowland Ecuadorian Quichua (Kichwa) radio production and reception to explore the semiotic recalibration of the wayusa upina, the guayusa-drinking hours as a register of media performance aimed at cultural revival. Identified as one of the most significant and endangered spaces for transmitting cultural and linguistic knowledge, the nondiscursive signs and material practices used in multimodal lowland Quichua radio productions reconstitute the ancestral guayusa-drinking hours, indexically linking it to the voices and knowledge of still living elders. In doing so, these programs attempt to establish a counterchronotope of remembering, which contrasts with a widely circulating chronotope of endangerment.

Pets using “talking buttons” to ostensibly tell their owner about their thoughts and needs have become a huge success on social media. With buttons that upon activation play a prerecorded message, these devices are marketed as tools in teaching human language to animals in order to allow them to “speak their minds.” This article investigates these practices of technologically mediated human-dog interactions through the analysis of social media videos and examines the claim that these button-based interactions are illustrative of animals’ language acquisition. This article concludes that “talking buttons” in human-dog communication should rather be understood as semiotic assemblages in which meaning is collaboratively constructed through the dynamic, situated interaction of bodies, linguistic resources, objects, and touch.

Colors play an important role in the social landscape of Mauritius. First and foremost, they help to distinguish the separate identities of the island’s major religious faiths. But that is not all, as they also serve to reinscribe cultural differences between the island’s various ethnic groups. And there is also evidence to suggest that this ethnoreligious color symbolism is exploited by the island’s major political parties to mobilize the support of voters. So saturated is the Mauritian social landscape with these color schema, that is hard to see how the society can overcome its ethnic divisions and foster a sense of national unity until these cultural practices are attenuated. Indeed as long as the state continues to allocate subsidies to religious organizations on the basis of their ability to objectify their respective cultural differences, it is unlikely such practices are going to disappear anytime soon. The aforementioned issues are explored using a variety of anthropological theories and methods, with particular emphasis laid in the article on the benefits of adopting a more nuanced symbolic approach to the construction of ethnicity in Mauritius to that which is currently available in the literature.

Posthumanist thought brings a set of ethical and political concerns to the (socio)linguistic table to do with human relations to the planet and its other inhabitants. This opens up a space for reconsideration of language and materiality. In some accounts, language is an immaterial medium whose relation to the material world is only symbolic or representational. New materialist accounts of language, by contrast, view it as embodied, embedded and distributed activity (language is assembled and extended by bodies in physical space). This is to suggest that language, both material and symbolic, is deeply entwined with a world both material and symbolic and that any approach to sociolinguistics that seeks to grasp language in the world needs to work with an understanding of the dynamic entanglements between an animated world of matter and a material world of language. This is to focus on the material foundations of communication, the corporeal, physical, or technological conditions of human and nonhuman communicative interaction and on the relationships between material realities and discourse. This is to ask what and where language is and to suggest that without material relations there is no language.

This article engages with contemporary meaning and meaning changes within the porcine semantic field in Denmark. More specifically, I argue that pork is acquiring the meaning of Danishness. Analytically, I focus on the relation between language usage in different settings and on how situational usage relates to nationwide, mediatized discourses. The porcine field lends itself readily to such analyses, as pork has been the center of much political and politicized attention over the past decade, and much of the discursive engagement with pork implies or expresses an ideological and moral stance. Interactional data come from field studies in a school, a fine-dining restaurant, and a fast-food restaurant. Media data are sampled from three relatively recent debates on Danish values.

The business corporation is explored as a reflexive cultural form shaped through complex and ongoing sign processes. The concern specifically is with the dynamic whereby external representations become internal to the corporation, shaping its form and operations, and, correspondingly, internally produced representations get projected outward into the world, mingling with other representations to influence how the corporation is construed. Seven contributions to this Signs and Society supplement are organized along a continuum—from the point of what is metaphorically conceptualized as the origo to the terminus, that is, from those studying the corporation as shaped through external representations, on the one end, to those presenting a view of how the corporation emerges through representations it projects outward on the other end.

Anthropological archaeology has long had an interest in understanding the semiotic properties of material objects, since it is through such objects that most archaeological analysis takes place. In recent decades, a new emphasis on materiality has focused attention on the links between material objects and social relationships in the past. In this article I argue that, just as in modern societies, the indexical meaning of material objects, and their role in social relations, were shaped by metapragmatic discourses in the past. Thus, in order to understand the role of material objects within ancient societies, it is necessary to analyze these discourses by means of historical records, their archaeological context, and analogical examples. I give an example of this method by analyzing Classic Maya inscriptions and the ways that the discourses recorded in them characterize material objects such as temples, cult objects, and tribute payments.

The evolution of monotheism within a polytheist culture is strictly connected with the institution of the dialectics between “monolatry” and “idolatry.” On the one hand, one divinity among many becomes the center of an increasingly exclusive cult; on the other hand, this exclusivity unfolds in parallel with the stigmatization of any alternative veneration. The establishment of monolatry is substantiated both in sacred texts, which designate the only god, forbid all others, prescribe the legitimate cult, and condemn deviations, and in liturgy that avoids any reference to multiplicity of transcendence. The liturgical work of monolatry, however, is not only positive, since in addition to regulating the material, verbal, and actional signs of the cult, it also entails a destructive tension. Thus, in establishing monolatry, determining formulae for evoking the only transcendence is as essential as destroying any signs that might contaminate it by representing a rival divinity.

On July 4, 2012, experimental physicists on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, in Switzerland, announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. After analyzing trillions of proton-to-proton collisions, two teams of physicists concluded that signatures of diphotons in the final state were evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs particle. The answerability of a particle search to polysemic signals raises a deeply provocative question: In what ways does a sign facilitate the discovery of a thing? Drawing on fieldwork at the Large Hadron Collider complex, this article attempts to probe the semiosis of signatures as a palimpsest of inherent possibilities spanning the width of the universe, which is neither a contingent ordering of the Saussurean kind nor a brick-by-brick Peircean construct. What it eloquently foregrounds is the capacity of a class of signs to reflect the presence of objects, even those that are materially nonexistent, which resolves many a metaphysical perplexity involving language, thought, and reality. In the process, this article makes a case for the role of meaningful, qualitative evaluations, which lie at the root of experimental searches, and explains how these qualitative evaluations are a more trustworthy source of discoveries in particle physics than metrics or magnitudes.

In Bulgaria, the Rom/Ciganin persona is defined by non-Ciganin Bulgarians as a set of reiterated features, displayed as fixed and supposedly identifiable by all. This persona is enregistered through various semiotic processes, television being one of the most important ones. Rom/Ciganin is the name that links together a set of indexical stereotypes (naturalized as essences) and purports to denote a particular referent, a community, an ethnicity, and the individuals who, by being so labeled, are said to belong to it. Through the study of a racist act of aggression filmed in Bulgaria, I hypothesize that the hatred of Cigani passes discursively through a typification constantly reelaborated by a process of enregisterment. The making of peoples, groups, and communities is not new, but it becomes problematic when researchers, and the institution in general, relay the idea of fixed ethnic categories without problematizing them. They thus legitimize the Roma (or Cigani, Gypsies, etc.) category, and indeed the Rom persona, through the (re)production of a set of political discourses based on ethnicity and discrimination. This legitimizes a category that allows the marginalization and exclusion of individuals and families in the name of their supposed membership.

This article draws on fieldwork conducted into the linguistic practices of religious languages by three Muslim individuals in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. All informants or their ancestors in the study were born in the Muslim quarter of the Indian sub-continent, with the exception of one informant who hails from Suriname. Few works (Schor 1985; Haque 2012, 2014; Zolberg and Woon 1999) in sociolinguistics focus on the practice of Islam by immigrants in their daily lives, where a plethora of languages are used for different functions. As a field of social inquiry, there is also an attempt to understand the role or impact of religion in the immigrant’s life as a practicing Muslim. The findings suggest that Arabic remains the principal liturgical language for prayers, while Urdu was rendered as a sanctified language for many believers, as literature on Islamic teaching is widely available in this language.

This article examines the role of referential directness and community emblematization in the documentation of Libyan sign processes construed by Italian colonial ethnographers as secretive. I examine the key texts on these practices to show that colonial ethnographers metasemiotically framed the so-called argots of Libya in terms of what was understood to be their occulting function of hiding one’s intentions and their anti-language function of opposing established society. I show that Italian colonial-ethnological preoccupations with clarity and moral unity were articulated against the discursive background of French colonial ethnology of Algeria as well as Italian racist criminology anchored in the metaphor of relative opacity.

In this article, I offer an account of the “linguistic landscapes” associated with the commodification and purchase of internet services in southern Peru. Through an account of public signage deployed by internet lounges in this area as well as the ideologies that make sense of it, the analysis reveals one of the ways in which moral panic over digital gaming gets semiotically mediated. To do this, the article develops a theoretical machinery that makes sense of the ways in which public signs—relative to their infrastructural contexts—come to project channels for their uptake. When these relationships are considered relative to the ideologies that target them, what gets revealed are the moral contours of Southern Peruvian public life. The analysis ultimately shows how the concept “linguistic landscape” can be useful for the semiotic study of infrastructure as well as the forms of the public life that it helps to mediate.

This article makes a case for understanding International Sign (IS) as a distributed practice. IS, a translingual practice, arose from interactions among individuals from diverse linguistic backgrounds, integrating signs from multiple national sign languages and leveraging iconic and transparent features of sign language lexicons and grammars. At the heart of IS is the principle of calibration, an adaptive process aimed at aligning signs to foster mutual understanding. This study delves into the use of IS in an adult education classroom in Denmark, where IS includes not only the use of signs but also their interplay with technology and writing. The discussed examples suggest that IS is a fluid process in which people shift between conventional and adaptive signing. Furthermore, the examples showcase an intricate relationship between signing and forms of writing, suggesting that the latter should not be seen as separate from IS.

Combining an ethnographic account of the Finnish national pastime of ice swimming and its remediation through the Wim Hof Method with an analysis of media representations, this article expands linguistic and semiotic anthropological scholarship on the enregisterment of bodily and affective qualia by looking at how practitioners of this therapeutic technology elaborate on their corporeal and semiotic selves and the transformations of those selves after indulging in full-body contact with freezing cold water. Laying particular emphasis on stress as a discursive hub and an intensely circulating qualisign within vernacular and institutionalized health discourses, the article discusses how pedagogical ice swimming exegesis is contributing to the enregisterment of emergent forms of personhood through metasemiotic regimentations of the body that draw from natural and holistic as well as scientific and technical registers.

In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a “medium of value” in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey’s postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea’s uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey’s modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North (“Turkish”) Kurdistan.

Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump’s heterodox style of self-presentation has stirred heated metapragmatic debates within the American and international public: Was that “locker-room talk,” or abusive speech? Is his verbal irreverence an unacceptable defiance of fundamental principles of interactional ethics, or a brave attempt at reforming contemporary American speech by dismissing the epistemic inaccuracy and moral hypocrisy of political correctness? This article engages these debates by analyzing an ingenious form of typographic parody that recently appeared on digital social media. Modeled on Trump’s handwriting, the font “Tiny Hand” operates on multiple metapragmatic levels. First, the font’s childlike shapes establish an iconic connection between Trump’s hand(writing) and his brain, which, incapable of adult reasoning, generates dangerously infantile political decisions. Second, as a replica of Trump’s handwriting, the font parodies the president’s habit of correcting journalists with handwritten marginalia, thus speaking back to his attempts at silencing the press. Third, Tiny Hand works as a counter-meta-parody of the president’s political incorrectness. Finally, by evoking the parodies of Trump’s allegedly diminutive hands (and implicitly small penis) that circulated during the electoral race, the font operates as an inside joke addressed at and indexical of Trump’s counterpublic.

This article examines the reparticularization of Chinese language and culture in a teaching-learning context at the University of Rwanda. It critiques models of dissemination that suggest direct inscription of semiotic value onto local contexts of use. Ethnographically, the article demonstrates that students’ uptake of what their teachers deem real or authentic is in fact a metapragmatic reconstrual of teachers’ lexemic tokens “real” and “original” that teachers enact in their teaching activities. Students’ reconstrual incrementally alters teachers’ sign values and links their users to one other. Students’ reparticularized sign values, in turn, link their users to distinct activity routines beyond learning Chinese and kung fu in the classroom. The article argues that language and kung fu classes for students are one phase segment of larger sets of activities students undertake to become competitive in a challenging job market.

In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges with foreign names, simultaneously decrying the schools’ names and their exorbitant tuition fees. During the campaign, members of multiple student unions vandalized signboards, buildings, computers, and buses belonging to various colleges and filed a court case demanding stricter management of private schools. These activists claimed control of the linguistic landscape of Kathmandu, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This article explores the semiotic implications of this movement through analysis of newspaper coverage of the protests. The school names and talk about appropriate names delineate two competing cultural chronotopes that students employed to promote a particular vision of proper Nepali behavior and to contest what they depicted as inappropriate commodification of higher education.

This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. Rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between new and old media, this issue draws on the rich visual tapestries of South Asia to examine implicit and explicit debates over codes, scripts, and sign language systems in relation to different forms of print and digital media, from street signs to social media posts. We demonstrate the centrality of visual semiotic systems in processes of political, economic, and sociocultural change in contemporary South Asia.