This article examines ideologies of chronotopic partibility at two state-affiliated churches in Hangzhou, one Protestant and one Catholic, that emerged in response to the politics of demolition and development. The presence of Christianity in the state imaginary of the modern cityscape has been challenged by urban renovation projects ranging from Zhejiang Province’s 2013–16 cross removal campaign to the construction, beginning in 2018, of a massive commercial complex on land partially expropriated from a Catholic church in Hangzhou. Protestants made sense of cross removals by organizing time, space, and personhood according to qualities associated with the home, separating warmth and sociality (renqingwei’r ) from the buildings in which they are experienced. Catholics protested the city government’s requisition of a part of their “house” by demanding in its place the renqing, or human feeling, mediated by money, that is God’s in perpetuity. Chronotopic partibility or time-space-personhood fracture is both a symptom of dispossession and an ideology that makes possible moral exchange between church and state.

This article examines the semiotic and rhetorical mechanisms by which Obama’s “race speech” builds a mutual identification between Blacks and Whites; it emphasizes the importance of locus communis commonplace and “equivalential links” (Laclau 2005, 94). It also looks at how Obama himself constructs his identity in order to appeal to a racially and politically heterogeneous audience. In addition, it attempts to identify and explain some elements of the speech that may carry heightened emotional content and that may induce a distancing or identification reaction in an audience. From the theoretical standpoint, the article brings to bear the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics understanding of metaphor and meaning-generation mechanisms on the Laclauian post-Marxist poststructural concept of the “people,” in order to explain how metaphors participate in the construction of a “people” during a presidential campaign. In terms of cognitive theory, it draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s understanding of metaphorical thinking ([1980] 2003) and Castells’s elaboration on emotions in relation to political cognition (2009). The sociological perspective on emotions aids in the analysis of emotions in social interaction (Turner and Stets 2009). The contribution of this article lies in the semiotic analysis of the role of emotion-evoking elements of the race speech that may indicate a constitutive role in the formation of a “people.”

Building on the case study of the performative practice of voguing within ballroom culture among LGBTQIA+ communities, the aim of this article is to recognize a facial agency capable of putting into tension three thresholds of meaning: visibility and invisibility; identity and otherness; nature and artifice. On the basis of these tensions, interpretive habits concerning identity are incorporated into the face as a semiotic dispositif that negotiate sociocultural expectations and limitations. These habits, when agentively performed through the face, give shape to a communicative project that manipulates platforms of identity into biopolitical masks. The analysis will also give an account of how “worn” biopolitical masks reproduce and perform a facial monstrum, or warning, and how this specification warns others of the normativity of aesthetic and biopolitical appearance while activating an intentional transformation of identity.

Focusing on Michael Silverstein’s account of relationships between “microcontexts of interaction” and the “macrosociological,” this article takes up his suggestion that news reporting provides particularly clear examples of such links. Examining a mundane ABC World News report on changing recommendations for vitamin intake, it analyzes how leading physician-journalist Richard Besser constructs a ritual center of medical semiosis, projects it as inaccessible to laypersons, and models a circulatory process that requires highly constrained forms of communication. Ethnography in newsrooms, clinical spaces, public health offices, and elsewhere suggests how notions of (1) a ritual center that produces medical knowledge, (2) a primordial space of doctor-patient interaction that affords limited, highly regulated access to laypersons, and (3) what are construed as processes of communication require the continual making of communicable models that attempt to separate projected first and second indexical orders and, just as importantly, generate indexical disorders that create anxiety and seem to require assistance from physician-journalist guides.

In Sri Lanka all public signs are required by law to be in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. This article investigates the multiple, clashing ways that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers (Tamils and Muslims) living in-country and abroad interpret Tamil signage blunders in relation to the position of ethnic minorities in the postwar nation. I incorporate ethnographic interviews to examine how three Tamil speakers made sense of a signboard, displayed in several government buses in Colombo, in which the Tamil portion read “reserved for pregnant dogs” instead of “reserved for pregnant mothers.” I situate their responses in an account of the circulation of Tamil signage errors on Facebook. I argue that Tamil speakers’ disparate interpretations reflect contrasting semiotic ideologies concerning the intentionality of the blunders and the relationship between the posted signboard images and lived sociolinguistic practices (Keane 2003, 2018), which have implications for imagined postwar futures and transnational Tamil political activism.

The multicharacter biographies of hip hop artists, consumers, and distributors in post-Yugoslav spaces (ex-YU) straddle a period of seemingly never-ending, teleologic ‘transitions.’ The business models of regional music industries have also dramatically changed after the emergence of new forms of digital distribution. These transformations each occur within broader, often violent shifts from self-managed state socialism to clientelistic neoliberalism. I analyze artists’ discussions of professional limitations and the debates surrounding brand acts, or artists’ symbolic range of ambivalent, critical, and pragmatic stances toward media industries. Artists often compare the precarious present of a marginal position within the record business in ex-YU using frames that reference foreign and past elsewheres, including an era of ‘good life’ socialism. A debate has emerged as to whose future a new present laden with brands and industry regulation best serves.

Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of āsana (posture, pose) that they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. In a wide range of contexts, teachers and master practitioners insist that these techniques of the body must be executed in particular ways and accompanied by specific mental states if they are to have their intended ethical effects. Yoga is thus understood to combine outwardly observable technique with an unobservable yet essential, inner component. One consequence of this to which students and teachers are pervasively oriented is that the techniques become vulnerable to a kind of deethicalization by which they are “bleached” of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. The paper begins by comparing concerns about deethicalization among yoga practitioners with similar ideas about folklorization among participants in a women’s mosque movement described by Mahmood (2012). I then turn to consider three semiotic processes relevant to the specific case: circumscription, performed demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization.

Tōru Takemitsu (1930–96), dean of Japanese composers, wrote scores for 100 films. In many cases, he faced the task of giving presence to an unseen, suprahuman force or being. This article deploys musical semiotics and topic theory to examine a gesture I call “distorted iconism,” in which an aural resemblance is altered so as to suggest transcendence. I analyze distorted iconism in Takemitsu’s film work, looking initially at Kwaidan, Hi-Matsuri, and Woman in the Dunes. In these films, Takemitsu needed to indicate that what we see is insufficient, and used such devices as delayed sonic cues, distorted instrumental sound, and strongly marked static music to create a sacred space in which the unseen and transcendent manifests. I use these examples to set up a close investigation of Ran, in which Takemitsu effects complex layers of meaning that both enrich and subtly contradict the director’s vision.

The late seventeenth century gave rise to a powerful innovation in Western European social and theatrical dance, the art of dance notation. The new representational technology of dance notation provided a means to broadcast fashionable dances emerging from the French court as well as new compositions from dancing masters operating in London and elsewhere. In the first three decades of the eighteenth century, dance notation quickly reached faddish heights, with published dance manuals in high demand among upper levels of English society. One publication from the era, Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures, provides a window onto the descriptive tool of dance notation, its function in society, and its eventual decline. While providing a previously unimagined communicational technology, the completeness and specificity of the dominant form of dance notation ultimately spelled its demise.

Cross-language internet memes have emerged as a unique and popular mode of online communication, combining bilingual elements with visually textual components. These memes exhibit distinctive characteristics at semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels, rendering them a noteworthy semiotic phenomenon in contemporary digital culture. To deepen our understanding of cross-language internet memes, this study investigates user perceptions through a questionnaire, employing SPSS Statistics software for analysis. Applying a social semiotic approach, we decipher the semiotic mechanisms of cross-language memes, shedding light on their potential implications for identity construction. Additionally, we reflect on two prominent trends in internet meme development: the shift from monomodal to multimodal communication and from monolingual to multilingual expressions. This research hopes to provide insights for meme research and online discourse investigations.

While numerous studies have addressed medieval wounds, few scholars have critically examined the religious role of scars in medieval Europe. This article incorporates theological writings, hagiography (saints’ biographies), chivalric romances, and the visual arts to assess the semiotic significance of medieval scars. This article uses Roland Barthes’s notion of semanticization as an organizing principle. As Barthes has shown, the process of meaning-making is contingent upon its social context. Indeed, semanticization allows the conventionality of signs to operate. This article explores how Western medieval Christianity, with its repository of values and symbolism, enabled scars to function as signs. The religious context undergirding medieval scars allowed them to transcend from traces of accidental bodily markings to portals to rich theological significance.

Interlingual translation, intersemiotic translation, and mediation seem to be the main means by which students who are learning English as a foreign language in Greece connect the learning of English as a foreign language and Greek as a mother tongue. This research probes into the teaching of English in Greek state schools and more specifically the teaching of English, as a foreign language, in the first year of junior high school. The research attempts to evaluate the authors’ choices of visual iconic messages that promote the Greek culture and language, the students’ mother tongue, as a means of mediation—mostly through interlingual translation—to familiarize them with the target language and culture, namely, the English language and culture. The fact that the visual iconic and verbal signs under scrutiny are all derived from a textbook published by the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs gives more significance to the specific signs (thus legitimizing them).

There is a very general problem of representing transcendence in different culture: how to make present what is by definition beyond human experience. Many cultures forbid it, other as the Christian one allow representations of some divine presence in the world. Jewish tradition is in general strongly anti-iconic and especially forbids any representation of divinity. But in the most sacred place of Judaism, the Holy of Holies, the book of Exodus prescribes the presence of two statues of “cherubim,” which are identified with a class of angels. This article follows the motif of cherubim in the biblical and postbiblical literature, showing that they are not representations of transcendence, but rather indirect representatives of the Jewish people as they provide a device for realizing the state of the people and its relation with the divinity, a metapragmatic sign for the paradoxical presence of the transcendence in the midst of it.

This article traces the 2015 controversy following porn performer Stoya’s accusation of rape by fellow performer James Deen, in which competing ideas about Stoya’s ability to consent circulated through popular and social media discourse. Focusing on the occupational class of porn performers, the article suggests that interpretations of sexual assault and notions of consent rely on particular models of personhood to prescribe and delimit definitions of who and how one can occupy a consenting (and thus, nonconsenting) subjectivity. The article introduces three chronotopic formulations of consent, spatiotemporal parameters for when and where consent is considered applicable, demonstrating how each is applied to a victim of sexual violence according to how the victim is interpellated as a particular kind of subject.

This article discusses how law is produced semiotically as a category of social action through a study of jury decision making and the production of jury verdicts. In the US criminal justice system, citizens called for jury duty are interpellated as jurors and instructed in legal reasoning through encounters with a variety of texts. Jurors respond to the state’s hailing by producing themselves as competent jurors who can reason according to specifically legal forms of objectivity that may diverge from their everyday assessments of facts in reaching verdicts: for example, they can find a defendant legally “not guilty” while maintaining a belief in the defendant’s guilt. In ethnographic data discussed in this article, jurors affirm their competence as legal reasoners via the “enregisterment” of a style of reasoning that they link indexically to the constitutionally enshrined ideal of “impartiality.” In so doing, jurors recontextualize a style of reasoning, grounded in a logic of a “moralized objectivity of self-restraint” (Daston and Galison 1992), entextualized in the texts used to instruct them in legal reasoning during the trial process. Tracing these processes of enregisterment illustrates how legitimacy of law is semiotically mediated.

Few manifestations of intertextuality are better known than plagiarism and copyright infringement, yet few have been less studied by linguistic anthropologists. A variety of textual ideologies of plagiarism and copyright are evident in English composition pedagogy and intellectual-property law, some more and some less author-centric or committed to the values of individuality and originality. The tension between them is articulated in sophisticated arguments, in the course of which the disputants draw explicit attention to the ideological character of the debate, giving it a reflexive, meta-ideological cast. These lay ascriptions of ideology play a wider variety of roles than do ascriptions by linguistic anthropologists—for example, to delegitimize expansive copyright jurisprudence, ward off plagiarism accusations, and rally support for the cultural commons. To facilitate the analysis, a cognitive account of language ideology is developed along with notions of accentuation, focalization, and peripheralization that can be of use in the study of language ideology more generally.