There are two lines of development in both sociological and linguistic thought. One makes a sharp distinction between individuals and society, with an overwhelming emphasis on the role and function of society’s norms and rules. The second holds a more integrative perspective on the interaction of society and its members and sees social norms as immanent in individual conduct rather than as externally imposed on the practices of everyday life. The first developmental line reaches its highest point in Saussure’s linguistic theory, while the second one is best promoted in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy theory. A thorough analysis of these two lines with reference to sociology and linguistics, respectively, helps further an understanding of the nature of sign. This article attempts to highlight a significant turn of semiotic thinking in Goffman’s sociological theory that has to a large extent been neglected. This semiotic turn could be formulated as characterizing the sign in terms of its more interactional function in the practices of everyday life and away from its more structural and external function of providing norms and rules for such interactions. In this approach the function of the sign is made more coherent with the social dimensions of individuals in the interactional situations of everyday life.

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 essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time’s uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.

“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 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.

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.

This essay will examine the work of Jack Spicer through the lens of Federico García Lorca’s homages and his concept of the dark earth inspiration called duende to explore the bonds created through imagined lovers, mostly looking at works proposing relationship through affect, apostrophe, and homoerotics. Spicer communicated with García Lorca in his book After Lorca, which Spicer saw as a direct channeling of the poet and his magic-imbued poetics via translation. In Spicer’s work, anamnesis and homage are attempts to unify the writer with the object of channeling—the “same-like” person with whom the author identifies. The act of imagining or channeling a similar writer into conversation provides a direct link to creativity for Spicer and others like him, who write in the vein of queer magic in order to create and perpetuate lineage and connection to the sexual world despite distances of time and space. Uncovering this perspective within the writings of García Lorca and Spicer allows a deeper and more empathetic rereading of both as queer poets and poets interested in writing-as-magic. This likewise encourages a deeper and fuller imitation of these writers by contemporary kin working into queer lineages.

This article explores the situated usage of recognitional deixis, a prominent feature of the religious register of the Catholic community of Mano, Guinea. Recognitional deixis is understood to be the marking of referents as known and recognizable by the interlocutors, typically belonging to their common ground. While deictic markers are known to reflect a specific speaker-hearer-object configuration, I suggest reversing the indexical relationship and claim that instead of indexing contextual relationships (context presupposition), deictic markers rather project them in a performative fashion (context creation). In the study in question dealing with the marking of common ground by recognitional deixis, what gets projected is a presupposition of shared knowledge. Because of the dialogic orientation of recognitional deixis, as a consequence of presupposition projection, the speaker and the addressees emerge as knowledge-sharing co-insiders. This, in turn, contributes to a performative creation of a community of co-insiders—a religious community sharing religious knowledge.

Inhabitants of Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, routinely move between economic, social, and territorial systems that order community spheres, the Brazilian state apparatus, and global networks. Each of these comes encumbered with temporalities and spatialities that differentially parse space and time. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how chronotopes are made, and remade, in a place where community commitments are paramount. Through planning and calculation of urgency and priority, Gurupaenses make strategic choices to achieve calibration between Clockwork and community time. By waiting or leaving, hurrying or lingering, and by choosing the object, mode, and speed of motion, actors independently and communally “flex” time, constructing a Ragtime temporality in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed. In so doing, actors strategically navigate these theoretically incommensurable chronotopes, thus meeting immediate and long-term needs and attending to the social, economic, and political demands of both worlds.

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 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.

Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transportation that had until then been used almost exclusively in service of colonial resource extraction at the New Guinea gold fields. The mission prized movement and circulation as a Christian evangelistic practice in and of itself, in which the “message” and the process of its spread could be conflated. Yet this emphasis on circulation has been obscured by the almost exclusive attention within the anthropology of religion to evangelism as a form of agonistic comparison between Christianity and local culture and within linguistic anthropology to circulation as about type-token relations among texts.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.