Qualia—sensory experiences of abstract qualities such as heat, texture, color, sound, stink, hardness, and so on—focus attention on prototypically “material” entities. But how is the ontological category of materiality constituted by conventional qualities, or qualisigns? For instance, how does the sound made by knuckles knocking on a table come to be an exemplary experience of, and a conventional sign for, “materiality”? What ontologies might undermine the seeming naturalness of this category, and to what effect? This issue contributes to the growing literature on semiotic approaches to materiality by arguing that attention to qualia, as sensorial and somatic experiences mediated by cultural qualisigns of value (Munn 1986), offers a useful analytic approach to the dialectics of matter (substrate, affordance) and nonmatter (idea, concept, category). The articles in this issue describe how modes of being and becoming are represented in and organized by discourses on qualia and demonstrate the crucial role of qualia and qualisigns in “ontological politics” (Mol 1999).

Tracking a single sentence as it moved around the globe, through space and across time, this essay examines the transformations it underwent, seeking to understand the motive force behind that movement and those transformations. The sentence in its various incarnations forms part of the constitutions of the majority of recognized nations on the planet. It encodes a key idea about the nature of the modern nation as a distinctive type of polity. At the same time, the motive force behind the movement may not be the power of that idea alone. Instead, the words in which it is encoded take on a thing-like quality, undergoing replication as they travel but also modification, such that the words become in effect emblems of a distinctive nation. The essay proposes that a “totemic force” impels this kind of motion, with the interest in being on a par with other nations stimulating recognizable similarities in wording, and the desire for distinctiveness vis-à-vis other nations simultaneously inspiring differences in wording.

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.

This article develops a Peircean conceptualization of qualia as “facts of firstness” by examining the pedagogical pragmatics of a voice lesson in which an intersubjective orientation to vocal sound via listening becomes a subjective orientation to voice production via bodily feeling. I focus specifically on various attempts by a teacher and a student collaboratively to repair and cultivate the student’s voice by generating and isolating qualia across proprioceptive and introspective dimensions. By tracing the sensuous semiotic modes through which qualia become crucial pragmatic signals in the process of “opening” the student’s throat, I demonstrate how these facts of firstness function as cultural emergents that are produced by and accessible through communicative, interactional, intersubjective conduct.

This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the “Superstar” Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini’s onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke reflection on indexicality—defined by Charles Sanders Peirce as a semiotic ground based on “real connection” or “existential relation,” such as copresence, contiguity, or causality—for at issue with Rajini’s fingers is precisely the question of his auratic being and presence. Instead of analyzing performative acts of presencing through appeal to the analytic of indexicality, then, what if we interrogate those ethnographic particularities of existence and presence that constitute the ground for indexical relations and effects as such? Such an inquiry would refuse to leave indexicality as a self-evident, pregiven analytic, but instead pose it as an open ethnographic question. Opening up the question of existence and presence, as I show, allows us to unearth other semiotic “grounds” of indexicality and representation beyond those that we all too often take for granted.

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).

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.

For the past thirty years, the Chinese state has focused on raising the quality (suzhi) of rural Chinese, who are seen as particularly lacking. This article shows how local bureaucrats undertake this project through distinguishing the stereotyped figure of the tuhao “rural rich,” who represents the façade of modernity without its substance, from the truly modern high-quality citizen. These oppositional figures are defined and identified through a dialectic process of rhematization and dicentization, which ties together and locates the qualities of coarseness, carelessness, and ruralness in the tuhao, and qualities of fineness, meticulousness, and carefulness in the high-quality bureaucrat. These qualia, which organize preexisting cultural logics of difference, are thereby subsumed to the state project of quality-raising. Through this process of identification, local bureaucrats commensurate local forms of valorization with those of the Chinese state and devalue nongovernmental local elites as tuhao.

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.

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.

Few sources exist from which to form impressions of how Indigenous Australians have made sense of the questions put to them by linguists. For one survey, conducted by Summer Institute of Linguistics linguists in 1970, we have a transcript of conversations between linguists and speakers. The linguists were asking for information about the mutual intelligibility and geographic extent of the named speech forms they had been tasked with documenting. Linguists and speakers brought to the encounter mutually incompatible visions of how linguistic variation unfolds in space. For speakers, speech-form geography was characterized by reticulation, rather than tessellation, and the mutual intelligibility of neighboring speech forms was to be characterized not in terms of basic vocabulary cognacy but in terms of histories of recurring encounters among speakers of different codes. The 1970 East Kimberley transcript makes audible speakers’ and linguists’ efforts to negotiate a shared way of talking about language.

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.

Hilary Putnam (1975) proposes that a “natural kind” term relies on a division of linguistic labor in which experts discern what is or is not a member of a kind. Centering on a Philippine-elite social kind term, this essay examines how self-appointed experts develop and share “scientific” instruments, or tests, that discern whether someone is a “real” or “fake” elite. These tests report about signs of realness and fakeness by assigning “gentle” and “rough” qualities to speech and body of differentiated social types. This essay demonstrates that such qualia are central to shaping ontologies of social types; that the discerning subject, who speaks from an elevated social position as reflexive expert, is critical to this process; and that the discerner shares expertise by developing tests that rest on different ontologies of emblem. The essay argues that discerning Philippine elite types and their aspiring subtypes and countertypes presupposes an overarching ontology of fake that already renders real elites as fakes.

What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is intimately linked to varied forms of discursive semiosis through which distinct forms of money are created and endowed with distinct use characteristics; that specific forms of money are readily linked to (or appropriated by) group-specific interests or ideologies; and that differences in types of money conduct readily differentiate social roles and relationships among persons and groups in social history. Yet the role of discursive semiosis in the existence and use of money is not well understood, a lacuna that links most descriptions of “money” to voicing structures (or discursive positionalities) that are not grasped for what they are by those who offer such descriptions (e.g., “speaking like the State” without knowing it). This article clarifies the role of discursive semiosis in the social life of money. It shows that such clarification is a prerequisite on ethnographic answers to the questions listed at the beginning of this abstract. It presents a comparative framework for reasoning about forms of money in forms of life.

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 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.”

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.

Porcelain is, today, a familiar material of dishes, figurines, vases, and tiles. As commodities, they are enregistered social indexicals, so that the aphorism fits: you are what you drink, eat, or in this case eat on—or know how to admire as collector or connoisseur. This does not yet tell us, however, what qualities are picked out as shared by object and user, on what axis of social distinction. I argue that this everyday material, exactly because of the varied qualities it has been presumed to embody, has been swept up in changing regimes of knowledge, in economic strategies, and in making political and ethical discourses persuasive. In European history over the last few centuries, it has been embedded in diverse axes of differentiation, enlisted and changed not only as sign but also as material in strikingly different ontological projects.