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Indexical Disorders and Ritual (De)Centers of Semiosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Charles L. Briggs*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
Contact Charles L. Briggs at 307 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720–3710 (clbriggs@berkeley.edu).

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The material examined here emerged from a long-term collaboration with media studies scholar Daniel C. Hallin. I would also like to thank the many journalists, health professionals, media consultants, and laypersons who participated in the study and the graduate students and undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego who help collect analyze the materials. I particularly appreciate Dr. Richard Besser’s comments on his role as Interim Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and as a physician-journalist for ABC News. Richard Bauman and Greg Urban kindly read drafts of the article.

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