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.

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.

What is the relation between wishes and witches, between Grice and Freud, between political repression and scientific rendering? What is the relation between ideational and affective phenomena (such as desire and jealousy) and material processes (such as particle scattering and diffusion barriers)? This article demonstrates the broad similarities underlying conversational implicature and dream interpretation, focusing on the use of communicative intentions and repressed wishes as grounds for motiving inferences. It describes a variety of other hermeneutics that evince a similar logic, albeit with different grounds—witch trials among the Azande, and taboo-reckoning among the Maya. And it details the intimate relation between such hermeneutics and the techniques scientists use to produce and interpret laboratory phenomena, and thereby render the real. It foregrounds the affective nature of such processes: the pleasures and pains of laboring in productively constrained, and phenomena-creating, inferential spaces.

Prehistoric archaeologists generally treat early body ornaments, such as the Blombos shell beads, as inherently symbolic artefacts that were created by symbolically capable brains. Essentially, they treat material signs in strictly linguistic terms and view them as the epiphenomenal products of internal representations that were used as templates. Yet material signification is neither inherently symbolic, nor the a priori product of innate neural structures. We must thus opt for a pragmatic semiotic theory that can describe the physical qualities and relations of material signs, and an enactive theory of cognition that can explain the anchoring of novel concepts to the material world. In synergistically fusing these strands, this article puts forth a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics. By applying this evolutionary epistemology to the case of early body ornamentation, this study traces the prehistoric process of semiotic scaffolding that eventually led to development of symbolic artefacts and practices.

Classic Whorfian work has explored the relationship between grammatical features and cognition, but how languages can also influence thought through discursive patterns remains a largely unexplored topic in the neo-Whorfian agenda. In this article, I conduct an ethnopoetic analysis of a Chol traditional story to investigate the relationships between Chol “fashions of speaking,” in the Whorfian sense of the term, and cognitive patterns. I revisit a classic Whorfian topic—how speakers of different languages conceptualize time—but through close examination of how temporal relationships between events are deployed in narrative contexts. I argue that Chol narratives possess a nonlinear plot structure, which exemplifies the kind of non-iconic, nonlinear presentation of sequential events that is characteristic of Chol discourse and thought.

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.