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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”