The article examines how the participants of a six-week community theater project in Helsinki (2015–16) become socialized into the role of Artist by the professional leaders of the project. One of the main goals of the project was to explore the “joint voice” of the ethnically and socioeconomically diverse group and to make that voice heard in society. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article focuses on a central writing technique that was used to scan the participants’ past experiences and to rewrite them into ingredients of the joint voice. The article argues that the process of socialization involves a comprehensive epistemological transformation that gives rise to changes in the participants’ perception of their experiences. The epistemological structure that regulates the writing activities pertains both to principles of entextualization (i.e., how personal experiences become transformed into textual patterns) and to rules of interpersonal engagement (i.e., how others’ contributions are treated). Thus, it enables the construction of safe and effective channels along which private experiences can flow to the group’s collective discursive space and onward to the public.

This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. Rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between new and old media, this issue draws on the rich visual tapestries of South Asia to examine implicit and explicit debates over codes, scripts, and sign language systems in relation to different forms of print and digital media, from street signs to social media posts. We demonstrate the centrality of visual semiotic systems in processes of political, economic, and sociocultural change in contemporary South Asia.

Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.

This is a case study of an official orthographic change in eastern India, which I approach as a debate about semiotic ideologies. In 2012, an Indian constitutional amendment changed the names of one of India’s eastern states, Odisha, and its state language, Odia, in Devanagari and Roman scripts. Building on recent studies of multilingual and multiscriptal orthographies on public signs, I examine official parliamentary and popular media arguments about the orthographic correspondences between Odia, English, and Hindi names for the state and its language. As the debaters propose contrasting models of official naming and justify them, they build on different orientations to the material embodiments of linguistic signs. These different assumptions also support contrasting social imaginaries of Odisha in relationship to the nation. This article proposes that orientations to the body and embodiment can be an important component of the semiotic ideologies of orthography.

This article draws on fieldwork conducted into the linguistic practices of religious languages by three Muslim individuals in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. All informants or their ancestors in the study were born in the Muslim quarter of the Indian sub-continent, with the exception of one informant who hails from Suriname. Few works (Schor 1985; Haque 2012, 2014; Zolberg and Woon 1999) in sociolinguistics focus on the practice of Islam by immigrants in their daily lives, where a plethora of languages are used for different functions. As a field of social inquiry, there is also an attempt to understand the role or impact of religion in the immigrant’s life as a practicing Muslim. The findings suggest that Arabic remains the principal liturgical language for prayers, while Urdu was rendered as a sanctified language for many believers, as literature on Islamic teaching is widely available in this language.

The Madonna of Humility has been a subject of great interest in the twentieth century. Scholars such as Millard Meiss and H. W. van Os have long dwelled on the origin and dissemination of this emblematic iconography. Nevertheless, scholars have said little regarding its role and possible reverberation on women of the late Middle Ages. The need to domesticate the female gender inspired great orators like Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), who used humility as a means to control society. Not only could humility, if perceived as a virtue, keep women within their limited social spaces, it would have allowed them—by following a specific fabricated way of life—to spiritually lead their households, gaining the possibility of eternal salvation. This article explores the faith-based concept of humility to unlock the forces that pushed toward the diffusion of a religious iconography, capable of imposing a modest way of life that was more in keeping with the Catholic teachings of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento. Several portrayals of the Madonna of Humility are proposed to investigate the role these paintings might have played in Italy in exalting humility as a noble virtue.

Over the last few decades there has been a miniature industrial revolution in the buying and selling of securities on capital and derivatives markets. Whereas most trading once happened in open outcry pits or over the phone, trading now occurs primarly via electronic limit order books. Whereas once traders could have little education and find work as a consequence of membership in a local insular network, new financial hires are now the most talented graduates of PhD and master’s programs in the hard sciences and mathematics. Even though these circumstances are well attested, knowing is not enough for some to become this new kind of trader. I suggest that the theory of semiotic ideologies—that is, what grounding assumptions people bring to the process of interpreting signs—can be used to illustrate boundary cases of social change in which people are simply unable to learn enough to adapt to new circumstances in their lives. I will show that even though traders can adopt the appropriate semiotic ideology of markets that their times demand, some of them will never be skilled enough to fully participate. This, in turn, has to do with the nature of change in a capitalist economic system.

This article explores how the affordances of pictorial representations of sign language forms (as enacted by illustrated signers) impact institutional processes of enskillment to sign language use. First, I attend to the participation framework roles such images inhabit in processes through which deaf teachers work to socialize novice signers to control the viewpoint reversals fundamental to local signing practices. I then explore how novice signers’ participant roles in relation to these images shift as they transition from animating the pictorially represented signs to performing them in ways aimed at yielding identification with the portrayed figures of personhood. Finally, through an analysis of a pictorially illustrated Nepali Sign Language version of Nepal’s new national anthem, I show how the particulars of such figures have shifted in response to dramatic political changes following Nepal’s Maoist Civil War.

This article traces the 2015 controversy following porn performer Stoya’s accusation of rape by fellow performer James Deen, in which competing ideas about Stoya’s ability to consent circulated through popular and social media discourse. Focusing on the occupational class of porn performers, the article suggests that interpretations of sexual assault and notions of consent rely on particular models of personhood to prescribe and delimit definitions of who and how one can occupy a consenting (and thus, nonconsenting) subjectivity. The article introduces three chronotopic formulations of consent, spatiotemporal parameters for when and where consent is considered applicable, demonstrating how each is applied to a victim of sexual violence according to how the victim is interpellated as a particular kind of subject.

The article looks at role socialization during a six-week community theater project for young adults lead by professional artists in Helsinki (2015–16). Using ethnographic data, the article examines the participants’ experimentation with photography-based and videography-based techniques, which are used to source materials from the participants’ own worlds of experience for the group’s collective creative project. The article suggests that such tasks, along with their instructional discussions, serve to introduce the participants to role-specific forms of “professional perception.” It is also argued that professional perception in the role of Artist functions in a distinctive “midgrounded” mode processing input from ongoing everyday experiences and activities in light of specific professional epistemologies. The process, then, involves significant changes in how the participants relate to their own identities and social environments.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken throughout eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It is currently written in multiple scripts, including a Roman script devised by missionaries in the late nineteenth century, various Indic scripts, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. Each of these script systems entails different sound-to-script relationships, especially for phones such as the word-final glottalized consonants, which are not present in the dominant Indo-European vernaculars. This article traces the historical transformations of sound-to-script relations in the various scripts of Santali and tracks in particular a Romanized Santali transcription orthography that developed as a way to mediate between different scripts. The Romanized Santali form assumed a particular importance as Santali speakers started using Santali in digital and online spaces due to software limitations. However, the differing use of variants within the script to represent sounds such as word-final glottal consonants shows that what appears to be a novel orthography is in fact a “trans-script,” rhematizing the historical and ideological trajectories of the various script systems already in use in nondigital domains. The article claims that the Romanized “trans-script,” though internally diverse, has been deployed to further the standardization project and cultural politics associated with the Ol-Chiki script.

The concept of otherworld is often conceived as a realm inhabited by supernatural beings or as a fantastic location where the possibilities of imagination are realities. It gets linked to concepts of otherness and the other, but the question of what makes something an otherworld generally remains unasked. Otherworlds are usually thought of as somehow outside of or beyond the empirical world, but the issue is not so simple.

Behavioral science, once a hypernym for a collection of fields, is becoming a hyponym of itself. Nonacademic and academic practitioners alike increasingly discuss a “behavioral science,” a discipline that consolidates research from the other behavioral sciences to improve humans’ (and organizations’) predictive and manipulative powers. Despite the usefulness of a shared understanding of behavioral science, few can agree on a definition. After a brief overview of what behavioral scientists do and produce, I provide an inexhaustive list of the predicates behavioral scientists use to interpret the objects, people, and signs of their field and explore the grounding phase parts of objects’ or signs’ existence that behavioral scientists read to categorize objects or signs. I propose that behavioral scientists have begun to define behavioral science work by classifying objects or signs (which make up their work) using a partonomy in which a behavioral science-ness of a sign is directly positively correlated with the strength of its relation to the signs psychology and economics. Finally, I discuss what this definitional practice suggests for the behavioral science field now and in the future.

In Sri Lanka all public signs are required by law to be in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. This article investigates the multiple, clashing ways that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers (Tamils and Muslims) living in-country and abroad interpret Tamil signage blunders in relation to the position of ethnic minorities in the postwar nation. I incorporate ethnographic interviews to examine how three Tamil speakers made sense of a signboard, displayed in several government buses in Colombo, in which the Tamil portion read “reserved for pregnant dogs” instead of “reserved for pregnant mothers.” I situate their responses in an account of the circulation of Tamil signage errors on Facebook. I argue that Tamil speakers’ disparate interpretations reflect contrasting semiotic ideologies concerning the intentionality of the blunders and the relationship between the posted signboard images and lived sociolinguistic practices (Keane 2003, 2018), which have implications for imagined postwar futures and transnational Tamil political activism.

This article considers the properly spatial aspects of communicative practices among speakers of Śħerēt, a Modern South Arabian language, living in Dhofar, Oman. I argue that participants in face-to-face interactions (particularly the domestic hospitality that dominates daily activity) move, speak, and position themselves in ways that attenuate interactional contact itself. This drawing out of contact is a site of normative practice across modalities including body posture, gaze, movement, and seating position in participation frameworks. Not simply creating distance or imposing categorical bounds on relationality, these signs attenuate the intensity of contact as the spatial extent of possible or actual encounters with others by complicating the accessibility of participants. As such, I constitute attenuation as an analytic that registers distortions of contact as manipulations of social space in a way that runs alongside (not counter to) other semiotic functions of gradation and categorization. The role of space as the medium of contact with others and its attenuation points to Dhofari concerns about accessibility that locally structure both interactional performance and understandings of sociality as such. This article in turn indicates new ways we can describe the nonneutrality of the spaces of social life.

The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that animate graphic artifacts and potentially lead to new encounters between francophone Tamils. Thus, transliterations into Tamil, French, or English recalibrate the chronotopes of francophone Tamil settlements. Embodying the present, Paris provides the grounds for reproducing the linguistic community through adherence to International French, despite its paucity of transliterations. Montreal’s transliterations embody the diaspora’s future, emphasizing vibrant entrepreneurial activities in grassroots literacy, whereas signs in Puducherry featuring ornamental displays of French offer opportunities to connect with a past in which Tamil and French once coexisted in colonial handbooks and streets.

This article is about machine learning as it relates to classic concerns in anthropology and the social sciences, regarding meaning, value, and culture, as well as agency, power and performativity. It focuses on the role of machine learning, with its peculiar manner of modeling phenomena, in mediating: (i) the sensibilities and assumptions agents have (qua interpretive grounds and algorithmic models) insofar as these mediate their actions, inferences, and affects; and (ii) the actions, inferences, and affects of agents (qua computational processes and interpretive practices) insofar as these drive their sensibilities and assumptions. More generally, it offers a model of the process of modeling per se, so far as this process unfolds in contexts of machine learning and beyond. In this respect, the metamodel offered is meant to capture some of the key dynamics of the tense and mutually transformative relations linking objects (of analysis), data (drawn from those objects), models (of such objects, as informed by such data), and actions (grounded in such models, and often transformative of such objects). It foregrounds the wily, epistemic, performative, and often violent dynamics of such processes when the objects being modeled are themselves agents capable of modeling.

The practice of attaching inventive labels for things with a wide spectrum of selections to choose from is a widespread marketing practice. This article examines how unusual “fancy” color names are used in the South Korean cosmetics industry. Selecting and comparing the semiotic composition of color names of four companies operating within a single cosmetics corporation, this article reveals how fancy color term formations ideologically constructed in order to represent color function so as to lay the ground for social semiosis. Color terms in contemporary mediatized interactional settings work to mark and distinguish shades but, further, to provide basis for the characterization of commodities. What is shown is that commodity color terms for female cosmetics entail a scaling of femininity and that this scaling also relates a rescaling of those who can purchase such verbalizable colors.

Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic changes in education and coaching services. By considering combinations of language and script as partly constitutive of the voice of an institution, this article accounts for the changing possibilities for the articulation of institutional distinctions and the ways institutional voices commoditize aspects of personae during the last twenty-five years or so in northern India.