Searle’s social ontology concerns the question of how it is that we are to reconcile different aspects of reality but takes for granted a particular kind of naturalism based on his unexplicated “basic facts” of nature. The consequence of this approach is that Searle’s ontology deals specifically with social reality and its institutions, and never directly with the basic facts upon which his position rests. Paradoxically, this naturalistic assumption alienates his theory from its connection with the basic facts because the nature of this connection is taken for granted and not explicitly shown how nature is connectable to the social world. I hope to show that Searle’s project is redeemed by biosemiotic theory that makes an explicit connection between the beginnings of sociality, which is where Searle’s work starts off, and the biological and physical nature of things, which is what Searle’s work takes for granted but what biosemiotics explicates.

One of the key reasons that have been put forward for justifying the superior argumentative force of visuals over verbal arguments in advertising discourse is their immediacy. The immediate resonance of visuals and their forceful appeal bear considerable resemblance to the argumentative force of enthymemes as hidden premises in informal rhetorical argumentation. In this article an attempt is made at bridging the logical and pathemic appeals of enthymemes under the aegis of what may be called the pathology of the enthymeme, while demonstrating that what has been pejoratively tagged, since Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, as “the psychopathology of everyday life” in fact constitutes the very underpinning of enthymematic structures and a system of topoi of which such structures constitute an integral part. By assuming as the point of departure of this genealogico-pathological tracing Heidegger’s opening up of the meaning of logos and as destination Heidegger’s ontological reading of everydayness, the enthymematic embeddedness of cultural topoi is depathologized, while being reinserted in its “proper” pathological dimension. The exemplification of how visual enthymemes function and may be translated as hidden premises in advertising discourse seeks to demonstrate the pathology of the enthymeme as “unquestionable” major premises that underpin visual arguments.

The double function of representation as “standing for” and “making present again” is explored in two case studies of ancient Egyptian cult statues and medieval Christian eucharistic transubstantiation. The experience of the “real presence” of the transcendent accomplished by ritual action is, in both cases, mediated by regimenting metasemiotic texts that proclaim and justify sacramental ontologies of transcendent realities that provide, in turn, models for their very representability in perceptible semiotic mediators. The concept of the “circle of semiosis” is proposed as a counter to scholarly efforts to anchor the variability of solutions to the paradox of representing the nonrepresentable in terms of their positioning relative to an “axial breakthrough” or to analyze metasemiotic texts as being primarily post hoc interpretations of universal psychological tendencies to see beyond the here and now.

Bakhtin’s concept of addressivity affords an investigation of why my students and I were frustrated by the seeming lack of a connection between our participation in a self-tutorial in preparation for a digital literacy initiative, on the one hand, and the benefits of the acquisition of digital literacy, on the other hand. More than one structure of addressivity emerged from the tutorial, such that my students and I found the one that provided clues to the benefits of digital literacy utterly irrelevant to the completion of the self-tutorial and future tutorials. Structures of addressivity identified herein demonstrate that the individuals involved in the self-tutorial are not poised to benefit from interdiscursive ties beyond the self-tutorial and future tutorials. Such benefits are relegated to organizations. This article thus locates what has been identified as neoliberal agency within the addressivity structures that underpin a digital literacy initiative.

Concerns of appropriate housing may arise in older adulthood. Some older adults may make life work in the place we call home; others take steps to voluntarily relocate in anticipation of health and other needs. While moving at any age can be challenging, moving from one's home in later life also represents multiple reflections: past, present, and future selves, control of one's space and relinquishing the care of one's space to another person or corporation, family support and family fissures, and the body's capacities and limitations. Moving is examined as a moment where regimes of value are negotiated through competing semiotic ideologies and at times social roles are transformed. Ethnographic fieldwork occurred from January 2009 to May 2012 in the Midwest United States. This paper presents experiences of relocation of material and social role transformation as older adults make this housing and, writ large, life transition.

Following Bourdieu, the process of commoditization has been understood to be the most socially significant process that art undergoes. That understanding presupposes the power of economic value, the order of value that all other values must resist or be overtaken by. This article analyzes the Santa Fe Indian Market as a tournament of values, where various orders of value compete for legitimacy and authority. While opposed aesthetic and economic orders frame evaluations at Indian Market, they serve primarily as background. At Indian Market, evaluations that use an administrative order of value are the site of intense contest and have great social significance both to this art world and to broader social, political, and economic concerns. A social theory of art relevant to many different art forms and traditions must take into account multiple orders of value and provide a method for analyzing their potential significance to participants.

There is a very general problem of representing transcendence in different culture: how to make present what is by definition beyond human experience. Many cultures forbid it, other as the Christian one allow representations of some divine presence in the world. Jewish tradition is in general strongly anti-iconic and especially forbids any representation of divinity. But in the most sacred place of Judaism, the Holy of Holies, the book of Exodus prescribes the presence of two statues of “cherubim,” which are identified with a class of angels. This article follows the motif of cherubim in the biblical and postbiblical literature, showing that they are not representations of transcendence, but rather indirect representatives of the Jewish people as they provide a device for realizing the state of the people and its relation with the divinity, a metapragmatic sign for the paradoxical presence of the transcendence in the midst of it.

Liberal arts education has become highly commodified, but what is the nature of the object commodified? I argue that that objectification is brought together through the branding process in the form of the Good Student, an unambiguously positive image of the product of higher education. Drawing from Peircian concepts and from recent works on branding as semiotic process, I show how college marketers produce this construction. I also argue that the Good Student is particularly suited to objectifying liberal arts education because of the peculiar qualities of liberal arts education: it does not train students for particular jobs, it is notoriously diffuse in academic content, and it is largely about class reproduction. The Good Student stands in as the ideal neoliberal middle-class product of such education: intelligent, flexible, self-controlled, productive, and socially safe.

This essay compares representations of religious conversion in four Italian chivalric poems: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Semiotically read, they cast new light on the Catholic idea of the religious self in its development from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern era. In this evolution, the Council of Trent represents a fundamental watershed.

Anthropological archaeology has long had an interest in understanding the semiotic properties of material objects, since it is through such objects that most archaeological analysis takes place. In recent decades, a new emphasis on materiality has focused attention on the links between material objects and social relationships in the past. In this article I argue that, just as in modern societies, the indexical meaning of material objects, and their role in social relations, were shaped by metapragmatic discourses in the past. Thus, in order to understand the role of material objects within ancient societies, it is necessary to analyze these discourses by means of historical records, their archaeological context, and analogical examples. I give an example of this method by analyzing Classic Maya inscriptions and the ways that the discourses recorded in them characterize material objects such as temples, cult objects, and tribute payments.

After pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae, a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works through a theoretical analysis of the human anthropology of wrapping. After indicating some possible directions for further analysis (in order to deepen the typological and comparative knowledge of reliquaries), I conclude the essay by focusing on a case study of a pragmatically felicitous instance of a reliquary: the semiotic “open work” of Francis Xavier’s seventeenth-century reliquary in Goa.

This article investigates the rhetoric of the photographic object in the context of the 3.11 disasters in Japan, where this particular object became essential for both commemorating the loss and communicating to future generations about the danger of a large-scale disaster. Through ethnography of the two different subcultures of photographic laboratory, the article documents various sign processes of the disaster-related photograph and argues that in the context of a sudden disaster, both the duty to remember the past and the hope for alternative trajectories for the future are grounded in the same regimented meaning of a particular object which nonetheless can be used to express different subjectivities. As a free-floating object, the photograph is by its nature antisemiotic in that it resists interpretation unless its visual persuasion is domesticated by “ethnometapragmatics,” that is, the highly coded cultural talk about the sociocultural, political, and historical significance of the image or a set of images.

This study presents an alternative interpretation of one of the most aesthetically charged objects known from southwestern Mesoamerica, a tripod vessel seemingly manufactured in the fifteenth century CE. The analysis links the content of the visual narrative painted on the vessel with the use of the object, a function glyphically described around its neck. I argue that the binary structure of the depicted imagery and of the myth of origin encoded in the narrative was dialectically projected into the historical social field that motivated the commissioning of the artifact: a marital alliance to unite two powerful noble houses in order to forge a new dynasty. The deployment of the vessel to drink cacao during a marriage ceremony helps explain how its inscribed surface was meant to be read, and the depicted archetypical toponyms are hypothetically identified with lived places in the valleys of Nochixtlan and Coixtlahuaca.

What is more vivid and earthly than death? A dead body does not involve problems of representation of transcendence. If death is meant not as an ending point but as a transition between life and afterlife, the theoretical problem is more complex. The Triumph of Death (1336–41), frescoed by Buffalmacco inside the Camposanto of Pisa, shows a personification of Death, half human and half devil, that connects two different semantic fields: /life/ and /nondeath/. Its terrible figure acts as an agent of transformation from the earthly life to the new life, hellish or heavenly. Several scrolls, mostly along the frame, underline this interpretation: words and images establish a new level of communication, acting as a guide to the beholder to look inside himself and get ready for the consequences of dying.

This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring idea that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, “accidents” caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly “threaten” the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former.

Much has been written about the life and work of Meher Baba (1894–1969), a spiritual master who gave up speaking at age thirty-one. Despite observing silence for the rest of his life, about forty-four years, Meher Baba remained highly eloquent and prolific. He continued to communicate both colloquially and metaphysically, which included giving detailed explanations on the origin and nature of existence. During most of his life he used a series of nonverbal systems that culminated in a sui generis gestural language. This progression of semiotic modalities is inseparable from the meaning of Meher Baba’s message. We look at this unfolding semiosis from the angle of a transcendental experience—the state of awakened deep sleep, turiya, that Heinrich Zimmer calls simply the silence.

Memorial tablets (ihai) and memorial portraiture (iei) are important parts of Japanese funerary ritual, serving as focal points during the wake, funeral, and subsequent ritual observances. Far more than static material representations of the deceased or the social relationships they inhabited, these memorial objects display a complex and complementary relationship with the deceased and serve to ground the persistent spirit of the departed (known as hotoke), which is simultaneously of this world and transcendent to it. Furthermore, I demonstrate how both everyday and ritual interactions with ihai and iei reveal a dynamic and decades-long semiotic process that guides this entity through its transformation from a living human being through a “lifetime” as a hotoke and, ultimately, into a household ancestor.

The Quyllurit’i (Shining Snow) pilgrimage is the most important of the Southern Peruvian Andes. The shrine is located at the bottom of a glacier and currently attracts all the sociocultural diversity present in the regional society of Cuzco. During the main days of the pilgrimage this usually quiet place is inundated by innumerable groups of musicians and dancers and by tens of thousands of pilgrims. These particularities also attract foreign New Age pilgrims, as well as researchers and film crews. I claim, discussing Durkheim’s elaboration on “collective effervescence,” that the strong emotional experiences of the pilgrimage are functional to the reproduction of coexisting heterogeneous ways to experience and understand the pilgrimage. Most pilgrims are vocal in expressing their experience of transcendence in Quyllurit’i, though they have different ideas about who the transcendent agents addressed by the rituals are, what their relation to the materiality of the shrine is, and how to recognize their agency. The article analyzes the different ways in which New Age pilgrims, Catholic priests, and pilgrims of a highland Quechua community frame and experience the pilgrimage through different assumptions about the nature of society and how signs function in the world.