This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, “Why Chinese?” we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as “cultural omnivores.” Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language.

Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin, a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of these struggles for recognition, including a clan’s dispute over public use of its land in 1987 and the outbreak of a secessionist war in 1989. News narratives from this period apply a strategy for attribution of people’s political claims in which provincial government officials are delegated a role as co-narrators of events. In the provincial officials’ narratives, popular sovereignty has two faces—primordial and civil—which only local government can harmonize. The elite model promotes institutional reform but erases alternative modes of political consciousness.

This article explores the ways in which individuals are able to create their own bodies, influence the perception of others, and shape their memories by getting tattooed. Tattoos can be a powerful way of gaining control and experiencing oneself as an active creator of one’s life. However, in the process of getting tattooed, people have to be passive: they are at the mercy of a person whom they usually do not know well and who has specific personal interests in tattooing others—working efficiently and earning money or a good reputation. Further, the tattooees cannot control how other people will interpret their tattoos. Yet, most tattooed individuals seem to regard the active aspects as more important than the passive act of getting tattooed and interpreted by others and qdevelop strategies to reinterpret their loss of control.

This article presents a case for approaching works of nineteenth-century realist fiction as proto-ethnographic documents that contain unique evidence for reconstructing extinct discourse practices. We focus on two previously undescribed phenomena: improvised rhyming in sparring dialogue, and the use of ideophones in oral storytelling.

In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.

While numerous studies have addressed medieval wounds, few scholars have critically examined the religious role of scars in medieval Europe. This article incorporates theological writings, hagiography (saints’ biographies), chivalric romances, and the visual arts to assess the semiotic significance of medieval scars. This article uses Roland Barthes’s notion of semanticization as an organizing principle. As Barthes has shown, the process of meaning-making is contingent upon its social context. Indeed, semanticization allows the conventionality of signs to operate. This article explores how Western medieval Christianity, with its repository of values and symbolism, enabled scars to function as signs. The religious context undergirding medieval scars allowed them to transcend from traces of accidental bodily markings to portals to rich theological significance.

Drawing on the Peircean concepts of qualia and qualisign (Munn 1986; Keane 2003; Chumley and Harkness 2013), I propose that Classic Maya hieroglyphs were associated with two fundamental sensorial experiences, materiality and proximity, which were expressed by coordinating lexical, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic strategies. I argue that Classic Mayan terminology distributed materiality between three basic qualisigns by privileging tactile and technological experiences of scribal production above interaction with the finished text. Qualia of proximity, in turn, implied differential access to hieroglyphic writing and its recorded knowledge with qualisigns that distinguished producers from patrons or owners. A semiotic approach articulates the material, the corporal, and the social in Classic Maya ontologies of writing and reveals the relational nature of hieroglyphic production and access. It also offers a theoretical consideration of the role of morphology, syntax, and pragmatics in culturally conditioned experiences of qualities and their interpretations.

This article examines the role of referential directness and community emblematization in the documentation of Libyan sign processes construed by Italian colonial ethnographers as secretive. I examine the key texts on these practices to show that colonial ethnographers metasemiotically framed the so-called argots of Libya in terms of what was understood to be their occulting function of hiding one’s intentions and their anti-language function of opposing established society. I show that Italian colonial-ethnological preoccupations with clarity and moral unity were articulated against the discursive background of French colonial ethnology of Algeria as well as Italian racist criminology anchored in the metaphor of relative opacity.

We examine the metalinguistic, psychosocial, and identity-related indexical indications of (speaking about) the other, as provided by 36 Santa Marta inhabitants (Blestel 2022). Santa Marta is a city on Colombia’s septentrional coast, populated primarily by individuals of multiracial heritage, descended from Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and Spaniards. We show that the established main axis of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) and associated judgments are adjacent, sometimes very explicitly, to racializing ideologies that more broadly traverse Colombian society as a whole. We maintain that these metapragmatic discourses, far from being anecdotal, indicate semiotic discrimination processes at work in sustaining or even renewing a system of values passed down from the colonial era.

This article examines the effects of commercial digital language technologies on the regimentation of language. Language technologies based on the exploitation of large data sets—from machine translation and automatic text generation to digital voice assistants—are a particular form of human-made sign practice in which traditional language norms interact with the affordances of digital devices and the capitalist interests of those who design them. Such sociotechnological practices construct language hierarchies within the realm of commercially based language technology and can shape both dominant discourses about language in society and epistemologies of language in linguistics. The article focuses on interrelationships between digital language technology and metasemiotic interpretations of language that pertain to multilingualism, language variation, and language prestige. It examines languages as discursive constructs and reviews the role of media technology in shaping language ideology, showing that writing and print have had a crucial impact on modern language concepts. It draws on expert discourse and qualitative interviews with programmers and users and examines ideological effects of digital language technology and the potential epistemological reconfigurations of concepts of language that may emerge as a result.

This article examines ideologies of chronotopic partibility at two state-affiliated churches in Hangzhou, one Protestant and one Catholic, that emerged in response to the politics of demolition and development. The presence of Christianity in the state imaginary of the modern cityscape has been challenged by urban renovation projects ranging from Zhejiang Province’s 2013–16 cross removal campaign to the construction, beginning in 2018, of a massive commercial complex on land partially expropriated from a Catholic church in Hangzhou. Protestants made sense of cross removals by organizing time, space, and personhood according to qualities associated with the home, separating warmth and sociality (renqingwei’r ) from the buildings in which they are experienced. Catholics protested the city government’s requisition of a part of their “house” by demanding in its place the renqing, or human feeling, mediated by money, that is God’s in perpetuity. Chronotopic partibility or time-space-personhood fracture is both a symptom of dispossession and an ideology that makes possible moral exchange between church and state.

Capturing the zeitgeist of youthful challenges to the status quo in Ghana, a video of an anonymous young person challenging an older politician with a derisive call of “Tweaa!” went viral in 2014. Reentextualizations of the encounter were soon circulating online in the form of memes, songs, and hashtags and offline in joking exchanges everywhere from vegetable markets to parliament. This article traces the many ironic reembeddings of the tweaa clip across these contexts, as young people used tweaa to subvert and interrogate Ghana’s rigid social hierarchies—ultimately producing an enduring shift in the vocabulary of protest in Ghana. Tweaa, once a casual interjection of disapproval, is now explicitly seen as iconic of the disenfranchised challenging those in power: a verb meaning “to protest inept authority.” This case study of memetic circulation suggests that memes not only discursively produce publics but can effect seismic semiotic shifts in everyday language.

Communication is necessary work and imagined want in corporations. Using firsthand data from a midsize corporation, this essay discusses the professional practices of corporate communication as a metadiscursive project of proleptically shaping the circulation of representations of the corporation. In corporate work, activities spoken of as “communication” are segmented and ritualized with respect to who the corporation seeks to engage in discursive and semiotic frameworks of participation and which communicative media it employs. The ways in which various communicative scenarios are imagined and framed in the design and use of corporate media are examined, as is the manner in which the boundary of the corporation’s communicative activity is drawn and (re)defined through metapragmatic regimentations of future participatory encounters. The expertise of corporate communication practitioners involves the ability to formulate the corporation as the mediatized center of the groups with which it communicates and to devise messages that target diverse groups as addressees.

The article engages with the semiotics of “stylized faces” in online communication, focusing on “smileys.” It reconstructs the origins of both emoticons and emojis, outlining how they differ functionally (paralinguistic signs vs. narrative figures) and commenting on their pragmatics, with regard to the issue of literacy as related to generational fruition. A chronology is provided of the first tokens of smileys in written communication, both before and after the Internet. By relying upon the anthropology of the face dating back to prehistory, the issues of iconism and universality are discussed, supporting the view that there is a strong cultural, conventional component in face depiction, varying diachronically (emoticons versus emojis) and diatopically (emoticons versus kaomojis, i.e., Japanese emoticons). Emoticons and emojis are regarded as prominent examples of intermedia, working at the intersection of written word and image. Finally, stylized digital faces are set in the broader framework of Internet memes, thus discussing the dichotomy between structural memes (the focus is on the formula) and iconic memes (the focus is on the image and, thus, the face). Throughout the text, great care is devoted to the philology of sources, some of them being presented in this form for the first time.

This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil’s favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants’ ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the “crossfire,” that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the “world of crime” in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the “convoluted” language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a “direct” and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world’s most unequal countries.

This article analyzes the significance of the place in Kyiv where the statue of Lenin stood before it was toppled during the Euromaidan protests. Following the monument’s demolition, many works of art have been successively exhibited on this site. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival sense of the world, the article suggests that these sculptures, installations, and performances have demonstrated the permanent carnivalesque potential of the place. Moreover, as different representations of Ukrainian memory and identity, these works of art have created a polyphony of voices about the Ukrainian past, present, and future. The research explains the significance of this phenomenon for the Ukrainian society.

Building on the case study of the performative practice of voguing within ballroom culture among LGBTQIA+ communities, the aim of this article is to recognize a facial agency capable of putting into tension three thresholds of meaning: visibility and invisibility; identity and otherness; nature and artifice. On the basis of these tensions, interpretive habits concerning identity are incorporated into the face as a semiotic dispositif that negotiate sociocultural expectations and limitations. These habits, when agentively performed through the face, give shape to a communicative project that manipulates platforms of identity into biopolitical masks. The analysis will also give an account of how “worn” biopolitical masks reproduce and perform a facial monstrum, or warning, and how this specification warns others of the normativity of aesthetic and biopolitical appearance while activating an intentional transformation of identity.