During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.

In his refutation of Marcion, Tertullian argued that Marcion failed to appreciate that Christ, as figured, is present in the Old Testament. Marcion may have similarly denied the presence of Christ, as figured, in the Eucharist. This outcome is expressed in the eucharistic theology of the great eighteenth-century Anglican theologian, Samuel Clarke. Clarke is a harbinger of modern Marcionism because his Old Testament denigration is the product of his specifically Marcionite impulse to excise Christ from the Old Testament. And as he consistently applies this impulse to his eucharistic theology, his memorialism becomes another venue for him to transmit Marcionism to modernity.

The aim of this article is to examine whether and how diplomacy may be gendered, symbolically and rhetorically, using US representations of diplomacy as a case. Prior scholarship on gender and contemporary diplomacy is sparse but has shown that the symbolic figure of ‘the diplomat’ has come to overlap tightly with ‘man’ and be associated with traits often attributed to masculinity. Inspired by queer international relations methods, relying on the concept of ‘figuration’ and focused on US news media and biographies of diplomats from the past decade, this article uncovers and examines a palette of feminised figurations also at play in US representations of diplomacy, including the diplomat as ‘the “soft” non-fighter’, ‘the relationship builder’, ‘the gossip’, ‘the cookie-pusher’, and ‘the fancy Frenchman’. These feminised figurations alternate between configuring the diplomat as a woman and – more commonly – a (feminised) man. The analysis complicates rather than displaces existing claims, highlighting the importance of attention to slippages and challenges to dominant masculinised subject positions.

The corpus of figurines from Çatalhöyük has attracted the attention of diverse audiences but there has been an overwhelming focus on a selection of female figurines, many of which lack exact provenience. Excavation from 1961 to 1965 yielded more mundane examples classifiable as anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and abbreviated forms. New work attempts to balance the picture through various methods and strategies. The research presented here collates the artefacts from these early seasons with those retrieved from 1993 to 2006 to gain a fuller understanding of figurine practice. The figurines almost exclusively represent secondary deposition. We can now assess the number and type of figurines deposited in buildings, middens, burials and elsewhere. Reassessment of the entire corpus has prompted interrogation of the category of ‘figurine’ and reconsideration of the taxonomies along with other artefacts and image production at Çatalhöyük. Depositional practices at the site suggest processes of mobility and circulation that have rarely been considered in studies of figurines. Typical ‘representational’ or aesthetic approaches imply that the figurines were a special category with particular values of religiosity and gender; but attention to the archaeological context can imply meaning from the material practices within which ‘figurines’ were enmeshed.

There were differences in the representation of humans and animals between the regions of Thessaly and the central Balkans during the earlier Neolithic. These differences imply the constitution of distinct worlds. Representation is anthropocentric in Thessaly and it focuses on particular actions of the human body. In the central Balkans, there is more animal imagery, although here too humans predominate. The lack of specific traits suggests an ontological principle of generic identity.

Korowai of West Papua practice a register of transgressive vocabulary substitutions in which a referent's normal designation is replaced by another expression with independent semantic meaning. Uttering a substitute term in the presence of its referent is thought to damage the referent. Usually the terms are carefully avoided, but they can also be deliberately uttered in anger. Substitutions highlight uncanny iconic resemblances between entities that are otherwise mutually incongruous. Substitutions often involve grotesque imagery of bodily disintegration, and they focus on strange margins close to humans' positions. Speakers use the register to portray uncertainty about the categorial integrity not just of referents but also of language users themselves. Through the register's core idea of avoiding damaging effects of iconic connections beneath fragile surface appearances, Korowai express a reflexive sensibility about language, in which transparently affirmative semantic relations between words and referents are a contingent pragmatic possibility, not a natural certainty.A draft of this article was presented in June 2006 at a conference on “Honorification and Enregisterment” at the University of Chicago. I thank Sue Philips, Sue Gal, and Michael Silverstein for inviting me to speak, and I thank all participants for their generous comments. Additional crucial and detailed help was given by Courtney Handman, Laura Hendrickson, Steve Hibbard, Barbara Johnstone, Webb Keane, Anne Lorimer, and Alan Rumsey. Fieldwork in 1995–1997 and 2001–2002 was made possible by Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Reed College, the Luce Foundation, the Australian National University (RSPAS), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and Universitas Cenderawasih. I am grateful to all Korowai I have met for their patience and humor.

A cautionary tale of technological innovation in eleventh-century Venice leads to reflection on human desire for and fear of such change. The story also shows that while individuals make choices about whether to adopt or reject technologies, their choices are social, not personal, in their effects. The vocation of social science is to help people see past both their hopes and fears of biotechnologies; in this way social science can at least deflect the advance of biotechnologies.