This article analyzes the semiotic links between embodied, linguistic, and nonlinguistic signs found in a Bikram yoga studio in Oslo, Norway, and on its website, which are informed by other hegemonic sites of yoga circulation on a more global level, which include the Bikram franchise and Lululemon. Drawing on (digital) ethnographic data, I employ the analytical concepts of enregisterment (Agha 2007) and mediatization (Agha 2011), in order to trace these interlocking processes within three institutional sites that disseminate and transmit a (Bikram) yoga register through the analysis of multimodal images both offline and online. The mediated messages of flexible, embodied, and highly commodified practices that attain high cultural and social value are dialectally embedded in physical, material, and technological environments contributing to posthumanist theorization on how we understand language in relation to people, objects, and place with the aim of broadening our understanding of communication to relocate where social semiotics occurs (Pennycook 2018b).

In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Austin’s explicit performatives (e.g., “promise,” “bequeath”) in terms of (i) the orders of regimentation between semantic-symbolic and pragmatic-indexical functions, (ii) the indexical anchoring of pragmatic effects within either denotationally mediated events-of-narration (En) or interactionally mediated events-of-signaling (Es), and (iii) the articulation of indexical function with speech participant roles. The article concludes with a reflection on how the architecture of the phonology-semantics interface (or duality of patterning) safeguards symbolism by impeding the processes of runaway semiotic naturalization that produce rigid performativity.

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.

Inhabitants of Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, routinely move between economic, social, and territorial systems that order community spheres, the Brazilian state apparatus, and global networks. Each of these comes encumbered with temporalities and spatialities that differentially parse space and time. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how chronotopes are made, and remade, in a place where community commitments are paramount. Through planning and calculation of urgency and priority, Gurupaenses make strategic choices to achieve calibration between Clockwork and community time. By waiting or leaving, hurrying or lingering, and by choosing the object, mode, and speed of motion, actors independently and communally “flex” time, constructing a Ragtime temporality in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed. In so doing, actors strategically navigate these theoretically incommensurable chronotopes, thus meeting immediate and long-term needs and attending to the social, economic, and political demands of both worlds.

Like Peirce, recognized as the “father-founder” of modern semiotics, Welby too, although just recently (despite her influence on important contemporary scholars), is acclaimed as the “mother-founder,” thus entering the pantheon of the “fathers” of language and sign sciences. These great figures share a common approach to sign and language as exponents of what today is recognized as the major tradition in semiotic studies, “interpretation semiotics.” Meaning, understanding, signs, signifiers, utterers, and listeners are described as evolving in live communication, as part of signifying processes in becoming. Signs develop in ongoing interpretive/ translative processes with other signs, signifiers, and signifying processes. Signs are interrelated with values, consequently sense and significance emerge as major investigation areas for studies on meaning. Moreover, both Welby and Peirce evidence the public, social, and intersubjective dimensions of signifying and understanding, and hence also the importance of intercorporeality, dialogism, otherness, ambiguity for healthy communication, and interpersonal relations.

This article considers the multimodal enregisterment of an ancestral time-space in indigenous-language media production. Beginning from the insight that chronotopes engage semiotically mediated, subjective experiences of time, space, and social personhood (Wirtz 2016; Hartikainen 2017), I use ethnographic evidence from lowland Ecuadorian Quichua (Kichwa) radio production and reception to explore the semiotic recalibration of the wayusa upina, the guayusa-drinking hours as a register of media performance aimed at cultural revival. Identified as one of the most significant and endangered spaces for transmitting cultural and linguistic knowledge, the nondiscursive signs and material practices used in multimodal lowland Quichua radio productions reconstitute the ancestral guayusa-drinking hours, indexically linking it to the voices and knowledge of still living elders. In doing so, these programs attempt to establish a counterchronotope of remembering, which contrasts with a widely circulating chronotope of endangerment.

This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.

Pets using “talking buttons” to ostensibly tell their owner about their thoughts and needs have become a huge success on social media. With buttons that upon activation play a prerecorded message, these devices are marketed as tools in teaching human language to animals in order to allow them to “speak their minds.” This article investigates these practices of technologically mediated human-dog interactions through the analysis of social media videos and examines the claim that these button-based interactions are illustrative of animals’ language acquisition. This article concludes that “talking buttons” in human-dog communication should rather be understood as semiotic assemblages in which meaning is collaboratively constructed through the dynamic, situated interaction of bodies, linguistic resources, objects, and touch.

Colors play an important role in the social landscape of Mauritius. First and foremost, they help to distinguish the separate identities of the island’s major religious faiths. But that is not all, as they also serve to reinscribe cultural differences between the island’s various ethnic groups. And there is also evidence to suggest that this ethnoreligious color symbolism is exploited by the island’s major political parties to mobilize the support of voters. So saturated is the Mauritian social landscape with these color schema, that is hard to see how the society can overcome its ethnic divisions and foster a sense of national unity until these cultural practices are attenuated. Indeed as long as the state continues to allocate subsidies to religious organizations on the basis of their ability to objectify their respective cultural differences, it is unlikely such practices are going to disappear anytime soon. The aforementioned issues are explored using a variety of anthropological theories and methods, with particular emphasis laid in the article on the benefits of adopting a more nuanced symbolic approach to the construction of ethnicity in Mauritius to that which is currently available in the literature.

The business corporation is explored as a reflexive cultural form shaped through complex and ongoing sign processes. The concern specifically is with the dynamic whereby external representations become internal to the corporation, shaping its form and operations, and, correspondingly, internally produced representations get projected outward into the world, mingling with other representations to influence how the corporation is construed. Seven contributions to this Signs and Society supplement are organized along a continuum—from the point of what is metaphorically conceptualized as the origo to the terminus, that is, from those studying the corporation as shaped through external representations, on the one end, to those presenting a view of how the corporation emerges through representations it projects outward on the other end.

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.

The evolution of monotheism within a polytheist culture is strictly connected with the institution of the dialectics between “monolatry” and “idolatry.” On the one hand, one divinity among many becomes the center of an increasingly exclusive cult; on the other hand, this exclusivity unfolds in parallel with the stigmatization of any alternative veneration. The establishment of monolatry is substantiated both in sacred texts, which designate the only god, forbid all others, prescribe the legitimate cult, and condemn deviations, and in liturgy that avoids any reference to multiplicity of transcendence. The liturgical work of monolatry, however, is not only positive, since in addition to regulating the material, verbal, and actional signs of the cult, it also entails a destructive tension. Thus, in establishing monolatry, determining formulae for evoking the only transcendence is as essential as destroying any signs that might contaminate it by representing a rival divinity.

On July 4, 2012, experimental physicists on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, in Switzerland, announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. After analyzing trillions of proton-to-proton collisions, two teams of physicists concluded that signatures of diphotons in the final state were evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs particle. The answerability of a particle search to polysemic signals raises a deeply provocative question: In what ways does a sign facilitate the discovery of a thing? Drawing on fieldwork at the Large Hadron Collider complex, this article attempts to probe the semiosis of signatures as a palimpsest of inherent possibilities spanning the width of the universe, which is neither a contingent ordering of the Saussurean kind nor a brick-by-brick Peircean construct. What it eloquently foregrounds is the capacity of a class of signs to reflect the presence of objects, even those that are materially nonexistent, which resolves many a metaphysical perplexity involving language, thought, and reality. In the process, this article makes a case for the role of meaningful, qualitative evaluations, which lie at the root of experimental searches, and explains how these qualitative evaluations are a more trustworthy source of discoveries in particle physics than metrics or magnitudes.

In Bulgaria, the Rom/Ciganin persona is defined by non-Ciganin Bulgarians as a set of reiterated features, displayed as fixed and supposedly identifiable by all. This persona is enregistered through various semiotic processes, television being one of the most important ones. Rom/Ciganin is the name that links together a set of indexical stereotypes (naturalized as essences) and purports to denote a particular referent, a community, an ethnicity, and the individuals who, by being so labeled, are said to belong to it. Through the study of a racist act of aggression filmed in Bulgaria, I hypothesize that the hatred of Cigani passes discursively through a typification constantly reelaborated by a process of enregisterment. The making of peoples, groups, and communities is not new, but it becomes problematic when researchers, and the institution in general, relay the idea of fixed ethnic categories without problematizing them. They thus legitimize the Roma (or Cigani, Gypsies, etc.) category, and indeed the Rom persona, through the (re)production of a set of political discourses based on ethnicity and discrimination. This legitimizes a category that allows the marginalization and exclusion of individuals and families in the name of their supposed membership.

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 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 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.

In this article, I offer an account of the “linguistic landscapes” associated with the commodification and purchase of internet services in southern Peru. Through an account of public signage deployed by internet lounges in this area as well as the ideologies that make sense of it, the analysis reveals one of the ways in which moral panic over digital gaming gets semiotically mediated. To do this, the article develops a theoretical machinery that makes sense of the ways in which public signs—relative to their infrastructural contexts—come to project channels for their uptake. When these relationships are considered relative to the ideologies that target them, what gets revealed are the moral contours of Southern Peruvian public life. The analysis ultimately shows how the concept “linguistic landscape” can be useful for the semiotic study of infrastructure as well as the forms of the public life that it helps to mediate.

Combining an ethnographic account of the Finnish national pastime of ice swimming and its remediation through the Wim Hof Method with an analysis of media representations, this article expands linguistic and semiotic anthropological scholarship on the enregisterment of bodily and affective qualia by looking at how practitioners of this therapeutic technology elaborate on their corporeal and semiotic selves and the transformations of those selves after indulging in full-body contact with freezing cold water. Laying particular emphasis on stress as a discursive hub and an intensely circulating qualisign within vernacular and institutionalized health discourses, the article discusses how pedagogical ice swimming exegesis is contributing to the enregisterment of emergent forms of personhood through metasemiotic regimentations of the body that draw from natural and holistic as well as scientific and technical registers.

In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a “medium of value” in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey’s postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea’s uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey’s modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North (“Turkish”) Kurdistan.