Abstract This article draws upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” to examine how the reproductions of religious images in domestic settings are (re)infused with spiritual power. Based on an ethnographic study of Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, I argue that the “aura” of these paintings emerges through semiotic management that tightens a preexisting link, stemming from the minority status of Copts, between house and church. To this end, I discuss how patrons and artists reshape, modify, and enhance both the subject-matter of these reproductions as well as certain formal properties like surfaces and frames. This semiotic labor clarifies a privileged zone of interaction I refer to as “the near-sacred,” which can be compared to Benjamin’s understanding of the conceptual proximity of art to ritual. I conclude by proposing the near-sacred as a site for studying how circulating religious signs (re)acquire a spiritual valence at the periphery of institutional religious practice.

Abstract During World War II, a prolific Kiowa composer named Lewis Toyebo initiated a new choreo-musical genre called War Mother songs for the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 as a means of encouragement while their sons deployed overseas. This article examines how these songs simultaneously evoke pre-reservation and post-reservation chronotopes of Kiowa martial motherhood. Through ethnographic research with Kiowa Elders, singers, War Mothers, and descendants of Kiowa composers, I analyze how War Mother songs express these chronotopes through musical (War Journey drumbeat), functional (preparing warriors for deployment and honoring returning veterans), and linguistic means (blending “Old Kiowa” and “Modern Kiowa”). Analysis of these chronotopes reveals how Kiowas creatively responded to settler colonialism to maintain gendered roles and personhoods that were important to their cultural identity. This article provides an ethnomusicological perspective on how chronotopes of gender are expressed through dynamic forms of music and dance.

Abstract The authors in this special issue explore the ways in which chronotopes are often gendered and gender performance is chronotopic. Articles examine a diverse range of discourses—tradwives, Chinese beauty influencers, paleofantasy health trends, Kiowa War Mothers, and Swahili-language Islamic marital advice—and unpack the ways that notions of gender rely on particular constructions of the “here-and-now” in contrast to various “theres-and-thens.” As this special issue demonstrates, one is not just a gendered subject; one is a particular type of gendered subject, and those types are embedded in imagined times and places.

Abstract In the early 2000s, mainstream US wellness culture started to develop something of an obsession with the distant past. These “paleofantasies” (Zuk 2013), such as barefoot running and the Paleo diet, are not based in scientific evidence about prehistoric human behavior or accurate understandings of evolutionary theory. Why, then, do so many people (especially men) find them compelling? In this paper, I argue that the “stone age” chronotope is implicitly masculine and in fact tends to exclude women altogether. Women are largely absent from imaginings of prehistory, whether those imaginings are car insurance commercials, diet and exercise programs, or even anthropological texts. Looking at various popular discourses about the stone age chronotope, I consider how women are effectively rendered invisible, leaving behind what is perceived as a distilled masculine essence. I suggest that the proliferation of paleofantasy in the past two decades has been part of a broader cultural backlash against feminist progress.

Abstract This essay explores the Danish concept of hygge, commonly glossed as “coziness,” as a structure of feeling attuned to particular qualities of light. It draws from an ethnographic study of Copenhagen Municipality’s Climate Plan to build the world’s first carbon-neutral capital. Homing in on one of the Climate Plan’s inaugural initiatives—the LED (light-emitting diode) conversion of street lighting—it tracks how ambient intensities of hygge are swept up with both changing lightscapes and changing national demographics. Via a semiotics of social difference, I examine how changing qualities of artificial light are experienced as eroding culturally configured sensory comforts, and how this erosion is grafted onto a fear of the city’s potentially diminishing “Danishness.” This semiotic process is evidenced in the lamination of racialized anxieties about “non-Western immigrants” onto discomforts derived from energy-efficient lighting technologies, and the apparent intrusion of both into habit worlds of hygge. In Copenhagen, I show how a semiotic account of atmosphere illuminates the fault lines of the Danish racial imagination.

Abstract The semiotic construction of corporate persons in law is key to the contemporary organization of global capitalism. The economic capacities enjoyed by corporations stem significantly from how the semiotics of corporate personhood work within domestic and international legal orders fundamentally designed for human persons. Signs (especially in documents—laws, incorporation papers, tax filings, etc.) construct corporations as legal persons—entities modeled on human persons yet differently bound to human embodiment. Corporations multiply themselves through the creation of legally independent corporate persons (“subsidiaries”), while unifying themselves through their control over these persons. Unlike human offspring, corporations’ corporate offspring are easily created, may take up residence in almost any jurisdiction, and always obey their parents. The paper will discuss the implications of these features of corporations with respect to tort liability, international trade, property, taxation, and private militaries.

Abstract Translation is key to the political economy of neorural revival in contemporary Italy. Drawing on fieldwork with neorural farmers, I show how translations across semiotic domains and displays of linguistic and pragmatic untranslatability simultaneously produce capitalist value and temporary disruptions of the subsumption of life under capital. To understand this apparent paradox, I analyze the complex relationship between contemporary neorural revivalists and mid-twentieth-century neodialect poets. Driven by a reaction against the post-war encompassment of regional linguistic varieties within a national standard, the metapragmatics of untranslatability developed by the neodialect literary movement has indirectly provided contemporary neoruralists with semiotic resources to conjure profitable forms of agrolinguistic incommensurability. However, unlike the poets’ nostalgic and anticapitalist sabotage of the collusion between centripetal linguistic standardization and intensive agribusiness scalability, the farmers’ interactional disruptions of pragmatic regimentation and seamless intertranslatability are both a project of capitalist valorization and an exit strategy from unfulfilling wage-labor arrangements.

Abstract This article analyzes the interconnected translation processes that led the Paris city council to conceptualize, address, and act upon “homelessness” through counting. By translation, we mean a range of semiotic processes that connect social worlds, their objects, practices, genres, and bodies of expertise. These are usually imagined as separate: For example, auditing and volunteering, science and government, charity and policing, poverty and social hygiene. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in Paris, France, between January and August 2023, during two editions of the Nuit de la Solidarité [Night of Solidarity], a large-scale effort by the city council, in collaboration with numerous volunteers, to count homeless people in Paris. Linking translation scholarship with academic work on quantification and liberal governmentality, we demonstrate that the semiotic process of translation is deeply interconnected with the political work performed by numbers and counting techniques, imbuing them with meaning and ensuring their capacity to exert power. Translation, we show, serves not only to link governance techniques across geopolitical borders but also to integrate various political projects and normalize and naturalize the structural inequalities that define cities like Paris.

Abstract In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose to view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure for speeding up and scaling up production and for crafting forms of sociality and subjectivity conducive to capitalist valorization. The articles in this collection ethnographically explore the working of translation across registers, channels, modalities, semiotic fields, and ontological orders (as well as linguistic codes). Our goal is to analyze how translation affords the global circulation of standardized discursive protocols and institutional policy bundles, and enables the formation of politico-juridical networks of corporate personhood and (neo-)liberal governmentality. Furthermore, we investigate how translation can be resisted, sabotaged, or made invisible, showing how its semiotic metamarks can be alternatively disguised or highlighted within the regimes of uniqueness and seriality underlying contemporary forms of commodity production. This Introduction provides the theoretical backdrop underlying these diverse contributions.