Semiotic Ideologies Research Articles

Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices

Mauritian Muslims have recently come to treat sound reproduction as enhancing and authorizing the transnational circulation of devotional discourse and poetry. In this article, I investigate the alternation between the storing of signs through media and their performative recontextualization as a practice that straddles the boundary between signification and materiality. The argument is that particular theological assumptions about mediation shape the deployment of media technology in religious settings. Such assumptions also influence the processes of entextualizing authoritative religious discourse. In the article I analyze how a sense of immediacy between religious performers and spiritual authorities emerges though the combination of uses of sound reproduction informed by a semiotic ideology of recitational logocentrism with particular deictic markers in discourse. [media, Islam, sound reproduction, entextualization, Mauritius]

Shimmering Foundation: The Twelve-Angled Stone of Inca Cusco

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticleShimmering Foundation: The Twelve-Angled Stone of Inca CuscoAdam HerringAdam Herring Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 37, Number 1Autumn 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/656469 Views: 411Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2010 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/10/3701-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:David Chicoine Enchantment in ancient Peru: Salinar period murals and architecture, World Art 12, no.11 (Nov 2021): 67–94.https://doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2021.1999315Edward Swenson Semiotic ideologies of stone in Andean and Khmer political landscapes, World Archaeology 52, no.33 (Jan 2021): 330–352.https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1878056Edward Swenson The Political Landscape of Early State Religions, (Jan 2014): 469–488.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118605936.ch25

The making and muting of an indigenous media activist: Imagination and ideology in Charles Round Low Cloud's “Indian News”

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine an example of American Indian activism through the once‐dominant mass medium of the newspaper. I focus on Ho‐Chunk author Charles Round Low Cloud and his development of an “Indian News” column into a vehicle for activism against everyday forms of racial oppression in the 1930s and on the ways others involved in publishing his column used the medium to subvert his message. The analysis shows how nonindigenous actors can mute activist messages through practices designed to celebrate indigenous voices. I argue that both indigenous media activism and reactions against such activism rely on the “mediated imagination”: the mediation of the use and reception of media messages by cultural ideologies and by individual creativity. Recognition of the mediated imagination, therefore, complements efforts to understand how language and other semiotic ideologies shape interpretations of social reality. It also facilitates analysis of the potentials and limitations of indigenous activism that uses existing media technologies.

Classifying African Christianities, Part Two: The Anthropology of Christianity and Generations of African Christians

AbstractCurrent approaches to classifying African Christianities include generalizing approaches like Ogbu Kalu’s assertion of ongoing revival and particular studies associated with the anthropology of Christianity. Here I argue for a generational approach to African Christian communities, noting what has been achieved and what remains to be done.Two recent ethnographies show the promise in the anthropology of Christianity for fruitful comparative approaches to African Christianity. Dorothy Hodgson’s study of Catholic evangelization of the Maasai and Matthew Engelke’s examination of a Zimbabwean independent church both develop concepts—inculturation and semiotic ideology, respectively—that prioritize African theological work in making Christianity suitable for African believers. Such conceptual approaches can include African Christians overlooked in past classifications and promote insightful comparisons. However, concepts that offer a comparative framework to address sociological belonging to mission-founded churches are still needed for a generational approach to African Christian communities.

Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition

Stephan Palmie My contribution to this special issue takes its origins in a footnote to an article on culinary metaphors in the modeling of African American cultural history that I published a few years ago (Palmie 2005). It was a long footnote on (what I think is) a fascinating instance of gastrographic revisionism very much apropos our common theme of “hybrid heritage” and even more interesting in light of current discussions about intangible cultural property. What I am concerned with in the following is, in principle at least, a well-known theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine, viz. the treatment of specific foods and preparations as emblematic markers of collective identities. Ever since Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1894), we have known that culinary practices can (and often do) serve as powerful vehicles for collective projections of a common history and future. Yet while much attention has been paid to the socializing function of commensality or patterned food avoidance, little attention (or so it seems to me) has been paid to the way in which culinary knowledge—shall we say “recipes”?— function to demarcate social boundaries, especially if and when they become objectified as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage. This, however, is exactly what African American cookbook-writing advocates of conceptions of “culinary Pan-Africanism,” or even more radically, Afrocentric proponents of the idea of the willful denial of the African origins of much of the world’s high cuisines, have been arguing for some two decades. But let me establish a bit of context first. At least since the 1960s, US African American foodways—especially the culinary complex known as “soul food”—have been subject to explicit and often highly self-conscious politicization. As both the black writer and activist Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1966) and the founder of the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad (1967) clearly recognized in their own very different ways, there is a vexing arbitrariness to the culinary signifier: eating corn bread, collard greens, ham hocks, or chitterlings by itself does not constitute an assertion or rejection of certain identities, subject positions, or visions of collective history. What does is the symbolic act of situating these same foods within narratives about their significance for patterns of commensal affinity among the oppressed and excluded (in Baraka’s case), or about hybrid heritage

Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans and Danish Cartoons

A comparison of two challenges to freedom of the press, in Indonesia and Denmark, reveals some of the linkages among semiotic ideologies, secularism, and a moral narrative of modernity. By analyzing conflicts between semiotic ideologies, the article shows how actual journalistic practices both presuppose and deviate from the assumptions of any given such ideology. The article also discusses claims about the role of the press in the history of the nation. The case comparison brings out some fundamental tensions between two grounds for this role, to speak as a voice of a people and to serve as a conduit for truth. Viewed in the context of the semiotic ideologies they presuppose, conflicts over the actions and authority of the press can reveal some of the difficulties posed by the moral narrative of modernity and the common sense of contemporary liberalism.

Modes of objectification in educational experience

Three aspects of the concept of objectification emerge from the papers in this issue. First is the role of experience in the process of conceptual objectification. Objectification disaggregates experiences and renders some of them irrelevant by means of translation across semiotic modalities. Second is the recursive character of objectification. Third is the fact that the forms and relative success of objectifications depend on social interactions. Social interactions are not only the background that facilitates or hinders objectification. They themselves can motivate, and, in part, are constituted by some forms of objectification as well. The pedagogical theories that underlie the classroom practices these studies observe embody certain semiotic ideologies, which both support and are in tension with those very practices. Although the educational theory stresses the development of the student's sense of agency, the studies here show that the inculcation of habits such as nominalization work to mute the agency of the student and the role of technology within the laboratory experiment, and instead to foreground inscription and objectified data. At the same time, this ideology also denies the role that such habits as nominalization play in the display of knowledge and the eventual success of students in school. This contradiction between semiotic ideology and practice contributes to the displacement effects sometimes called fetishism.

Reading Jewish signs: The socialization of multilingual literacies among Hasidic women and girls in Brooklyn, New York

In this article literacies are defined as a set of interconnected signifying practices interpreted by semiotic ideologies, that is, cultural beliefs about signs. This approach integrated with a language socialization approach to literacy provides a way to go beyond the reproduction of the normative social scientific categories of religious or secular literacies, orality and literacy, tradition and modernity. The focus of the article is the literacy practices of Hasidic Jews, an example of a nonliberal (fundamentalist) religious community. Hasidic Jews present a particularly relevant case study because their critique of secular modernity includes efforts to dismantle distinctions between the secular and the religious, thus creating an alternative religious modernity. This becomes evident through an exploration of multilingual (Hebrew/Aramaic, Yiddish and English) literacy socialization practices between women and girls. The article focuses on how girls begin to acquire literacy in Hebrew/Aramaic in kindergarten, comparing and constrasting girls' simultaneous acquisition of Yiddish and English literacy. Included are an examination of leisure literacy practices and new genres of English-language books for children. Across contexts, languages, and genres of Hasidic literacy socialization, distinct semiotic ideologies share an interpretive project: to teach girls to decode signs as nonarbitrary, that is, as divinely intended, and to turn what seem to be arbitrary or Gentile/secular signs into Jewish ones.

Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies.A Review Essay

Social scientists usually agree that it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of the United States without invoking race. The same is often assumed of the Americas' second most populous nation, Brazil, albeit for different reasons. Throughout much of the twentieth century, debates about Brazil's apparent exceptionalism turned on claims about an ostensibly ambiguous blackwhite color line and assertions that its ideologies are somehow more mutable, more multifaceted, and hence less riven by descent-based and legallysanctioned distinctions than North American variants. In fact, the twentiethcentury construction of the Brazilian nation has drawn in critical ways on such idealized, often contradictory, engagements with mixtures that supposedly gird a hybrid brownness known as racial democracy. This seductive yet problematic story of a nation made modem through miscegenation has been popularized by a number of influential thinkers, most notably Gilberto Freyre, a Franz Boas-trained public intellectual and scion of a planter family. Freyre, as part of an elite response to European and North American denigrations of Brazil's mixed-race populace, argued famously in his

Accent matters: Material consequences of sounding local in northern Italy

In this article, I discuss accents as signs of ‘things in the world,’ social practices whose forms and functions matter. I move beyond the common tendency to analyze accents as just indexes of identity or phonological variables, and treat them as verbal symbols that circulate in everyday conversation and in the mass media, bridging the symbolic and the material. Focusing on the accent of Bergamo, a town in northern Italy, I look at semiotic ideologies of accent in local and national contexts, illustrating Bergamascos’ views of their own and others’ accents in the process. Drawing on Goffman, I treat accents as phonological representations of sociogeographical characterological figures and the qualities associated with such figures, linked to the Italian social hierarchy of place.

The nation, the state, and the neighbors: personation in Irish-language discourse

Irish-language discourse features a pervasive system of practices involving the production and dissemination of directly reported speech. These homologous practices, here termed personation, include brief imitations of others in conversational speech, the use of direct voice in several poetic genres, the Irish-language song tradition, and a few influential novels. Personation is motivated by a semiotic ideology (personalism) which naturalizes speech and other expressive behavior as an immediate aspect of a person's social being. It is argued that personation, as a semiotic practice, motivates Irish-speakers' resistance to various attempts, centered in discourses of the nation and the state, to refigure the Irish language as the “voice” of a generalized and purified national past or as a semiotically transparent medium for the state.

Semiotics and the social analysis of material things

This article discusses certain aspects of Peircean semiotics as they can contribute to the social analysis of material artifacts. It focuses on the concepts of iconicity and indexicality, paying particular attention to their roles in mediating contingency and causality, and to their relation with possible actions. Because iconicity and indexicality themselves ‘assert nothing,’ their various social roles turn on their mediation by ‘Thirdness’. This circumstance requires an account of semiotic ideologies and their practical embodiment in representational economies. The article concludes with a call for a richer concept of the multiple possible modes of ‘objectification’ in social life.

The Word made land: Incarnationalism and the spatial poetics and pragmatics of largesse in medieval Cornish drama

The presence of local Cornish places-names in medieval Cornish drama on biblical themes is perhaps the most salient feature of these texts. This paper suggest that the deployment of place-names from the locality of performance must be understood in the context of textual largesses for good or evil services from which these localities take on moral valuations. Within the context of a semiotic ideology of medieval realism, gifts of Cornish land in biblical drama thus serves metapragmatically to mediate between cosmological order of the text and the actual order of the context of performance, strongly regimenting the possible contexts of performance and imbuing the context with transcendent values. The parochial locality of the plays is thus performatively transformed by opposing the immediate locality of regions (associated with good biblical characters) to more distant regions (associated with evil biblical characters).

A Taste for "the Other": Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices

L'A. considere le fait que dans leurs representations les intellectuels surprivilegient les indigenes comme une pratique raciste. Commentaire de F. Harrison, K. Narayan, A. Ong, H. Page, A. R. Ramos, J. Ritchie, V. Stolcke, et de M.-R. Trouillot

Race and the Ideology of Race

Previous articleNext article No AccessRace and the Ideology of RaceManning NashManning Nash Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 3, Number 3Jun., 1962 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/200294 Views: 92Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1962 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jared Clemons From “Freedom Now!” to “Black Lives Matter”: Retrieving King and Randolph to Theorize Contemporary White Antiracism, Perspectives on Politics 53 (Jun 2022): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592722001074Elizabeth A. DiGangi, Joseph T. Hefner Ancestry Estimation, (Jan 2013): 117–149.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385189-5.00005-4Veerendra P. Lele Semiotic Ideologies of Race: Racial Profiling and Retroduction, Recherches sémiotiques 32, no.1-2-31-2-3 (Dec 2014): 143–159.https://doi.org/10.7202/1027776arCharmaine D M Royal, Georgia M Dunston Changing the paradigm from 'race' to human genome variation, Nature Genetics 36, no.S11S11 (Oct 2004): S5–S7.https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1454Henry P. Lundsgaarde Racial and ethnic classifications: An appraisal of the role of anthropology in the lawmaking process, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 3, no.44 (Jun 2010): 349–358.https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.1974.9975311Douglas Cole ‘The crimson thread of kinship’: Ethnic ideas in Australia, 1870–1914∗, Historical Studies 14, no.5656 (Apr 1971): 511–525.https://doi.org/10.1080/10314617108595440