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.
{"title":"Gaining and Losing Control: Tattoos and Interpretive Sovereignty","authors":"Maja Tabea Jerrentrup","doi":"10.1086/717559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717559","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47635331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Housing God, Losing Ground: Protestant and Catholic Chronotopic Ideologies in Urban China","authors":"Alice Yeh","doi":"10.1086/717625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717625","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44554196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Linguistic anthropologists have shown that the way a person reports speech or represents discourse—for example, whether they ‘put on an accent’ or merely repeat attributed words—is crucial for understanding what social action that person is undertaking. And yet, our tools for talking about the form of represented discourse are still crude. This paper offers a new tool in the notion of figure composition, defined as the formal semiotic elements that comprise a given voice. Reflecting on figure composition, alongside Agha’s (2005) notion of figure transparency, invites us to shift from asking what kind of represented discourse any given stretch of represented discourse is to asking (1) What elements of represented discourse appear to be coming from the quoted figure(s)? and (2) How are these elements used to produce interactional effects?
{"title":"Figure Composition","authors":"Charles H. P. Zuckerman","doi":"10.1086/715515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715515","url":null,"abstract":"Linguistic anthropologists have shown that the way a person reports speech or represents discourse—for example, whether they ‘put on an accent’ or merely repeat attributed words—is crucial for understanding what social action that person is undertaking. And yet, our tools for talking about the form of represented discourse are still crude. This paper offers a new tool in the notion of figure composition, defined as the formal semiotic elements that comprise a given voice. Reflecting on figure composition, alongside Agha’s (2005) notion of figure transparency, invites us to shift from asking what kind of represented discourse any given stretch of represented discourse is to asking (1) What elements of represented discourse appear to be coming from the quoted figure(s)? and (2) How are these elements used to produce interactional effects?","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43185383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of āsana (posture, pose) that they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. In a wide range of contexts, teachers and master practitioners insist that these techniques of the body must be executed in particular ways and accompanied by specific mental states if they are to have their intended ethical effects. Yoga is thus understood to combine outwardly observable technique with an unobservable yet essential, inner component. One consequence of this to which students and teachers are pervasively oriented is that the techniques become vulnerable to a kind of deethicalization by which they are “bleached” of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. The paper begins by comparing concerns about deethicalization among yoga practitioners with similar ideas about folklorization among participants in a women’s mosque movement described by Mahmood (2012). I then turn to consider three semiotic processes relevant to the specific case: circumscription, performed demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization.
{"title":"Technique and the Threat of Deethicalization","authors":"J. Sidnell","doi":"10.1086/716433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/716433","url":null,"abstract":"Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of āsana (posture, pose) that they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. In a wide range of contexts, teachers and master practitioners insist that these techniques of the body must be executed in particular ways and accompanied by specific mental states if they are to have their intended ethical effects. Yoga is thus understood to combine outwardly observable technique with an unobservable yet essential, inner component. One consequence of this to which students and teachers are pervasively oriented is that the techniques become vulnerable to a kind of deethicalization by which they are “bleached” of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. The paper begins by comparing concerns about deethicalization among yoga practitioners with similar ideas about folklorization among participants in a women’s mosque movement described by Mahmood (2012). I then turn to consider three semiotic processes relevant to the specific case: circumscription, performed demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41812461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in “labor work” could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that “practical” would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds.
{"title":"Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry","authors":"Adam Sargent","doi":"10.1086/715715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715715","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in “labor work” could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that “practical” would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42063654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The present paper investigates discursive justification as a moderative device in Kalevala-metric incantations. It explores different uses of justification by Finno-Karelian ritual specialists and argues that justification functions differently with positively and negatively evaluated non-human agents. In addition, a typology of discursive units of justification is provided. The results of the analysis reveal that justification functions as a register-based feature within the incantation genre. Types of justification directed to differently evaluated agents work as register-emblematic features. These findings open up new directions in the research of registers in Kalevala-metric incantation genre as constituted of multiple registers of communication.
{"title":"Discursive Registers in Finno-Karelian Communicative Incantations","authors":"Tuukka Karlsson","doi":"10.1086/715780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715780","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper investigates discursive justification as a moderative device in Kalevala-metric incantations. It explores different uses of justification by Finno-Karelian ritual specialists and argues that justification functions differently with positively and negatively evaluated non-human agents. In addition, a typology of discursive units of justification is provided. The results of the analysis reveal that justification functions as a register-based feature within the incantation genre. Types of justification directed to differently evaluated agents work as register-emblematic features. These findings open up new directions in the research of registers in Kalevala-metric incantation genre as constituted of multiple registers of communication.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary—“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself—were first given fleshly and ghostly form in the spiritualist séance, which early on was likened to a “spiritual telegraph.” Throughout this period, newfangled ghosts and communication infrastructures (including the telegraph, but also the equally novel postal service) developed in tandem. This article explores three such boundary genres of communication between the living and the dead: how the séance converted the “spectral aphasia” of haunted houses into the domestic séance; how ghosts of loved ones dying far away across the “phantasmal empire” turned the ghost from an actor to a message, working in tandem with telegrams and letters in the “psychical ghost story”; and lastly, how the American spiritualist press created “spirit post offices” to publish communications from the dead alongside ordinary postal “correspondence” from the living.
{"title":"Spectral Aphasia, Psychical Ghost Stories, and Spirit Post Offices: Three Modern Ghost Stories about Communication Infrastructures","authors":"P. Manning","doi":"10.1086/714424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714424","url":null,"abstract":"Nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary—“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself—were first given fleshly and ghostly form in the spiritualist séance, which early on was likened to a “spiritual telegraph.” Throughout this period, newfangled ghosts and communication infrastructures (including the telegraph, but also the equally novel postal service) developed in tandem. This article explores three such boundary genres of communication between the living and the dead: how the séance converted the “spectral aphasia” of haunted houses into the domestic séance; how ghosts of loved ones dying far away across the “phantasmal empire” turned the ghost from an actor to a message, working in tandem with telegrams and letters in the “psychical ghost story”; and lastly, how the American spiritualist press created “spirit post offices” to publish communications from the dead alongside ordinary postal “correspondence” from the living.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42409513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic signs in enregisterment processes (Agha 2007) through the analysis of multimodal images of racial otherness in YouTube videos. It aims to show the role of images in indexing social meaning and performing hegemonic Whiteness among metropolitan Cameroonian-French elites living in Paris, through the use of a specific semiotic register indexing an “Afropolitan” persona – an elite, socially mobile and transnational type of Blackness. By focusing on the poiesis of “image-texts” (Nakassis 2019), this article will contribute to understanding the “total semiotic fact” of racial and social differentiation. It will also demonstrate that these images constitute a counter-discourse and are political acts that negotiate agency and contest power relations.
{"title":"Performing Whiteness, Troubling Blackness: Afropolitanism and the Visual Politics of Black Bodies in YouTube Videos","authors":"S. Telep","doi":"10.1086/714423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714423","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic signs in enregisterment processes (Agha 2007) through the analysis of multimodal images of racial otherness in YouTube videos. It aims to show the role of images in indexing social meaning and performing hegemonic Whiteness among metropolitan Cameroonian-French elites living in Paris, through the use of a specific semiotic register indexing an “Afropolitan” persona – an elite, socially mobile and transnational type of Blackness. By focusing on the poiesis of “image-texts” (Nakassis 2019), this article will contribute to understanding the “total semiotic fact” of racial and social differentiation. It will also demonstrate that these images constitute a counter-discourse and are political acts that negotiate agency and contest power relations.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714423","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48385791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.
{"title":"Cutting without Cutting Connection: The Semiotics of Power Patrols in Urban Tanzania","authors":"Michael Degani","doi":"10.1086/714856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714856","url":null,"abstract":"Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714856","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46761493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Qualia of Stress and Bodily Enregisterment in Ice Swimming","authors":"Antti Lindfors","doi":"10.1086/714857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714857","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714857","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47324880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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