Sicoli Peirce and Anthropological Theory

Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies 7/25/18, 11)42
Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological

Theory
Mark A. Sicoli, Matthew Wolfgram
LAST MODIFIED: 27 JUNE 2018

DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0187
Introduction
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (b. 1839–d. 1914) has had a profound, expansive, and sometimes unrecognized
impact on anthropological research and theory. Part of Peirce’s impact has been mediated through the work of philosophers influenced
by Peirce’s theory of signs, and who were themselves subsequently taken into anthropological theory. But the impact of Peirce’s
semiotic on anthropologists who have interpreted Peirce directly has also been transformative, in particular, in developing a surprisingly
transdisciplinary theory of meaning in anthropology. This article documents the role of Peirce’s theory of signs in facilitating a semiotic
approach in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and in providing a framework to critically expand research on visual and material
culture, archaeology, trans-species environmental relations, life-systems, and the evolution of language and culture. The transformative
impact of Peirce’s semiotic can be understood against the history of the dominant structuralist semiotic theory that guided much 20th-
century anthropology that developed from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure called for a science of signs
(termed “semiology”) that placed at its center an analysis of the arbitrary linguistic sign (constituted by an ideal binary binding concept
and sound-image) and which has value as part of a system of oppositions (langue), held commonly in the minds of speakers as
members of a society. A parallel model of language was incorporated into American anthropology by Franz Boas, who argued that
language is a conventional system of classification for a society, and the dominant focus became the study of such systems of
classification in domains such as botany, zoology, kinship, color, and so on. The structuralist concept of language as a conventional
system also became a dominant model of culture in French and British anthropology, in particular through the integration of Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s binary analysis of mythic and mental structures, and which was coordinated with the Durkheimian concept of
language/culture as a public representation of a society’s values to itself. In contrast, Peircean semiosis does not take the idealist and
arbitrary linguistic symbol as the privileged basis of semiotic analysis. Peirce’s semiotic provides a framework for understanding actions
relating signs and their material qualities to their interpretations by agents (human and nonhuman) in the habit of making meaning in
social-ecological contexts. Peircean semiosis focuses attention on dynamic interpretive processes and their consequences, and on the
form, diversity, function, and positionality of signs in chains of actions playing out in time and space to practical, meaningful, productive,
or consequential ends.
The Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology
Peirce’s Collected Papers (CP) (Peirce 1932–1974) establishes his truly polymathic and expansive philosophical oeuvre of fundamental
insights into epistemology (especially pragmatism), as well as the philosophy of mind, language, self, ethics, science, education, and
religion; and, importantly, the final volume of the CP and another separate book-length bibliography—Robin 1967—provide a detailed
annotation of Peirce’s large corpus of papers. Peirce is perhaps the most influential American philosopher in history and thus, a robust
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-97801997665…99766567-0187.xml?rskey=jtXFB9&result=1&q=sicoli&print#firstMatch Page 1 of 25
and expansive literature of philosophical and historical commentary is available. The Charles S. Peirce Society is dedicated to the study
of Peirce’s thought, and it publishes the Society’s journal, The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in
American Philosophy. Peirce’s works on semiotics, in particular, has been taken up into the history of anthropological theory. Perhaps
the most commonly employed source in anthropology for Peirce’s semiotic theory is “Logic as semiotic,” assembled from various
writings by Justus Buchler in Philosophical Writings of Charles Peirce (Peirce 1955); however, other key writings on semiotics are
collected in Peirce on Signs (Peirce 1991). In addition, Peirce’s writings on other topics relevant to anthropology, such as Peirce’s
phenomenological categories, abduction, and pragmatism are collected in the two volumes of The Essential Peirce: Peirce 1992 and
Peirce 1998. From among the expansive commentary literature, a number of works may be useful to help clarify key aspects of Peirce’s
thought, such as Fisch 1986 for commentaries on the theory of signs, Sonesson 2013 on phenomenology, and Melrose 1995 on
abduction as a form of cognition.
Fisch, Max. 1986. Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel.
Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Volume of essays of Fisch’s biographical engagement with Peirce as a polymath philosopher, mathematician, semiotician, historian,
and working scientist. Essays detail the development of pragmatism out of dialogues of the “Metaphysical Club,” differences between
Peirce and others in that circle (particularly William James), the logical relationship between pragmatism and Peirce’s general theory of
signs; draws a parallel between Peirce’s pragmatism and the work of 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, both growing
out of a dissatisfaction with Cartesian thought.
Melrose, Robin. 1995. The seduction of abduction: Peirce’s theory of signs and indeterminacy in language. Journal of
Pragmatics 23.5: 493–507.
This paper reviews Peirce’s systems of categorization of signs, phenomenological states, and modes of cognition, and it illustrates how
they relate to his concept of “abduction”—a type of quasi-inductive inference that involves developing a theory based on proximately
available evidence (which can later be evaluated through fully inductive or deductive reasoning). The paper connects the concept of
abduction to other relevant traditions of linguistics and philosophy.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932–1974. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press.
Volume 1, “Principles of Philosophy”; Volume 2, “Elements of Logic”; Volume 3, “Exact Logic”; Volume 4, “The Simplest Mathematics”;
Volume 5, “Pragmatism and Pragmaticism”; Volume 6 “Scientific Metaphysics”; both Volume 7 (“Science and Philosophy”) and Volume
8 (“Reviews, Correspondence and Bibliography”) are edited by A. W. Burks.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Philosophical writings of Peirce. Selected and edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover.
An edited collection of Peirce’s essays and compilations of Peirce’s writings assembled by Buchler into article-length essays, such as
“Logic as Semiotic,” which is commonly cited and used to introduce anthropology students to Peirce. “Logic as Semiotic” concisely
outlines the three trichotomies of signs based on firstness (qualisign, sinsign, legisign), secondness (icon, index, symbol), and thirdness
(rheme, dicent, argument), and presents the typology of Peirce’s ten classes of signs.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on signs: Writings on semiotic. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
This volume collects twenty-one of Peirce’s essays, including works on god, metaphysics, categories, human cognition, Berkeley, signs,
argumentation, James, self, and several essays on pragmatism.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings. Vol. 1, 1897–1893. Edited by Nathan
Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press.
First volume of a two-volume collection of Peirce’s writings, including works on phenomenological categories, cognition, logic in
science, and writings from the Monist rejecting determinism and advocating for absolute chance, arguing for mind and nature as
processes of growth, the laws of the universe as acquired habits, and writings on evolutionary love that critique the greed and
individualism of 19th-century political economy as metaphorical ground for Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings. Vol. 2, 1893–1913. Edited by Nathan
Houser, André De Tienne, Jonathan R. Eller, Cathy L. Clark, Albert C. Lewis, and D. Bront Davis. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana
Press.
Second volume in the two-volume collection of Peirce’s writings, including works on synechism, signs, science, nature, pragmatism,
abduction, and excerpts from letters to Lady Welby and William James.
Robin, Richard S. 1967. Annotated catalogue of the papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
This is a book-length annotated bibliography of Peirce’s extensive papers housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. It is
divided into two sections: Part 1 includes manuscripts and Part 2 is correspondence by and to Peirce.
Sonesson, Göran. 2013. The natural history of branching: Approaches to the phenomenology of firstness, secondness, and
thirdness. Signs and Society 1.2: 297–325.
This paper reviews the concepts of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, contextualizes Peirce’s phenomenology in relationship to
Husserlian phenomenology, structuralism, and social psychology, and identifies relationship between Peirce’s thoughts on
consciousness and on semiotics.
The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. 1965–.
Transactions is the journal of the Charles S. Peirce Society, focusing on research on the history of American philosophy. The journal is
a major source of philosophical and historical commentary on Peirce’s thought.
Philosophical Appropriations into Anthropology
Peirce’s impact on the history of anthropological theory has sometimes been filtered through philosophers whose thinking through
Peircean semiosis resonates with anthropological questions. The philosopher Charles Morris (Morris 1938), for example, developed
Peirce’s semiotic into a framework for organizing and unifying the sciences (including anthropology, linguistics, and other human and
social sciences). Morris writes: “if semiotic is a science co-ordinate with the other sciences, studying things or the properties of things in
their function of serving as signs,” then “it is also the instrument of all sciences, since every science makes use of and expresses its
results in terms of signs” (Morris 1938, p. 2). Benjamin Lee (Lee 1997) and Vincent Colapietro (Colapietro 1989) have used Peirce’s
semiotic to develop philosophies of language and performativity important to linguistic and cultural anthropological theory. Jacques
Derrida (Derrida 1976) and Umberto Eco (Eco 1986) drew upon and developed Peirce’s dynamic and indeterminate characterization of
semiosis, which was appropriated into anthropology as it aligned with literary approaches. And the authors of Deleuze and Guattari
1987 mirror Peirce’s second trichotomy in their own sign typology. They introduce a rhizomatic understanding of semiotic chains, which
has become influential in the work of Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, and others. In addition to Peirce’s indirect impact on anthropological
theory via philosophers, there is a more capillary but also profound impact of Peirce’s theory of knowledge, called pragmatism or
sometimes pragmaticism. Pragmatism states that the value of a proposition should be evaluated in terms of the practical effects of the
knowledge, which contrasted with verificationist epistemologies dominant in continental philosophy that argued the truth value of
propositions should be evaluated in terms of their correspondence to an objective state of the world. Peirce’s pragmatist epistemology
had a pervasive effect on American philosophy, although it has often been mediated by Peirce’s peers and later-generation
philosophers, such as William James (James 1985), who has also had a major impact on the anthropology of religion; John Dewey
(Dewey 2004), who has been taken up in the anthropology of education; and George Herbert Mead (Mead 1934), whose social theory
of self has had a major impact on anthropologists. Furthermore, drawing on Peirce, Richard Rorty (Rorty 2009) developed the
pragmatic theory of knowledge, which has, in turn, impacted American analytical philosophy, including the work of W. V. O. Quine, Saul
Kripke, Hilary Putnam, John Austin, and John Searle, and whose ideas have informed practice in linguistic and sociocultural
anthropology as well as theory on evolution and material culture in biological and archaeological anthropology.
Colapietro, Vincent M. 1989. Peirce’s approach to the self: A semiotic perspective on human subjectivity. Albany: State Univ.
of New York Press.
Studies agency and autonomy of the self, arguing that Peirce’s acting subject within a semiotic mind process of sign development goes
beyond Cartesian, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories of self. As signs mediate between object and interpretant, community
provides context as source of meaning and truth. The developing self involves relations of community to embodied habits and behavior.
Providing for an embodied semiotic consciousness, Colapietro critiques Eco’s theory of signification that leaves the acting subject
outside the scope of semiotics.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Masumi.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
This is a philosophical work exploring assemblages, spaces, becoming, machines of state and appropriating Peircean sign types with
new connotations of territoriality-deterritorialization: indexes (territorial), symbols (deterritorialized), icons (reterritorialization). Introduces
rhizomatic, connected, understanding of semiosis in critique of autonomous linguistic (tree and root) models. Like rhizomes “semiotic
chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only
different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status” (p. 7). Originally published as Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1980).
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of grammatology. Translated by G. C Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
This text draws on Peirce’s dynamic and emergent concept of semiosis to identify an indeterminacy of signs as always “becoming-
unmotivated.” Derrida was appropriated into anthropology as part of the post-structuralist turn, but Derrida himself understood
indeterminacy—the lack of a stable presence of the sign—as a consequence of the processes of signification as value produced
through difference (the structuralist position), and criticized structuralists such as de Saussure, Jakobson, and Lévi-Strauss for
harboring hidden romanticisms, in effect, for not being structuralist enough.
Dewey, John. 2004. Democracy and education. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Originally published 1916. Dewey’s writings on the philosophy of education, which describe the goals of liberal education and its
relationship to democratic society, have been central to social science and critical studies of education, including the history and
anthropology of education. In addition to the work of William James, Dewey’s philosophy of education is responsible for popularizing
Peirce’s epistemology of pragmatism and in developing the connection between the theory of knowledge and the project of cultivating
just and equitable democratic institutions.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Advances in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
The explicit goal of the book is to show that Saussure’s dyadic sign is compatible with Peirce’s triadic sign action. Eco subordinates
semantics to pragmatics, arguing that signs be disentangled from coded equivalence/identity of dictionary meaning, and that
interpretive process is present in encyclopedic, textual meaning. Eco’s argument is, however, less grounded on the work of the seldom
cited Saussure, but rather in reading Saussure through Peirce’s notions of abduction and interpretants through which signs acquire
meaning in cultural history.
James, William. 1985. The varieties of religious experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
James’s descriptions of mystical experiences—and the analysis of their ineffable qualities—have been foundational to ritual studies and
to the anthropology, psychology, and social science of religion, demonstrating that such experience could be scientifically studied.
Reflecting his commitment to Peirce’s pragmatism, James argued that despite the ineffable quality of such experiences, there are
common patterns in such experiences, and the insights that they impart are pragmatically useful.
Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press.
Lee shows subjectivity to be at the center of new conceptions of identity—the “we” of national consciousness, produced since the rise
of print media and forms of speech in the novel. Lee ends with a discussion of the performative “we” of the US Declaration of
Independence and links performativity with metalanguage developed through a reading of Peirce’s approach to quantification as
indexes that trigger inferences for interpreters.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press.
Mead pioneered work in symbolic interaction theory and social psychology with a pragmatic perspective seen in a theory of a reflexive
self-consciousness: the “I” experienced as an object “me” through a perspective of others, where, for example, one speaks in design
and anticipation of another’s response (a Peircean interpretant). Mead’s pragmatism predicted later work in ethnomethodology and
social cognition and anthropological notions of objectification and recognition as semiotic processes that depend on the work
interpreters bring to interaction.
Morris, Charles. 1938. Foundations of the theory of signs. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Following Peirce, Morris argues that scientific knowledge is both mediated by signs and communicated by signs, and thus a theory of
signs is fundamental to a modernist conception of knowledge. As a metascience, Morris argues that semiotics could unify various
domains of knowledge. His semiotic unification and classification of these domains of knowledge (syntactics, semantics, and
pragmatics) has been influential in linguistics, anthropology, and social sciences, often without knowledge, or recognition, of this source.
Rorty, Richard. 2009. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Originally published 1979. Richard Rorty is one of several prominent American philosophers who developed Peirce’s theory of
knowledge into a full philosophical critique of positivism and verificationism, which Rorty argues falsely assumed that true knowledge
was a “mirror of nature.” This critique became central to the American school of analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language,
which has had a wide impact in anthropology theory.
From Symbolic to Semiotic Anthropology
Peirce’s semiotics has had a major impact in the history of American anthropology, in particular, by providing a non-dualistic theory of
meaning that expanded and elaborated the narrow focus of structuralist semiotics on conventional signs, typified by the linguistic sign
and cultural symbols that were a major focus of what became known as “interpretive” or “symbolic anthropology.” Anthropologists have
drawn on Peirce’s philosophy to expand their analysis beyond the interpretation of symbols to an analysis of the holistic process of the
role of signs in the emergence of value, involving a continuous process uniting convention (symbol), experience (index), and material
qualities (icon). Peirce’s semiotics was grounded both on the context of the production and interpretation of signs and on the material
qualities of the sign medium, thus transcending the material/ideal dualism that was debated in post–World War II American and British
anthropology. Milton Singer (Singer 1980, Singer 1984) and Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban (Lee and Urban 1989) introduced and
developed Peirce’s semiotic to frame a holistic social and material semiotic approach to culture, which formed the basis of what
became known as semiotic anthropology more generally, as reviewed in Mertz 2007. Richard Parmentier has also provided extensive
framing and commentary on the anthropological significance of Peirce’s semiotics (Parmentier 2016), and Stanley Tambiah has
employed aspects of this semiotics to develop an anthropological approach to ritual and a resolution to the “rationality debates” in
anthropology (Tambiah 1979, Tambiah 1996). In addition, several major ethnographic works exemplify this transition from interpretive to
a more holistic semiotic anthropology. Valentine Daniel, for example, provides a full exposition of Peirce’s framework, and then
develops an analysis of rituals and practices related to the creation of persons in Tamil Hindu society (Daniel 1984). And the
ethnography of Nancy Munn on the Kula exchange on the island of Gawa in the archipelago of Papua New Guinea illustrates how the
material qualities of prestige exchange items are central to the production of value in society and to the politics of fame that are central
to the local manifestation of personhood (Munn 1992). Later work in this tradition has employed semiotic analysis to identify the sign
processes involved in politics, such as E. Valentine Daniel’s analysis of the signs used to produce historical narratives that foster ethnic
nationalism and conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka (Daniel 1996) (on semiotic processes in politics, see also the works
in Language Ideology and Language and Commodification).
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1984. Fluid signs: Being a person the Tamil way. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
The first chapter introduces Peircean semiotics and phenomenology in relation to problems in cultural anthropology, such as analysis of
ritual, myth, caste, and the dynamics of personhood, that are applied to Hindu rituals and social practices throughout the text. The book
also contains a rich ethnographic description of a temple pilgrimage, which Daniel analyzes using Peircean phenomenology, as a
process that produces an experience of firstness, or unification between the pilgrims and Lord Ayyappan in the temple.
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred lullabies: Chapters in an anthropography of violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Studies cultural processes motivating ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka. Argues that Singala Buddhist
nationalists employ traces on the landscape as signs of the Buddhist past (Buddha’s footprint or a Buddhist king’s irrigation tanks) to
produce nationalist ideology, which actualize an idealized past in the present through what Peirce termed “dicicigns.” Daniel argues that
Sinhalese dicisigns contrast with rhematic signs employed in Tamil nationalist ideology, which projects a future from a vague
primordialism associated with the Tamil community.
Lee, Benjamin, and Greg Urban, eds. 1989. Semiotics, self, and society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
A volume of essays dedicated to Milton Singer by students, colleagues, and friends and including an essay by Singer on the semiotic
self. The volume as a whole critiques Cartesian models of self with contributions exploring how language, through pronominal play,
communicates qualities of emotions, senses, and representations of self and in relation to societies.
Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. Semiotic anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:337–353.

This article describes the role of Peirce’s semiotics in the transition from an interpretive-hermeneutic approach to a social-semiotic
approach. Mertz tracks thirty years of change in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology that has permitted a productive dialogue
between these subfields mediated through semiotics. Themes focused on include indexicality, linguistic ideology and social interaction,
social power and history, agency and linguistic creativity, and shifting units of analysis from entextualization to globalization.
Munn, Nancy D. 1992. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society.
Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
Munn documents Kula transactions in Melanesia, focusing, in particular, on the role of the inter-island exchange of prestige objects
along with food production, consumption, and speech making in the production of value, self, and the politics of fame. Munn argues that
such cultural practices produce value as signified as a sign on the body (called qualisigns, following Peirce) and through the extension
and management of personhood through space-time.
Parmentier, Richard J. 2016. Signs and society: Further studies in semiotic anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Echoing the name of his earlier volume, Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology, published in 1994, Parmentier assembles
fifteen essays spanning his career and divided into three parts: “Foundations of Peircean Semiotics,” “Critical Commentaries and
Reviews,” and “Comparative Perspectives on Semiosis.”
Singer, Milton. 1980. Signs of the self: An exploration in semiotic anthropology. American Anthropologist 82.3: 485–507.
Singer works with Peirce’s general theory of signs to ground a theory of the self that is phenomenological, pragmatic, and non-
Cartesian. Singer’s account considers the self as occupying different positions in semiotic chains as signs, objects, and interpretants,
and, as subject, participates on both sides of dialogic sequences of becoming in which the self (through self-talk) can be less than the
individual organism, and, when in dialogue with other organisms, can be more than the individual in an emergence of a “social
consciousness.”
Singer, Milton B. 1984. Man’s glassy essence: Explorations in semiotic anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Builds on Peirce’s triadic semiotic to develop a “semiotic anthropology” in arguing that Saussure’s binary sign is degenerate from the
perspective of sociocultural theory and the source of many problems in French structuralism, British structural-functionalism, and
symbolic (semiological) anthropology. Relates ideas of a phenomenological self to Peirce’s fragmentary writings on a semiotics of self.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. A performative approach to ritual. Proceedings of the British Academy 65:113–169.
This article develops an influential theory of ritual that uses Peirce’s semiotics to analyze how formal features of ritual, such as often
high degrees of conventionality and repetitiveness, and the social effectiveness of ritual utterances (as Austinian speech act) form an
index connecting ritual actions with social contexts.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1996. Relations of analogy and identity. In Modes of thought: Explorations in culture and cognition. Edited
by David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, 34–52. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
This piece draws on Roman Jakobson’s linguistic interpretation of Peirce’s semiotics (see Jakobson 1957, cited under Deixis, Emergent
Contexts, and Social Relations) to identify two semiotic processes that relate language and the world. Identity relations posit that
language has an essential relation to the world, and analogy relations posit a conventional relation to the world. Tambiah applies these
concepts to the moral/legal debates about the protest burning of the American flag in the 1990s and to cases of ethnolinguistic
nationalism.
The Semiotic Approach in Linguistic Anthropology
Peircean semiotics has had a major impact of anthropological approaches to the study of language, which are addressed below under
the subsections Deixis, Emergent Contexts, and Social Relations; Iconicity in Language; Gesture and Embodied Communication;
Language Ideology; Language and Commodification.
Deixis, Emergent Contexts, and Social Relations
Peirce’s concept of indexical signs has been important in understanding linguistic reference, quantification, performativity, social status,
and social interaction. Deixis are features of language that index features of the communication context, such as space, time, social
roles, and the discourse itself (i.e., intertextual deixis, such as discourse markers and anaphora). Peirce wrote that the deictic “may
require its interpretation to refer to the actual surrounding circumstances of the occasion of its embodiment, like words as that, this, I,
you, which, here, now, yonder, etc. (Peirce 1932–1974, Vol. 4, p. 447, cited under the Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for
Anthropology). Such forms often presupposed and actually require specific information about the speech context in order for the
propositional content of the talk to be intelligible to an interpreter. The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson developed and critiqued the
structuralist concept of language by incorporating a Peircean concept of indexicality, demonstrating that such features are both
ubiquitous and cross-linguistically universal, which illustrated the fundamental importance of the social-interactional context of language
use to any analysis of the linguistic system (Jakobson 1957). Steven Caton has reviewed the significance of Jakobson’s contributions to
anthropology (Caton 1987). A great deal of this impact has been advanced by the American linguistic anthropologist and student of
Jakobson, Michael Silverstein, who interpreted and framed this Peircean approach to language for the general problems of
anthropology (Silverstein 1976). In particular, he developed a contrast between two relationships of indexes to contexts, one that
presupposes a particular context and the other that creates an emergent context; he later developed a systematic framework for
interpreting how language is used to produce social reality (Silverstein 2003). Following this approach, anthropologists have shifted
their focus away from formal descriptions of indexicality in language to indexical creation, including analyzing the productive nature of
indexical forms in managing social relations (Manning 2001), establishing sociocentric spatial frames of reference (Hanks 1992),
considering scales of causation (Enfield 2013), treating the formation of local concepts of self and subjectivity (Kockelman 2007 and
Kockelman 2010), and producing authority in ritual speech (Kuipers 1990). William Hanks has reviewed the concept of indexicality and
its relevance to anthropological studies of language (Hanks 1999).
Caton, Steven C. 1987. Contributions of Roman Jakobson. Annual Review of Anthropology 16.1: 223–260.
This article gives a helpful review of Jakobson’s theory of language and metalanguage as influenced by Peirce, Jakobson’s far-reaching
criticism of Saussurean structuralism, and its various impacts on linguistic and anthropological theory. Jakobson saw form and meaning
as inextricable and language as multifunctional and teleological in involving meaning beyond reference to the indexical functions
pointing to speech situation, and the iconicity and indexicality organizational of the poetics of parallelism, which Jakobson saw as
pervasive at all levels of language, and thus integral to linguistic research.
Enfield, N. J. 2013. Relationship thinking: Agency, enchrony, and human sociality. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Integrates traditions of conversation analysis, linguistics, and philosophy using a Peircean concept of meaning as ascribed through an
interpreting agent to develop a theory of interaction involving semiosis, distributed agency, and the causal frame of enchrony, where two
moves, or signs, are linked through an effective, or prospective, relation in which one action gives rise to another and, retrospectively, in
a relation of appropriateness, relevance, and normativity.
Hanks, William F. 1992. The indexical ground of deictic reference. In Rethinking context: Language as an interactive
phenomenon. Edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 43–76. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Hanks provides a detailed analysis of the use of deictic forms of reference in Mayan social interaction, and how such forms indexically
ground and produce the context of talk. Hanks’s analysis emphasizes the creative nature of such forms, which establish social
symmetries and asymmetries, in the forms of participants’ orientations toward spatial location, time, social roles, and forms of common
knowledge.
Hanks, William F. 1999. Indexicality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 124–126.

This is a review of the concept of indexicality as the context-dependency of utterances, including phenomena like regional accent,
deference and demeanor, referential pronouns, demonstratives, deictic adverbs, and tense.
Jakobson, Roman. 1957. Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb. In Word and language. By Roman Jakobson, 130–
147. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971.
Emphasizes the prevalence and importance of indexical features in human language, such as pronouns, verb tense, and other forms of
time reference, and deictic forms, which reference spatial location. Deictic reference shifts with the context of the utterance—and such
features are known as “shifters” in the linguistics literature—which Jakobson argued illustrated the fundamentally indexical quality of
speech. This context dependency is evidence that language is fundamentally organized for social interaction in dynamic temporal and
spatial contexts.
Kockelman, Paul. 2007. Agency: The relation between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology 48.3: 375–401.
Builds on Peirce to define agency along dimensions of flexibility and accountability as well as knowledge and power. Introduces
“residential agency,” the degree to which one can control a sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant, which is
distinct from, yet presupposing of, “representational agency,” the degree to which one can thematize a process, characterize a feature
of the theme, and reason with the theme-character relation. Agency is thematized as a multidimensional, graduated, and distributed
semiotic faculty.
Kockelman, Paul. 2010. Language, culture, and mind: Natural constructions and social kinds. New York: Cambridge Univ.
Press.
Integrates linguistic, social, and cognitive sciences with ethnographic research with Q’eqchi’ Maya using Peirce’s semiosis to synthesize
insights of Jakobson, Goffman and Kockelman in their earlier work on stance. He develops a semiotic and distributed understanding of
intentionality and mind. Intentionality is semiotically distributed across speakers, topics, and addressees where public and emblematic
actions are signs of mental states and social statuses (immaterial objects) that become knowable through interpretants that are
attitudes, responses, and reactions to prior signs.
Kuipers, Joel Corneal. 1990. Power in performance: The creation of textual authority in Weyewa ritual speech. Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Kuipers documents the role of indexical forms of language in establishing the social efficacy of Weyewa ritual speech. He found that the
authority of genres as divination is based on a connection to the social context established through a high frequency of demonstrative
and personal pronouns and locatives. In contrast, other genres, such as ritual blessings, are effective on account of a separation from
social context, represented as the authoritative and poetic “words of the ancestors.”
Manning, H. Paul. 2001. On social deixis. Anthropological Linguistics 43.1: 54–100.

Drawing on data across diverse cultural settings, Manning builds on Peircean indexicality and Voloshinov’s view of a multithreaded
intertwining of utterance and contexts to propose a unified account of situational (contingent) deixis of the social situation and to argue
additionally for forms of social deixis that index durative (perduring) social relations beyond the contingency of the situation.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Meaning in anthropology. Edited by Keith
Basso and Henry A. Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
Argues that some indexical features of language assume the existence of particular social relations, e.g., mother-in-law registers,
honorifics, and kin terms, that presuppose preexisting status relationship between speaker and addresses, and that other indexical
features of language bring social relations into existence by virtue of the utterance, as with participant pronouns (I;you) and
performative speech acts. This contrast has been widely employed by anthropologists because it facilitates analyzing the social and
political efficacy of language in social interaction.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23.3: 193–229.
Silverstein develops the concept of indexical order, which is the process by which micro-contextual social interaction and talk indexically
presuppose and entail macro-sociological categories and values. He provides a number of examples of this process from the
anthropological literature, and he includes a detailed analysis of the indexical ordering in American English identity-commoditizing “wine
talk” (also known as oinoglossia).
Iconicity in Language
Contrary to the structuralist focus on the purely conventional and unmotivated nature of the linguistic sign, Roman Jakobson, having
become influenced by Peirce’s semiotic, argued that iconicity was so ubiquitous and so fundamental a feature that research on this
topic constituted “the quest for the essence of language” (Jakobson 1965). For Jakobson, many linguistic universals on various levels of
language could be explained in terms of the iconic nature of linguistic signs. For example, Jakobson documented a number of
morphological universals based on iconicity, such as the markedness relations of unmarked/comparative/superlative forms (cross
linguistically, the comparative form is always marked and superlative form is always additionally marked, not vice versa). Jakobson
1978 also describes how bundles of phonological features in language tend to iconize particular sets of meanings, thus identifying the
semiotic basis of the process of “sound symbolism” (for a review of subsequent research on sound symbolism, see Nuckolls 1999). On
the lexical level, the author of Jakobson 1962 employs the concept of iconicity to develop a theory to explain the prevalence of “mama”
and “papa” forms across historically unrelated languages. Following Jakobson’s path-breaking work, linguistic anthropologists have
documented the principle of iconicity on various levels of language (reviewed in Mannheim 1999), focusing, in particular, on the social
and pragmatic effects of iconic sign processes. For example, Mark Sicoli has documented how shifting voice features in Zapotec has an
iconic relationship with local characterizations of social “size” (Sicoli 2010); and a cross-linguistic research work, Sicoli, et al. 2015
demonstrates how pitch level in discourse iconizes (in particular, rhematizes) pragmatic functions in interaction. Like many uptakes of
Peirce in anthropology and related fields, researchers have tended to focus on Peirce’s trichotomy of “icon, index, symbol” (how signs
relate to their objects). Though since signs only relate to their objects through the work of interpretation, Sicoli 2014 argues the study of
material signs would benefit from explicit attention to the third trichotomy of “rheme, dicent, argument,” which examines the sign from
the perspective of the interpretant.
Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Why “mama” and “papa”? In Selected writings. Vol. 1, Phonological studies. By Roman Jakobson,
538–545. The Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson provides a linguistic-semiotic explanation for the high frequency of “mama” and “papa” forms in historically unrelated
languages. He argues that nasal sounds that are produced by babies during breastfeeding become associated with nurturance and
then with the mother (or, potentially, the wet nurse). The consonant-vowel reduplication of such words is an early form of babbling.
Jakobson argues that such words originate through iconic-indexical processes initiated by children, and they are then conventionalized
by a community of speakers.
Jakobson, Roman. 1965. Quest for the essence of language. Diogenes 13.51: 21–37.
Jakobson argues that iconicity permeates all levels of language. For example, on the level of morphology, Jakobson argues that in
markedness relations of the pattern unmarked/comparative/superlative (big/bigger/biggest; small/smaller/smallest) the contrast is likely
marked by an increase in linguistic form and never a decrease in form. Jakobson identifies many examples of this principle of iconicity
in language, and he argues that it is a fundamental and perhaps universal feature of language.
Jakobson, Roman. 1978. Six lectures on sound and meaning. Brighton, UK: Harvester.
Jakobson discusses sound systems, arguing that certain combinations of distinctive features have iconic associations with common
particular meanings in language, such as acoustically open and grave sounds in words for large objects (and thus words for large
objects will tend to have more open and grave acoustic features). Thus, Jakobson identified the linguistic and semiotic mechanisms of
sound symbolism, which was itself a phenomenon documented by Edward Sapir and other Boasian anthropologists in American Indian
languages.
Mannheim, Bruce. 1999. Iconicity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 107–110.

Explains iconicity—Peirce defined an icon as a “sign by virtue of its own quality and [a] sign of whatever else partakes of that quality” (p.
107)—and subtypes of images, diagrams, and metaphors. While iconicity has often erroneously been taken as natural relation,
Mannheim shows the importance of mediation and that an effect of iconicity can be the erasure of its mediation by naturalizing the
semiotic distinction through reference to another believed to be outside culture.
Nuckolls, Janis B. 1999. The case for sound symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology 28.1: 225–252.
This is a review of research on sound symbolism as a cross-cultural feature of language, documenting the prevalence of the
phenomenon and discussing the semiotic, sociocultural, acoustic, and biological mechanisms involved in sound symbolic processes.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2010. Shifting voices with participant roles: Voice qualities and speech registers in Mesoamerica. Language in
Society 39.4: 521–553.
Argues that voice qualities can be the primary signs of linguistic registers termed “voice registers” and illustrates registers of falsetto
voice, harsh breathy voice, whisper voice, and creaky voice that function in Zapotec, and across Mesoamerica, for respect, authority,
direct address/exclusion, and commiseration, respectively. Posits iconic metaphorical relations: the falsetto voice described by
speakers as “speaking small” depicts one as socially smaller in a participation frame, the harsh voice described as “speaking big”
depicts one as interactionally larger.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2014. Ideophones, rhemes, interpretants. Pragmatics and Society 5.3: 445–454.
Observes that Peirce’s uptake in anthropology and linguistics is often limited to the second trichotomy (icon, index, symbol), which
considers signs in relation to objects; for example, icons can resemble their objects, like portraits. Argues this “naturalizes” iconicity and
that cultural analysis should attend to Peirce’s third trichotomy (rheme, dicent, argument), which examines signs from the perspective of
their interpretants. Rhemes for example, take an icon as their interpretant revealing, rather than erasing, the cultural conventionality of
signs.
Sicoli, Mark A., Tanya Stivers, N. J. Enfield, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2015. Marked initial pitch in questions signals marked
communicative function. Language and Speech 58.3: 204–223.
Examines how the initial pitch of utterances functioning as questions can provide a frame for inferential interpretation. Draws on
Peircean semiotics to explain how a phonetic pattern where initial pitch deviated from a speaker’s median initial pitch was predictive of
questions with functions that deviated from common “information seeking” use to a “socially evaluative” use that require a listener to go
beyond the literal meaning. The inference is grounded on an iconic relation where exceptional form cues exceptional meaning.
Gesture and Embodied Communication
Classifications of gesture and embodied communication practices by linguistic anthropologists and cultural psychologists are explicitly
based on a Peircean semiotic framework. The first of these was anthropologist Adam Kendon’s continuum of gesture behavior ranging
from indexical-iconic “gesticulations” tied to the co-occurring speech to conventionalized “emblems,” such as the “middle finger” in
American gesture or some Italian “quotable” gestures, many of which not only co-occur with speech, but also are detachable from
speech on account of their highly conventionalized meaning (Kendon 1972). David McNeill, a cultural psychologist and pioneer of the
psycholinguistic approach to gesture studies, developed “Kendon’s continuum” into an explicitly Peircean semiotic categorization of
gesture behavior (McNeill 1992). Anthropological research on gesture has transitioned from classifications of gesture behaviors based
on semiotic considerations to analyses of the roles of gestures and other forms of embodied communication in the management of
interaction in social-spatial ecologies, as in Enfield 2009 and Goodwin 2011 as well as in Wolfgram 2014, which examines gesture in
larger social-ideological processes.
Enfield, N. J. 2009. The anatomy of meaning: Speech, gesture, and composite utterances. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Drawing on Peircean semiotics, Enfield researches speech-with-gesture with a critique of the focus of mainstream linguistics on
competence and static representational meaning to motivate meaning as performative, interactive, and dynamic. Examines the
semiotics of speech, gesture, and composite utterances, which combine multiple signs of multiple types (for example, speech with
gesture) in dynamic moves that present themselves for interpretation. Component signs can make sense only as part of a larger
composite of which they are an increment of a developing sequence.
Goodwin, Charles. 2011. Contextures of action. In Embodied interaction: Language and the body in the material world. Edited
by Jürgen Streeck, Charles Goodwin, and Curtis LeBaron, 182–193. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Building from insights of communicative ecologies, including an aphasic man with a three-word vocabulary who nonetheless becomes a
powerful speaker through building action in concert with the other participants, Goodwin draws on Peirce and Deacon 1997 (cited under
the Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction) to argue that speaking requires cooperative semiosis in which human
action is constructed through signs that are public, embodied, and multimodal, and which “mutually elaborate” each other and the world
to which they are tied.
Kendon, Adam. 1972. Some relationships between body motion and speech. In Studies in dyadic communication. Edited by
Aron W. Siegman and Benjamin Pope, 177–210. New York: Pergamon Press.
A pioneering classification of gesture behavior, including deictic gestures (pointing gestures), beat gestures (which resemble prosody),
and iconic gestures (representational gestures), which are based on a similarity between the hand-shape-and-movement and the
concept. Gestures are arranged on a continuum from those that are tightly timed to the speech, such as beats and other forms that
resemble the prosody and/or meaning of the talk, to highly conventionalized emblems (symbols), which can function independently from
language.
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
McNeill further developed Kendon’s Peircean work on gesture classification, which has been highly influential in anthropological,
psychological, and linguistic research on gesture. McNeill added important psychological dimensions, including metaphorical gestures
where an iconic similarity relates to an abstract concept, such as container metaphors used in some Western speech communities, in
which knowledge is contained within metaphorical containers formed by the hands, and abstract points, when a person points to a
concept that is imagined in empty space.
Wolfgram, Matthew. 2014. Gesture and the communication of mathematical ontologies in classrooms. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 24.2: 216–237.
Wolfgram employs a Peircean framework to analyze the role of gesture in math classrooms, which communicates an implicit and highly
authoritative ontology of the nature of mathematical knowledge. Math teachers’ gestures and patterns of bodily activity in the classroom
ecology form an iconic diagram—a metaphor of participation—that represents examples of mathematical knowledge as Platonic
“abstract objects.” The process communicates an ontology to socialize mathematical knowledge, which is associated with the social
authority of math to model and communicate truth about reality.
Language Ideology
Language ideologies are beliefs about languages and their speakers that are coordinated and reinforce social and political positions.
Like all ideologies, ideologies about language clarify some aspects of social reality, and, at the same time, they misrecognize,
obfuscate, and erase other aspects. Thus, the development of the concept of language ideology in linguistic anthropology is part of the
expansion of a political economic perspective about language use more generally (review in Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). The early
development of the concept by linguistic anthropologists incorporated Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular because of the processual
quality of Peirce’s concept of semiosis that makes visible the social-political nature of signification. Peirce is sometimes read as being a
typologist. But he argued that his semiotic categories were ideal types, never realized as such and made visible only with considerable
philosophical mediation. And so, while he employed typology as a philosophical method, on a fundamental level Peirce viewed
semiosis as a process, and later linguistic anthropologists documented the political consequences of that process. Also, Peirce’s
semiotic theory emphasizes that signs are always interpreted by particular interpreters—contrasting with the structuralist concept of
language as a property of a speech community—which is a feature that highlights the social positionality of meaning. Following the
Peircean focus on semiotic process and positionality, Silverstein 1979 identifies the semiotic processes by which speakers become
aware of their own language, a prerequisite for the production of language ideologies. Then, Irvine and Gal 2000 identifies a set of
constituent semiotic processes that speakers use to transform this potential of linguistic awareness into language ideological
projections. Most of the work on language ideologies that followed either directly referenced or assumed these analyses of the
fundamental semiotic processes involved in language ideologies. Irvine 2001 develops language ideological analyses that employ this
semiotic perspective to analyze the systems of contrasts involved in speech styles, and Kuipers 1998 argues for historical processes
involved in the transformation of ritual speech genres. Keane 2003 argues that for language ideological and other ideological processes
that cause an objectification or naturalization of social relations—via iconization, for example—it is necessary to contextualize that
analysis within local cultural assumptions, or “semiotic ideologies,” about what are the qualities and values associated with “objects” or
“nature.”
Irvine, Judith T. 2001. “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Style and
sociolinguistic variation. Edited by Penelope Eckert and John Rickford, 21–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Irvine argues that “styles” are part of systems of contrast in which distinctiveness is created, and draws on Peirce to point out that
“indexes,” as commonly referred to in sociolinguistics, require an interpretant, informed by participants’ understandings as positioned in
their social and semiotic worlds. Distinctiveness and interpretation work alongside an iconicity of aesthetic consistency in the semiotics
of style.
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Regimes of language: Ideologies,
polities, and identities. Edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–48. Santa Fe, NM: SAR.
This paper identifies three semiotic processes involved in the production of language ideologies, which involve the projection of a
resemblance (i.e., iconicity) between language and some other sociocultural domain (i.e., fractal recursivity), which highlights certain
feature of the sociolinguistic scene and obfuscates others (i.e., erasure). These three semiotic processes coordinate in the production
of socially authoritative and effective ideologies of language. Further research has found these semiotic processes to be a common—
perhaps universal—feature of language ideological representations.
Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language & Communication 23.3: 409–425.
This article describes the semiotic consequences of signs mediated by material objects. Keane argues that when anthropologists—
following a Marxist analysis—argue that a sign process produces an objectification or naturalization of social relations it is necessary to
contextualize that analysis within local cultural assumptions about what are the qualities and values associated with “objects” or
“nature.” Keane refers to these broader cultural assumptions about local sign processes as “semiotic ideologies.”
Kuipers, Joel C. 1998. Language, identity, and marginality in Indonesia: The changing nature of ritual speech on the island of
Sumba. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 18. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
In this book Kuipers develops a language ideological and semiotic analysis of factors that have transformed the practice of ritual speech
on the island of Sumba in the Indonesian archipelago.
Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and
levels, April 20–21, 1979; Including papers from the Conference on Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, April 18, 1979. Edited
by Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
This paper identifies the semiotic features of language that are conditions of metalinguistic awareness and, thus, the features of
language that can be ideologized. Features of language that are continuous (versus discontinuous), segmentable (versus non-
segmentable), and presupposing (versus creative) are more accessible to speakers to serve as a basis of language ideological
representations.
Woolard, Kathryn A., and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1994. Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23.1: 55–82.
This is a review of research on language ideology, which includes discussion of several edited volumes that have impacted this line of
research.
Language and Commodification
The role of language and other semiotic processes in the production of the commodity form is a central problem in anthropological
theory, and it relates to research on the political economy of language (see Language Ideology) and on processes of objectification in
material culture (see Visual Anthropology and Material Culture). Judith Irvine identifies the social semiotic conditions by which language
itself can be alienated and exchanged within a particular political economy of value (Irvine 1989). Following Irvine, research on the sign
processes involved in commodification is addressed in Kockelman 2006 and, with particular attention to the way semiotic thirds mediate
changing values in response to the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) in Kockelman 2016 and to semiotic processes of
objectification in Keane 2003 (cited under Language Ideology). Pedersen 2013 examines semiotic processes in the production of value
in the transnational networks, and Maurer 2005 studies the signifying role of the materiality of alternative currencies in the production of
value. A particularly robust line of research on the relationship between language and commodification are analyses of the role of
language, image, and text—often in combination with images and packaging materials—in the creation of “brands” that circulate with
objects and both produce and authenticate the regime of value which motivates the commodity’s circulation and consumption,
exemplified in Manning 2010, Moore 2003, and Urciuoli 2014.
Irvine, Judith T. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16.2: 248–267.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the rural Wolof people in Senegal, Irvine argues that linguistic signs play many simultaneous
roles in political economy, including serving as an objective exchange itself. Irvine draws on Peircean semiotics and Jakobson’s
multifunctional linguistics (through Silverstein) to show language as part of political economy dissolving the false dichotomy between
idealism and materialism.
Kockelman, Paul. 2006. A semiotic ontology of the commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16.1: 76–102.
The author uses Peirce’s sign-object-interpretant trichotomy to deploy a theory of meaning that can handle linguistic meaning and
commodities as types rather that conflating economic value and linguistic meaning as in Saussurean semiology. Kockelman grounds a
reanalysis of Marx’s ontology of the commodity, expanding commodities from goods to the value of affects, acts, and relations.
Grounded in ethnography in Guatemala, he focuses attention on how a Peircean semiotic ontology of the commodity illuminates
neoliberal governance through semiotic processes of commensuration.
Kockelman, Paul. 2016. The chicken and the quetzal: Incommensurable ontologies and portable values in Guatemala’s cloud
forest. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
A semiotic ethnography of relations between ecotourism and the desire of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to protect the cloud
forest and quetzal birds and the Q’eqchi’ Maya community of Chicacnab, Guatemala. Kockelman traces semiotic paths linking desire
and NGO ideas of value and measurement, with chainsaws, entrepreneurship, materials generation, the changes in housing they
afforded, and the negotiation across incommensurate ontological worlds that they demanded.
Manning, Paul. 2010. The semiotics of brand. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:33–49.
Reviews literature on brand semiotics, much of which draws on Peircean concepts of qualisigns, icons, indices, and symbols, and
critiques “dematerialization” of brand in research that opposes brand to material properties of products for erasing contingency and
hybridity in the material semiosis of brands. Manning moves to follow Moore 2003 in overcoming such schismogenesis by attending to
“semiotic moments of brand” modeled as dialogues among producers (speakers), consumers (addressees), products (referents), and
brands (messages).
Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual life limited: Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press.
This is an ethnographic study of two alternative currencies, an international system called Islamic Banking and Finance, which is based
an Islamic theological priority to avoid “interest” in social relations, and a democratizing currency system used in the university town of
Ithaca, NY, called HOURS. The study employs anthropological interpretations of the Peircean semiotic, which foreground the
generative nature of the materiality of signs, to illustrate how the alterative money forms are transacted in a moral project to produce
value.
Moore, Robert. 2003. From genericide to viral marketing: On “brand.” Language & Communication 23.3–4: 331–357.
Approaches the phenomenon of “brand” in the Peircean semiotic to show how events, experiences, and communication can be
“branded” as things where the objectification of diffuse and unstable sets of practices or products become visible things to purchase,
consume, and talk about through semiotic processes in which “Firstness” is produced in qualisigns of design features, a “Secondness”
in how products fit consumer activities, and a “Thirdness” in positioning brand characteristics in relation to other brands.
Pedersen, David. 2013. American value: Migrants, money, and meaning in El Salvador and the United States. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press.
Pedersen draws on Peirce’s synechism to examine continuities connecting Intipucá, El Salvador, with Washington, DC, examining
forms of value embodied in labor, services, and remittances in a framework using Peirce’s notion of the continual development of signs
into new signs, such as transformations of stories in new environments, exported commodities into the labor of migrants sending
remittances to El Salvador, and US counterinsurgency in El Salvador with subsequent mobilizations of this strategy in the Middle East.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2014. The semiotic production of the good student: A Peircean look at the commodification of liberal arts
education. Signs and Society 2.1: 56–83.
The author draws on Peirce and semiotic processes of branding developed in Moore 2003 and Manning 2010 as well as objectification
in Keane 2003 (cited under Language Ideology). Urciuoli argues that the branded object commodified in liberal arts education is formed
in the objectification of “the good student” as visual image and value carrying product of higher education represented in visual
qualisigns (student and logo images), which bundle with indexical messages of captions and narratives. These signs are rhematic in
projecting possible futures for consumer families.
Visual Anthropology and Material Culture
A central feature of Peirce’s semiotic and a key innovation over structuralist and other approaches is that his framework incorporates
the material qualities of the sign medium into the framework for analyzing the process of signification. So, icons and indices signify in
part because they incorporate (or are interpreted to incorporate) the qualities of the object or concept to which they have a signifying
relationship. Such qualities that enter into semiosis are included under Peirce’s phenomenological concept of “firstness,” the perception
of peer qualities (this aspect of Peirce’s semiotic is described extensively in Sonneson 1989). This incorporation of materiality into a
holistic semiotic theory has been particularly generative for visual anthropologists, material culture specialists, and archaeologists
(addressed in Archaeology). The transdisciplinary framework for such a semiotic theory of material culture integrates linguistic
anthropology, material culture studies, and archaeology, and contributions include Parmentier 1997, Keane 2005, and Keane 2003
(cited under Language Ideology), which emphasize the role of language and other semiotic processes in the creation of objects and the
semiotic and social consequences of sign processes that are mediated by object forms. In Manning 2012, an ethnography, the author
develops a theory of material culture that employs Peirce’s semiotic to analyze practices of consumption. Prominent examples of the
indexically agentive quality of art and visual-material culture are developed in Art and Agency (Gell 1998), and the work of the
archaeologist Carl Knappett (Knappett 2002; see also Knappett 2005, cited under Archaeology). The philosopher Gilles Deleuze
extends Peircean semiotics in an analysis of cinematic perception (Deleuze 1986). And an example of the transformative nature of the
introduction of visual signs into a society is developed by Brian Rotman, who analyzes the semiotics of the mathematical form “zero”
during the European late Renaissance (Rotman 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The movement-image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze uses Peircean categories to create a typology of cinematic imagery where firstness corresponds to affection-image,
secondness to action-image, and thirdness to relation-image. He also defines additional sign types of impulse-image between affect
and action and reflection-image between action and a relation involving a transformation reflecting another image with its own reference
(a chain of semiosis). This and later work by Deleuze explores the temporality of semiosis constituting motion pictures and their relation
to viewers.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
Uses Peirce’s concepts of “index” and “abductive” reasoning to analyze social relations objectified in material art forms. Gell excludes
more commonly studied iconic and symbolic dimensions of art to focus on how art objects become social participants as indices of
agency with causal agentive effects on interpreters. These insights on agents for interpretation would, in a more holistic uptake of
Peirce’s semiotic, be approached from the perspective of interpretants of material dicent signs.
Keane, Webb. 2005. Signs are not the garb of meaning: On the social analysis of material things. In Materiality: Politics,
history, and culture. Edited by Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
Starting from the haunting problem of persisting ancient dichotomies that infect thinking about materiality, Keane considers how the
semiological lineage running from Saussure to post-structuralism has reified a divide between things and ideas dematerializing the
nature of the sign. Focusing on the example of clothing, Keane draws on Peircean concepts of indexicality and iconicity, and semiotic
ideologies, to treat how things as signs have a practical and contingent character, with social and historical dimensions in continuous
relations to communication and thought.
Knappett, Carl. 2002. Photographs, skeumorphs and marionettes: Some thoughts on mind, agency and object. Journal of
Material Culture 7.1: 91–117.
Knappett argues that while “material culture” in archaeology and material culture studies is often treated as “symbolic,” in fact, such
objects are often, in Peircean terms, indexical and iconic. Knappett describes how different forms of material culture involve particular
icon-index composite profiles, which affect the meaning and agency of the object in contexts of production and consumption.
Manning, Paul. 2012. Semiotics of drink and drinking. New York: A & C Black.
Manning studies drinking as embodied semiotic in which the materiality of drinks are media of sociality. Drinks and brands are treated
as participants in interactions. Manning builds upon Peircean qualisigns, specifically in the bundling of qualisigns (Keane 2003, cited
under Language Ideology) and draws a parallel between their “potentialities” and the “affordances” of materials in science and
technology and perception studies to the end that he describes semiotic processes through which material qualities and specific drinks
become conventionally invested with social meaning.
Parmentier, Richard. 1997. The pragmatic semiotics of culture. Semiotica 116.1: 1–114.
Parmentier has published a series of lectures first describing the development of semiotic anthropology interpreted as a “fusion” of
insights of Peirce and Saussure in linguistic anthropology, then presents takes on semiotic cultural analysis, and finally develops a
semiotic analysis of style and material objects, artifacts, images, and the use of semiotic typology in cross-cultural comparison.
Rotman, Brian. 1987. Signifying nothing: The semiotics of zero. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
Historian, philosopher, and sociologist of science Brian Rotman analyzes the semiotics of the concept and inscription of the
mathematical form “zero” during the European late Renaissance, as a novel and paradoxical sign of an absence, which was adopted
and that transformed social domains as disparate as science, banking, and art.
Sonneson, Göran. 1989. Pictorial concepts: Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance to the interpretation of the
visual world. Lund, Sweden: Lund Univ. Press.
Focuses on pictorial signs in considering iconicity of perceptual experience, the indexical connections between visual signs and the
world, and the production of “surplus of meaning” relying on symbolic modalities of language and inference.
Archaeology
Things have effects on their worlds and those who interpret them. Peirce’s theory of signs is well suited as a framework for the
interpretation of material culture in the archaeological record because it incorporates the material qualities of the sign medium in the
theory of signification. Like Singer’s earlier attempt to show that the ontological differences between Saussurean and Peircean
conceptions of the sign are consequential for anthropology, archaeologists have come to argue that the Saussurean conception of sign
as the coding of a preexisting message, where meaning is encapsulated in the binary, and ideal, signifier-signified relation, is
inadequate for archaeological interpretation of material culture. Theorizing archaeology’s relation between objects and cognition,
Shelley 1996 applies Peirce’s theory of abduction as explanatory visual-based reasoning involved in positing hypotheses in
archaeological work. Preucel and Bauer 2001 argues that Saussurean approaches have hindered post-processual approaches to
archaeology that aim to focus on “symbolic, structural, or practice-oriented meanings” and advocates that rethinking archaeological
interpretation through a Peircean lens is transformative for the science. The call has been taken up productively in the work of Bauer
2002, Crossland 2014, Joyce 2008, Knappett 2005, Lele 2006, Preucel 2006, and Wallis 2013. Archaeologists have drawn on Peirce
directly and on interpretations; specifically important has been Keane 2003 (cited under Language Ideology) and Keane 2005 (cited
under Visual Anthropology and Material Culture) in which Keane draws on Peircean semiosis to argue for understanding signs through
the meaningful interpretations of things affected through historical process, and also through Gell 1998 (cited under Visual
Anthropology and Material Culture), which explicitly draws examples of the agentive effects of art and material culture. The interpretive
and inferential processes of meaning making with things is foregrounded in archaeological materials and methods where Peirce’s
semiotic—uniting sign, object, and interpretant—is seen as an opening that goes beyond reading signs or texts to interpreting
embodied and material cognition.
Bauer, Alexander A. 2002. Is what you see all you get? Recognizing meaning in archaeology. Journal of Social Archaeology
2.1: 37–52.
Argues for a discourse-centered approach to interpreting the meaning of symbolic and functional artifacts in noting that rather than draw
from Saussure-inspired linguistic models, archaeology should draw on approaches to meaning through practice, or language as social
action, as has been developed, in contrast, in American linguistic anthropology. Bauer uses Peirce to engage how archaeologists, as
knowing agents, take artifacts as signs to produce knowledge and how contexts mediate meanings.
Shelley, Cameron. 1996. Visual abductive reasoning in archaeology. Philosophy of Science 63.2: 278–301.
Shelley applies Peirce’s theory of abduction as explanatory reasoning involved in positing hypotheses, or new ideas, in scientific work.
Shelley contrasts a focus on visual modality with the application of linguistically centered semiotics in archaeology in demonstrating
visual abductions in archaeology based on shape or structure and the processes that can generate or use artifacts as a cognitive tool of
explanation for archaeologists. The author works to provide a framework for grounding understanding of how abduction as creative
process may be better understood.
Crossland, Zoë. 2014. Encounters with ancestors in highland Madagascar: Material signs and traces of the dead. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Crossland studies how ambiguous signs of the dead are interpreted by the living and how the presence of the dead in landscape and
material culture changed in the colonial history of Madagascar. The author bases analysis on a Peircean semeiotic framework for its
engagement of both material and immaterial dimensions and effects of sign relations, and for its perspective on sign processes where
the absent can become present and remain mutable through the iterability of multiple and varied interpretants.
Joyce, Rosemary A. 2008. Practice in and as deposition. In Memory work: Archaeologies of material practices. Edited by
Barbara J. Mills and William H. Walker, 25–39. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Joyce draws on Peirce’s semiosis to argue that the work of memory is continuous and interpretive as people engage with things to form
concepts that are linked with other people, other things, and related concepts through history and material practices.
Knappett, Carl. 2005. Thinking through material culture: An interdisciplinary perspective. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Press.
Knappett works to dissolve a pervasive Cartesian dualism in archaeology that has hindered the theory of material culture. Cognitivist
views of symbolism as mental operations assume causal sequence of thought-action-object. Rather, Knappett draws on Peirce to
theorize objects with the humans who produced and used them as connected through dynamic networks of agency and personhood,
cognition, and perception. Saussure’s sign is seen as inadequate for material culture studies and motivates a rethinking of
archaeological semiotics through the potentiality of Peircean semiosis.
Lele, Veerendra P. 2006. Material habits, identity, semeiotic. Journal of Social Archaeology 6.1: 48–70.
Lele builds on Peirce’s interest in overcoming the Cartesian division between mind and matter and claims that archaeology is well
positioned to forward this argument and benefit from the dissolution. The material world and its habitual effects are bound together.
Matter affects habit but matter also is habit. Lele identifies that the Peircean continuity between thought and semiosis is helpful for
archaeology’s aim to understand how persistent social identities emerge in relation to artifacts and are interpretable through material
habits.
Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological semiotics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Develops a theoretical account of material semiosis and the interpretation of material culture based on Peircean indexicality, synechism
(continuity of the universe increasing in complexity through semiosis), and pragmatism. Synthesizes approaches to material culture
(objectification, materialization, and the social life of things) and reviews semiotics in anthropology, including Saussurean structuralism,
Russian formalism, and Prague linguistics and their relations to structural, symbolic, and cognitive anthropologies and their
archaeological parallels in processual, post-processual, and cognitive archaeology.
Preucel, Robert W., and Alexander A. Bauer. 2001 Archaeological pragmatics. Norwegian Archaeological Review 34.2: 85–96.
Preucel asks to what extent semiotics is an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning, and, more specifically, what
kind of semiotics is appropriate for archaeological methods and questions. Argues that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches
that informed post-processual archaeology are incomplete and ill-fitted to archaeological inquiry and argues for an archaeological
pragmatics based in Peircean semiosis and informed by the anthropological pragmatics of Peircean linguistic and semiotic
anthropology.
Wallis, Neil J. 2013. The materiality of signs: Enchainment and animacy in woodland southeastern North American pottery.
American Antiquity 78.2: 207–226.
Explicitly contrasts with approaches to signs based on Saussure to draw on Peirce’s semiotic process to examine symbolism expressed
in pottery that relies on iconicity and indexicality for potential and particular social effects.
Biosemiotics
Peirce’s holistic and trans-species framing of semiotics has inspired biosemiotic approaches to anthropology, which are addressed in
the sections Signs of Life and Mind and the Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction.
Signs of Life and Mind
Biosemiotic approaches focus on how the interpretants of semiosis are involved in varied phenomena ranging from the phototropism of
plants leaning toward light and animal cells moving toward or away from objects to the evolutionary figure-ground iconicities of
camouflage and to animal cognition and communication, trans-species assemblages, consciousness, metacommunication, and human
language and culture as phylogenetically evolved and ontogenetically developed. For Peirce, semiotics is inherently connected with life
process. Peirce provides an architectonic framework for analyzing the origination of simple signs from the habits of biological,
ecological, and temporally recurrent processes. “Every symbol is a living thing . . . its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new
elements and throws off old ones” (Peirce 1932–1974, Vol. 2, pp. 222, cited under the Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for
Anthropology). This view itself grows out of Peirce’s notion of synechism “that all that exists is continuous” (Peirce 1932–1974, Vol. 1,
pp. 172, cited under the Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology) and which has been extended into arguments that the
semiotic-nonsemiotic divide is itself coterminous with that of life-nonlife, as developed in Hoffmeyer 2012, Deacon 2011, and other
works. Much of the foundation for contemporary biosemiotics was laid by Thomas Sebeok, whose primary research and service in
convening scholars in discussions is seen in Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1992, a volume that builds explicitly on Peircean semiotics.
Explicit connections between Peirce’s corpus and biosemiotics are also explored in Romanini and Fernández 2014 and Favareau 2010,
which gather many foundational papers in biosemiotics. Other fundamental influences engaging a transhuman semiotics is seen in
Jakob Von Uexküll’s umwelten as the diverse meaningful relations of life perspectival niches, and, importantly, in work of anthropologist
Gregory Bateson (Bateson 1979), whose own influence drawn from Peirce made use of Peirce’s idea of abduction as involved in
recognizing the “pattern that connects” biotic, cybernetic, and symbolic processes and which parallels Peirce’s synechism. A
biosemiotics informed by Peirce’s philosophical writings has become important in shifting the anthropological focus from human
perspectives to relations beyond humans and involving perspectives from and of other organisms and nature. Reno 2014 draws on a
Peircean biosemiotics to expand our understanding of waste products as signs of life, and Kohn 2013 works toward an anthropology
beyond the human.
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Dutton.
Bateson thinks through Peirce’s process of abduction—the fitting of observations through hypotheses, often analogy, to rules absent of
evidence, and which for humans can provide comfort and connection. Thought would be impossible without abduction, which involves a
“double description” of assumed reflections. Evolution and learning both fit the same regularities of thought, connected in ways of
knowing common to all life. Bateson’s ideas resonate with Peirce’s views on synechism as a dialogic mind not limited to brains inside
bodies.
Deacon, Terrence. 2011. Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: W. W. Norton.
Deacon argues that while processes of mind, like language, culture, and evolution, demonstrate emergent levels of causality distinct
from physical and chemical systems, there is also continuity with lower order systems. Universal types of emergent organizations are
homeodynamics (involving thermodynamics), morphodynamics of self-organization, and teleodynamics of self-reproducing life and
semiotic systems. Incomplete phenomena he terms ententional, and they include meaning, value, purpose, function, agency, reference,
and sentience exist in relationship to, or become constituted by, something nonintrinsic.
Favareau, Donald. 2010. Essential readings in biosemiotics: Anthology and commentary. New York: Springer.
Favareau assembles and introduces twenty-four essays on biosemiotics, sketching the many beginnings of biosemiotics in highlighting
the works of Jakob von Uexküll, Thure von Uexküll, Peirce, Morris, Lotman, Sebeok, Thom, Deely, Rothschild, Bateson, Deacon,
Hoffmeyer, Brier, Barbieri, and others.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2012. The natural history of intentionality: A biosemiotic approach. In The symbolic species evolved.
Edited by Theresa Achilhab, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon, 97–116. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
Hoffmeyer describes “semethic interaction” as a kind of co-evolution where habits can become signs and individuals of one species
acquire the capacity to interpret other species habits as signs. Discusses how causality in life systems differs from nonlife systems
because life involves interpretive processes organized according to semiotic dynamics. Semiotic freedom is the capacity of a cell,
organism, or species to act through interpretation of sensible surrounding or a biological state.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Kohn’s ethnography of the Runa of Amazonian Ecuador builds on the openness of Peircean semiosis, biosemiotic concepts of
emergence, and incomplete natural phenomena from the work of Terrence Deacon as well as the ontological and multispecies turns in
anthropology to critique social science that places humans at an exceptional center and to theorize the agency of objects and the
relational thinking of environments in ways that are not projecting “all too human” traits on ecologies.
Reno, Joshua O. 2014. Toward a new theory of waste: From “matter out of place” to signs of life. Theory, Culture, and Society
31.6: 3–27.
Reno argues that the Western conception of waste as “matter out of place” and distinctly human traces of culture are anthropocentric.
Reno turns to biosemiotics and cross-species scholarship to ask what theories of waste emerge when beginning with, for example,
trans-species encounters with scat, as material signs that allow for interpretation of life, as semi-biotic, spatio-temporal continuation.
This revisioning of waste through its material and semiotic conditions can be applied to the management of the mass waste of human
societies.
Romanini, Vinicius, and Eliseo Fernández. 2014. Peirce and biosemiotics: A guess at the riddle of life. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer.
An edited volume that explores semiosis as living process and the science of signs “as” living systems with each chapter starting from
an excerpt from Peirce’s corpus covering triadic relations, chance, continuity, indeterminacy, habit, causation, intelligibility, instinct,
abduction, living symbols, mindless signs, and proto-propositions.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, eds. 1992. Biosemiotics: The semiotic web. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
A volume that brings together papers in biosemiotics on topics that include the semiotics of nature, life, disease, diagnosis, evolution,
and ethnography.
The Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction
Peirce did not view human language or the linguistic sign as the basic fundamental sign-form, against the model of which other types of
signs could be evaluated and considered (unlike Saussure, who considered the linguistic system as the prototype of a semiology
placing humans at the center of a science of signs). Peirce provides an architectonic framework for analyzing the origination of simple
signs from the habits of biological, ecological, and temporally recurrent processes, and, thus, his semiotic has been central to
biosemiotic accounts of the evolution of language and interaction. Complex symbolic systems of language are explored in Deacon 1997
and in the volume The Symbolic Species Evolved (Schilhab, et al. 2012). Semiosis is continuous with life processes back to the dawn
of life, prompting scholars to transgress classical ontological divisions between the humanities and the sciences. The author of
Favareau 2008 works with theory from anthropology, conversation analysis, and linguistics in a biosemiotic approach to develop an
approach to language in use grounded in the temporality and sequencing of semiosis. Favareau 2008 and Sonneson 2007 make
important biosemiotic critiques of linguistics and cognitive science, which find a parallel and are elaborated in Goodwin 2017. Urban
2002 develops a linguistic anthropological theory of metacommunication into a theory of language origins, and Sicoli 2015 argues for
the phylogenetic relevance of voice registers as a metacommunication distributing topic and comment or predicate and argument
across semiotic modalities.
Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species. New York: W. W. Norton.

Synthesizing neuroanatomy, biological anthropology, cybernetics, and linguistics, Deacon argues for a theory of language evolution in
which symbols emerge from more biologically common icons and indices. Deacon’s emergence thinking brings together Bateson’s
notions of logical types with Peirce’s trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol. Rather than an innate language acquisition device, it is the
capacity for symbolic reference that distinguishes humans, developed in a dynamic coevolutionary path involving social relations,
brains, thought, and communication.
Deacon, Terrence. 2012. Beyond the symbolic species. In The symbolic species evolved. Edited by Theresa Schilhab, Frederik
Stjernfelt, and Terrence W. Deacon, 9–38. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
Deacon addresses prominent criticisms of and proposes future directions. He critiques simplistic notions of symbolic interpretation as
having hindered progress in the study of language, language evolution, neural processing, and language learning, and he describes the
indexical and iconic infrastructure for symbolic interpretation important for understanding universals of grammar. He looks toward a
better understanding of the role of relaxed selection and self-domestication in language evolution.
Favareau, Donald. 2008. Collapsing the wave function of meaning: The epistemological matrix of talk-in-interaction. In A
legacy for living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics. Edited by Jesper Hoffmeyer, 169–212. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
The author develops interaction analysis within a biosemiotic framework drawing from Peirce and Bateson and conversation analysis.
In this view, interacting agents provide each other with the grounds for an immediate connected next action in a chain of semiosis.
Favareau critiques generative linguistic theories of language as computation and their speakers as autonomous agents and argues that
the efficacy of language involves the co-participation of speakers creating contexts of relevance, constraint, and possibility that shape
their worlds.
Goodwin, Charles. 2017. Co-operative action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Building on insights in biosemiotics, conversation analysis, and multimodal interaction, Goodwin develops a framework for studying how
humans create action and shared knowledge “in concert” by reusing the artifacts of prior actions. The accumulation of culture and
language through cooperative action is demonstrated through video analysis in arguing for an intertwined and dialogic semiosis in
embodied interactions that distributes meaningful resources in the actions, tools, and landscapes of co-presence.
Schilhab, Theresa, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence W. Deacon. 2012. The symbolic species evolved. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer.
This volume compiles contributions from conferences on symbolic species that took place in 2006 and 2007 in reflecting on the impact
of Deacon’s influential book The Symbolic Species (Deacon 1997) and surveying research on language evolution and evolutionary
cognition in the decade that followed. Scholars engage Peirce’s semiotics in evolution and biology, biosemiotics, neuroscience, and
embodied cognition, and they take on themes of self-control, intentionality, cooperation, knowledge, and emergence.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2015. Voice registers. In The handbook of discourse analysis. 2d ed. Edited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E.
Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 105–126. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
A review of work on voice qualities in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Voice qualities that conventionally frame the content of
speech in relation to situations, stances, and participant roles are seen as living fossils of language form illustrated to have
metalinguistic functions important for both language ontogeny, as when configuring “one word” utterances as multisign emotional
predicates, and in language phylogeny, as neuro-laryngeal control would evolve through the global application of voices over utterances
as antecedent to the fine motor control that configures voicing at the sub-utterance scale of segments.
Sonneson, Göran. 2007. From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning: A study in phenomenological
semiotics. In Body, language, and mind. Edited by Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev, and Roslyn M. Frank, 85–127. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Sonneson critiques cognitive linguistics and biosemiotics for not distinguishing meaning in a general sense from sign functions, which
require differentiation. Argues “image schemas” are kinds of bodily meaning produced in a phenomenology of what Husserl called the
“lifeworld” involving the way things tend, which Sonneson relates to Peircean thirdness, abductions, and Gibsonian affordances and to
umwelten as described by von Uexküll.
Urban, Greg. 2002. Metasignaling and language origins. American Anthropologist 104.1: 233–246.
Urban theorizes metasignal-signal relations as involving iconicity, where signals are like other signals that are given new meaning
through distinctiveness, in which they are unlike the like signal. Argues that linguistic anthropological theorizing of metadiscourse and
metasignaling producing sociability has an importance for understanding the evolutionary origins of language. In this view, an instinctive
limbic vocal signal becomes the model for a neocortically managed metasignal where strategic vocal manipulations in hominins may be
precursors to cultural metasignals and language.
back to top
Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.

Sicoli Peirce and Anthropological Theory

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Sicoli Peirce and Anthropological Theory

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies 7/25/18, 11)42

Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological

LAST MODIFIED: 27 JUNE 2018

The Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology

Philosophical Appropriations into Anthropology

Dewey, John. 2004. Democracy and education. Mineola, NY: Dover.

From Symbolic to Semiotic Anthropology

Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. Semiotic anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:337–353.

The Semiotic Approach in Linguistic Anthropology

Deixis, Emergent Contexts, and Social Relations

Hanks, William F. 1999. Indexicality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 124–126.

Manning, H. Paul. 2001. On social deixis. Anthropological Linguistics 43.1: 54–100.

Mannheim, Bruce. 1999. Iconicity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 107–110.

Gesture and Embodied Communication

Language and Commodification

Visual Anthropology and Material Culture

Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological semiotics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Signs of Life and Mind

The Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction

Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species. New York: W. W. Norton.

Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi