Suchergebnisse

Doing style -- Brand and brandedness -- Brandedness and the production of surfeit -- Style and the threshold of English -- Bringing the distant voice close -- College heroes and film stars -- Status through the screen -- Media's entanglements

This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists' research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology on prototypic images to show how these advances (e.g., entextualization, performativity, perspective, and enregisterment) can be leveraged to theorize images more generally. In doing so, I argue against any hard distinction between language and image. I conclude by expanding out from a linguistic anthropology of images to what I call "a linguistic anthropology of …," a field characterized by an open-ended horizon of objects and modes of inquiry, all linked together as linguistic anthropology.

AbstractThrough its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality's implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, language in culture—has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality's ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality's ongoing utility to both.

AbstractThis article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the "Superstar" Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini's onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke reflection on indexicality—defined by Charles Sanders Peirce as a semiotic ground based on "real connection" or "existential relation," such as copresence, contiguity, or causality—for at issue with Rajini's fingers is precisely the question of his auratic being and presence. Instead of analyzing performative acts of presencing through appeal to the analytic of indexicality, then, what if we interrogate those ethnographic particularities of existence and presence that constitute the ground for indexical relations and effects as such? Such an inquiry would refuse to leave indexicality as a self-evident, pregiven analytic, but instead pose it as an open ethnographic question. Opening up the question of existence and presence, as I show, allows us to unearth other semiotic "grounds" of indexicality and representation beyond those that we all too often take for granted.

This article examines young men's concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of 'style'. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability, propriety and authority from which young men are excluded by virtue of their age. I show how the peer group is marked by a productive tension between transgression and self-differentiation, and reciprocity, intimacy and peer pressure. The article then turns to two kinds of source material for young men's performances of status: English-Tamil slang and counterfeit global brands. I show how the tension between, and negotiation of, the mandates to status-raise and status-level in the peer group transform and revalourise these signs of status. The article concludes by arguing that while from afar, such youth practice seems to be negotiating globalisation, modernity and tradition, a close analysis of peer-group dynamics shows that youth practice is more centrally concerned with peer-group status negotiations.

AbstractThis essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this has consequences for their material form and their pragmatics. Finally, the essay turns to the recalcitrance of events of semiosis to being cited, in particular, to taboo speech. Taboo speech presents a case of speech that seemingly cannot be bracketed, where performative effect necessarily and always attains. As such cases show, citation brackets and suspends, but perhaps never totally.

ABSTRACT This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand types, and a brand ontology. Such calibration is achieved through moments of citing brand type and brand ontology. The article then discusses three forms of brand citationality that exceed the brand by situating themselves in, and exploiting, these gaps: brand counterfeits, "remixes," and simulations. The article concludes by discussing the relation between citationality and performativity, arguing that the performativity of brand turns on the (meta‐)semiotics of citationality and the excesses it continually generates.

This article investigates the circulation and production of branded apparel consumed by lower and lower-middle class young men in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on garments which exceed the authorized brand: export surplus, duplicates, hybridized branded forms, and fictive branded forms. I argue that the circulation and production of such brand surfeits is governed by the (dis)articulation of global brand logics and local aesthetics of brandedness. The interlinkages between this aesthetics and the logics of export-oriented and local ("counterfeit") production result in the bracketing of brand image and identity, even as particular aspects of the brand are reproduced. The article concludes by critically interrogating the analytics "brand" and "counterfeit" as naturalizations of particular frames of commodity intelligibility. I argue that the coherence of commodity classifications like brand and brandedness is contingent upon the regular regimenting of excesses of brand materiality and intelligibility across moments of production, circulation, and consumption.

Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value—be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise—have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We suggest that one way to understand the question of value is through in-depth ethnographic analysis of 'social value projects': reflexive and purposive attempts by social actors to produce, negotiate, transform, maintain and sometimes abjure various types of value. We suggest that such value projects can be ethnographically approached through the interactional events that comprise them and that these, in turn, require attention to the emergent and contingent nature of value, its multiplicities and excesses and the ways in which value is articulated to, and through, the performing and ratifying of social identities.

"Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples - from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture"--

Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.