Search

The workings of “message”—a coherent, brand-like biographical chronotope—as it has long-circulated in the specifically American system of fifty-state presidential electoral politics helps to explain the outcome of the 2016 vote. The agōn of positive and negative messaging about the respective candidates, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, seems to have worked, at the regional margins of an otherwise remarkably stable system, to the ultimate disadvantage of the former and the ultimate advantage of the latter.

A postscript to the HAU (Volume 6.3) Lectures section on "Teleologies of Structuralism," edited by Alejandro I. Paz.

Comment on Palmie, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Where can we find “culture” in relation to humans’ experience of it in by-degrees normatively appropriate and socially effective semiotic interactions? By analyzing several examples of such semiotic material, we can develop the idea that “culture” is a socio-historically contingent wave phenomenon immanent in social practice dimensionalized by semiotic characteristics I here term signification—circulation—emanation.

Events of political communication define issues and create spaces of action that position people with respect to them. How? Political talk is not effective in these ways just because it describes the world--as it is or as it might be. In various ways, effective talk in political events forms a diagrammatic microcosm of its targeted field of action, linking events of political process in which it thrives with varying degrees of compelling effectiveness. Political talk of the "factional" politics of Indo-Fijians draws on principles we can see--and discerning participants can hear!--as well in our own agonistic electoral politics of recognition.

Events of language use mediate human sociality. Such semiotic occasions develop, sustain, or transform at least part—some have argued the greater part—of people's conceptualizations of their universe. Reserving the term cultural concepts for such sociocentric aspects of human cognition, this article sketches linguistic anthropology's methods for discovering truly cultural conceptualizations, illustrated at the polar extremes of ritual efficacy (Christianity's Eucharistic liturgy) and of everyday conversational language games. Knowledge schemata structuring cultural concepts, here termed ‐onomic knowledge, turn out to be “in play” in interaction, made relevant to it as interactants use verbal and perilinguistic signs in the work of aligning as relationally identifiable kinds of persons. In interactional experience, ‐onomic knowledge anchoring cultural concepts is always implicit and is even sometimes part of largely abstract cultural patterns only indirectly experienceable by people such as the cultural “e...

1.1. In our historical work, we must be ever aware that reconstructing chunks of a protolanguage-be they phonemes, lexemes, or whatever-and tracing the grammatical development of attested daughter forms-be there one or many-are two necessary aspects of the same method of proof. On the one hand, we can justify a reconstruction only to the extent that it is a necessary starting point for historical development into some attested formation. On the other hand, several lines of historical reasoning from attested formations must predict and determine a specific reconstructed form. Kurylowicz, we are told, summed up this fact about doing etymologies by the formula, "Every com