Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by translating the familiar concepts of “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “sustainable” into something far more inchoate: feelings. They do so through their supersaturation with signs of greenness in a design strategy we label “semiotic overdetermination.” Selling “green” as a feeling, eco-city renderings capitalize on present-day anxieties over urban decay and commodify “the ecological” as a rich resource of pleasurable qualitative experiences. The result, we contend, is to reinforce a neoliberal mode of subjectivity that equates consumption with somatics and reduces climate responsibility to individual consumer decisions.

During World War II, a prolific Kiowa composer named Lewis Toyebo initiated a new choreo-musical genre called War Mother songs for the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 as a means of encouragement while their sons deployed overseas. This article examines how these songs simultaneously evoke pre-reservation and post-reservation chronotopes of Kiowa martial motherhood. Through ethnographic research with Kiowa Elders, singers, War Mothers, and descendants of Kiowa composers, I analyze how War Mother songs express these chronotopes through musical (War Journey drumbeat), functional (preparing warriors for deployment and honoring returning veterans), and linguistic means (blending “Old Kiowa” and “Modern Kiowa”). Analysis of these chronotopes reveals how Kiowas creatively responded to settler colonialism to maintain gendered roles and personhoods that were important to their cultural identity. This article provides an ethnomusicological perspective on how chronotopes of gender are expressed through dynamic forms of music and dance.

The functioning of the liberal order relies on the semiotic indeterminacy of its key concepts—they need to be broad enough to encompass multiple, and at times conflicting articulations—but the denotational open-endedness of these concepts also renders them particularly useful for efforts to unsettle liberal political projects. In Brazil, state institutions’ secularist commitments to retaining “religion” and its derivates as denotationally indeterminant both constrain efforts to combat Evangelical Christian “religious intolerance” against African origin religious traditions and enable Evangelical Christian graftings of the discourse of “religious intolerance” onto claims that frame the efforts to curb their attacks on religious and sexual minorities as a form of religious persecution. These effects are, however, rendered invisible by the state emphasis on the denotational open-endedness of “religious intolerance,” which obscures the different forms of enregisterment that organize the entextualization of the term in religious activist and government spaces in Brazil.

This article examines some characteristics and functions of multiplex tactics in small storytelling. It uses a case-study based on three long informal interviews with a participant from the Gauteng, South Africa. Analysis and discussion raise questions of conversational resources and involvement, and thereby of a critical understanding of creativity and cooperation in interactional doing being. Multiplex tactics produce effects on several levels of interactional and discursive organisation simultaneously: signalling participative and narrative framing, footing and stance, whilst also effecting story entry and exit, or providing coherence between storied elements, for example. Multiplexity is a resource for accessing intersubjective meaning-making and narrative co-construction. Furthermore, it contributes to the vast body of work on indexicality and discourse marking. The article focuses on the creative, affective, and evolutive nature of involvement in interactional work.

Some people have become disenchanted with modern bureaucratic forms and modern governments, and in their attempts to imagine an alternative, have joined the sovereign citizen counterpublic, a right-leaning movement comprised of loosely affiliated groups rejecting the validity of national laws that are present in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These groups focus their energies on legal systems as they resist modern institutions and have developed a shared semiotic ideology about how legal language works and how legal texts should be interpreted. This semiotic ideology hinges upon a particular form of semiotic determinacy; our article unpacks its implications. Sovereign citizens’ ideology is antithetical to how institutionally entrenched actors understand the interplay of semiotic determinacy and indeterminacy in legal contexts, which leads their logics and historical narratives to resonate with conspiracy theories. We conclude by exploring how this counterpublic re-configures older strands of Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation logics as resistance in this neoliberal moment.

This article analyzes the interconnected translation processes that led the Paris city council to conceptualize, address, and act upon “homelessness” through counting. By translation, we mean a range of semiotic processes that connect social worlds, their objects, practices, genres, and bodies of expertise. These are usually imagined as separate: For example, auditing and volunteering, science and government, charity and policing, poverty and social hygiene. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in Paris, France, between January and August 2023, during two editions of the Nuit de la Solidarité [Night of Solidarity], a large-scale effort by the city council, in collaboration with numerous volunteers, to count homeless people in Paris. Linking translation scholarship with academic work on quantification and liberal governmentality, we demonstrate that the semiotic process of translation is deeply interconnected with the political work performed by numbers and counting techniques, imbuing them with meaning and ensuring their capacity to exert power. Translation, we show, serves not only to link governance techniques across geopolitical borders but also to integrate various political projects and normalize and naturalize the structural inequalities that define cities like Paris.

It is well-known that metapragmatic verbs exhibit leakage between representations of speech, thought and action, but details have remained opaque. The first half of this paper presents an account of the processes through which they do so. The second half describes the consequences of the existence of these processes (in speech) for social life (in general) by giving an account of how genres of “mentalese” are crafted from locutions involving such verbs and derived nominals, and of how these genres, in turn, are used to manufacture social constructs of various kinds. The discussion is organized around the manner in which four influential authors (Locke, Hume, Gibson, and Durkheim) crafted their own constructs through forms of mentalese. The overall goal is to develop tools for the analysis of all genres of mentalese, and of all social constructs fabricated through it, wherever we may find them.

The process by which “common knowledge” is created via chains of communicative activities is now well understood, especially due to the work of linguistic anthropologists. This paper draws upon this work to examine how “common knowledge” about the causes of tidal flooding in Kendal Regency is created in communiques’ published on Kendal’s municipal government website over a period of seven years. We argue that there are five particular processes at play in the creation of “common knowledge” about flooding in general and tidal flooding in particular as a “natural disaster” in this social domain. We end by pondering why dire predictions about the impact of future tidal flooding events on hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have not yet produced any sustainable solutions within different levels of the Indonesian government.

This article presents the theoretical concept of language de-socialization, which refers to processes through which the declining linguistic and interactive capacities of an individual, as well as the loss of personhood as defined in a particular cultural setting, are managed in and through language. The article discusses de-socialization as an extension of a theoretical forebear, language socialization, which has been defined as “how young children and others become communicatively and culturally competent within their homes, educational institutions, and other discourse communities, both local and transnational, and how language (in its many varieties and modes) mediates that process”. However, language de-socialization is not simply the inverse of language socialization, because understanding language at the end of life requires expanded sensitivity to a range of topics that are not usually treated in linguistics, such as assumptions about abledness and impairment that underpin determinations of linguistic and communicative competence.

This article draws upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” to examine how the reproductions of religious images in domestic settings are (re)infused with spiritual power. Based on an ethnographic study of Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, I argue that the “aura” of these paintings emerges through semiotic management that tightens a preexisting link, stemming from the minority status of Copts, between house and church. To this end, I discuss how patrons and artists reshape, modify, and enhance both the subject-matter of these reproductions as well as certain formal properties like surfaces and frames. This semiotic labor clarifies a privileged zone of interaction I refer to as “the near-sacred,” which can be compared to Benjamin’s understanding of the conceptual proximity of art to ritual. I conclude by proposing the near-sacred as a site for studying how circulating religious signs (re)acquire a spiritual valence at the periphery of institutional religious practice.

This essay explores the Danish concept of hygge, commonly glossed as “coziness,” as a structure of feeling attuned to particular qualities of light. It draws from an ethnographic study of Copenhagen Municipality’s Climate Plan to build the world’s first carbon-neutral capital. Homing in on one of the Climate Plan’s inaugural initiatives—the LED (light-emitting diode) conversion of street lighting—it tracks how ambient intensities of hygge are swept up with both changing lightscapes and changing national demographics. Via a semiotics of social difference, I examine how changing qualities of artificial light are experienced as eroding culturally configured sensory comforts, and how this erosion is grafted onto a fear of the city’s potentially diminishing “Danishness.” This semiotic process is evidenced in the lamination of racialized anxieties about “non-Western immigrants” onto discomforts derived from energy-efficient lighting technologies, and the apparent intrusion of both into habit worlds of hygge. In Copenhagen, I show how a semiotic account of atmosphere illuminates the fault lines of the Danish racial imagination.

Replika, an artificial intelligence (AI) companion, is part of a growing number of social chatbots. This paper examines the multimodal semiotic signs influencing how users perceive realness in their chatbots. I argue that what users describe as real/alive in relation to the bots refers to an iconization of humanness, following Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal on the semiotic process of “iconization.” Users reflect and share their experiences of voicing contrasts of Replika in digital spaces that function primarily for sociability. I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia” as a framework for thinking about the multiplicity of voices implicit in the conversational exchanges with the chatbots and among users in reflexive texts. I look at the relationships with the chatbots through frames of language ideologies, historical discourse, and visuality.