In Signs of Difference, Gal & Irvine provide a systematic and abundantly illustrated guide to the semiotic basis of social, including language, ideologies, expressed in ways indexing (pointing to) the positions from which they originate and rhematizing (investing with qualities) the values they contrast. The key points are laid out in detail in the introduction. Ideologies operate as socially and historically particular visions of the world, mediated through sign relations. Ideologies are always partial: incomplete and specific to actors’ perspectives. The specificity and partiality of ideologies are built on differentiations, established and maintained as regimes of value through semiotic work, which operate in and organize everyday life. Whether or not they are consciously articulated (and some are not), they signify the distribution of social power. As the processes by which actors make social life meaningful, they are important objects of ethnographic investigation. Signs, the stuff of semiosis, involve recognition (anything can be a sign so long as people recognize it as such) and contrast (a sign of X versus what X is not). Drawing on Peircean principles of signification through which interpretations unfold into other interpretations (so that semiotic processes are never necessarily finished or fixed) in ways that apply equally to linguistic and non-linguistic signs, the authors track social actors as they take anything available as a sign along a (not-so-Peircean) social path of continually constructing comparisons taking place in succeeding conjectures. In any conjecture, contrasting qualities of indexes may be taken as contrasting depictions (rhematization) organized by schemas of qualitative contrast (axes of differentiation) repeatedly projecting contrasting qualities onto different levels of organization (fractal recursivity), and selectively rendering invisible elements that do not fit the schema (erasure), all ‘aspects of one semiotic process of differentiation’ (p. 21, and readers will recognize here concepts that the authors have long been developing). The application of these analytic strategies starts by noting informants’ gazes or uptakes radiating from sites of ideological work, generally linking to other such sites.
In Part 1, ‘Ethnography’, each author provides an ethnographic overview of language practices and ideologies in which processes of differentiation are viewed from local perspectives. In chapter 1, Irvine shows how local Wolof (Senegal) ideologies typify gewel (griot) speech as loud, rapid, and verbose, and géer (noble) speech as terse, quiet, and plain (most typified in the interdependent relation of praise-singer and noble patron), thus creating a binary between the most markedly distinct manifestations of those styles, despite the more gradient variation produced in discourse involving actual gewel and géer speakers. The opposition of qualities underlying this ideological contrast recurs with considerable moral weight throughout Wolof society and characterizes talk across and within categories of rank. Contrasts among speakers within categories of rank disappear across categories. In chapter 2, Gal examines binary distinctions in language and social type, made by descendants of German-speaking settlers in Hungary, about types of German spoken among them. Here the types are the ‘refined’ speech of artisans and the ‘genuine’ speech of farmers, registers signifying contrasting social personae decades after any actual widespread existence of such artisans and farmers. Still, these personae remain salient as classifications of membership and participation in local social worlds, the binary extending to an imagined parallel distribution of speech forms which can also be projected onto individuals within groups. For both the Wolof and the Hungarian German speakers, speech forms are interpreted as personal, image-invoking qualities in a process of rhematization; in both instances, contrasts involve ranking; in both cases, contrasts might be projected across or within groups.
The chapters in Part 2, ‘Semiotics’, take a more detailed look at the semiotics of differentiation. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce and Nelson Goodman, and reminding us that signs are always socially located, chapter 3 details the sign processes that give interpretive shape to ethnographic materials, making the social order meaningful to those who live it, and who perceive signs in particular times and places. Their interpretive processes start with situated observations and conjectures leading to other conjectures about what is connected to what, what has qualities of what (indexicality and iconicity, routinely intertwined)—each conjecture potentially becoming a new sign in chains of conjecture. This ultimately leads to typifications (conventions, generalizations) that metasemiotically organize routine experience embodying abstract qualities. Chapter 4 shows these processes at work in the construction of comparison and differentiation. Drawing from the writings of Anne Royale, an early nineteenth-century US traveler and writer, the authors show her work organized by an axis of differentiation systematically composed of qualitative contrasts typifying East versus West, a contrast which erases distracting variation. This axis makes it possible to rhematize perceptions of indexicality, to cast perceived connections as also resemblances (lands seen as belonging to Western countryside also seen as big and rich relative to Eastern lands). Such contrasting qualia can be projected onto any sign (especially speech and social persona), and can also be projected fractally, as in West/East recurring as American/European, backed up by narratives. Chapter 5 addresses shifts in the axis of differentiation guiding the conjectural chain that does the ideological work, as can be seen in pre- and post-revolutionary shifts and variations in the axis framing the meaning of +/-American or +/-Yankee or North/South. Such variation is in part motivated by what is marked or unmarked for those making the comparisons, so that all systems of differentiation carry the seed of their own change. Differentiation can be complicated by fractal pivoting (taking a marked perspective, like the very American John Adams appreciating European elegance and wanting to see more of it in America) which in turn may be blocked by powerfully typifying (and erasing) social forces.
The chapters in Part 3, ‘Sites’, describe the siting of ideological work. In chapter 6, we see how semiotic activity makes a site. Sites do not pre-exist nor are they inherently bounded, but they are semiotically centered, each opening onto other semiotically relevant sites. How sited ideologies are constructed depends on how the gazes of those doing the constructing are framed, as the authors show with a basic example about conjectures concerning how people treat windows in academic office doors. Ideological work may or may not be packaged as explicit statements; language ideologies may or may not be metapragmatically available. Investigators must be aware of what is unspoken or erased, and why. In particular, ideologies are not inherent in forms, as the discussion of familiar/formal pronouns illustrates. Chapter 7 takes up the way sites grow rhizomatically complex, illustrated by changes in civic slogans on Baltimore bus benches over a couple of decades leading to branching conjectures along new sites about civic authorities’ views of the city and its people, the initial site opening into multiple differentiations. As sites expand, each is linked by metamoves, interpretive responses to what made sense in prior sites, based on idealized (and sometimes institutionally regimented) explanatory models. Chapter 8 takes up scaling among sites: what to make of increasing or relative size, or types of inclusion. Is it perspectival, is something seen as a distinct thing or indicator of a larger type, or of the differentiations within differentiations of fractal recursivity; is it aperspectival, ideologically objective, like standard measures, often institutionally or state enforced; whose interests do scaling projects represent?
In Part 4, ‘Pasts’, chapter 9 observes these semiotic principles in nineteenth-century philological work, with its controversies over descent, classification, purity, boundaries, linguistic evidence—and its underlying cultural politics. For example, early work on African and Finno-Ugric languages had erased complex language practices to line up lexical/grammatical elements, people, and territory in ways that fit nineteenth-century hierarchic typifications. Later, marginalized philologists Robert Cust and Pál Hunfalvy ‘scaled up’ classificatory treatments of these languages to fit major accepted schema of language descent while representing what they saw as important (and often socially unpopular) aspects of these languages and their histories.
Signs of Difference is the result of collaborative work that has, for a quarter century, strongly influenced scholarship in linguistic and semiotic anthropology, especially among those entering the field. Synthesized in this volume, it provides a deeply insightful and well-equipped set of theoretical resources, organized in a carefully assembled guide to tracking and analyzing how people construct and ideologize systems of value. With each chapter building on the previous and illustrated by vignettes from historical sources and contemporary social sites and news, the book walks the reader through the semiotic experience of everyday life, making it possible to see meaning-making as it happens, a quality that makes it particularly valuable for students. It is not only an academic resource. It illustrates, in the world we live in, the processes sustaining the dangerous semiotics of language, race, gender, class, and nation that increasingly entrench power and make fractal pivoting more and more difficult.
