The articles in this issue examine activity routines in which sensory experiences form the basis of both practical and social coordination. In the ethnographic phenomena that the authors examine, successful coordination between actors almost always requires engagement across multiple senses and practices of sensory expertise, as well as between discursive and non-discursive signs. It is in this spirit that we offer the organizing concept of synesthetic encounters. We advocate for an ethnographic approach to language and synesthetic encounters that foregrounds: (1) a situated practice analysis of the senses, (2) attention to the continuum between improvisation and conventionalization in the use of lexicons for sensory calibration, and (3) the metapragmatic regimentation of sensory experience in specific contexts toward specific ends.

Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” has evolved from a regional phenomenon into a global force shaping media, consumption, and international perceptions of South Korea. As Korean cultural products circulate worldwide, they operate as instruments of soft power while being reinterpreted through local histories of race, gender, class, and nation. Moving beyond media and cultural studies approaches, this special issue foregrounds language and semiotics as central to processes of circulation, advancing a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspective on how Korean popular culture is localized, resemiotized, and negotiated across transnational digital networks. The contributions examine how mediatized discourse and diverse engagements with Korean genres shape the global circulation of Korean popular culture across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries. Rather than treating hallyu as a homogenous export, the issue conceptualizes it as an ongoing set of projects in which various actors negotiate authenticity, modernity, and belonging, underscoring how language mediates global cultural flows.

This special issue pursues a social semiotic study of improvisation. The approach considers the phenomenon both as a constitutive dimension of action and as a socially recognizable achievement. Contributions share a common focus on interaction, which is analyzed across multiple modalities including virtual reality, heavy machinery, paint and canvas, rock, theater, war, and the ethical relation between self and other.

This paper examines virtual reality gaming as a form of embodied interaction at the intersection of digital mediation, improvisation, and agency. In VR environments, players act through avatars, and their actions are shaped in real time by shifting relations among embodiment, disembodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The analysis brings together Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s work on cooperation and multimodal interaction, and Alessandro Duranti’s account of improvisation. Focusing on Population: One and Richie’s Plank Experience, I argue that improvisation emerges through the unstable relation between the biophysical body and the digital body. Glitches, misalignments, and other breakdowns create moments in which participants must adjust ongoing action spontaneously, thereby destabilizing established physical and linguistic categories. These moments reveal a continuing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through which bodies, joint action, and agency are continuously reconfigured.

What if linguistic anthropological studies of sensory evaluation began not with wine connoisseurship but with scat identification? Focusing on Sino-Tibetan community-science collaborations on the Tibetan Plateau, this paper examines wildlife scat—a crucial indicator for Indigenous experts and conservation biologists. In everyday life, Tibetans and Han Chinese rarely agree on shit; yet, collaborative scat identification sustains a scientific chronotope that suspends macro-level ethnonational frictions. Analyzing an English-language scatological manual alongside a Mandarin-Amdo Tibetan interactional transcript, I investigate the specialized linguistic repertoire used to calibrate scat observation. By examining how speakers simultaneously describe perception (“sensation”) and judge species origin (“ontology”), I argue that adjectival predicates function as dynamic interactional operators—a phenomenon I term adjectival deixis. Ultimately, this paper delineates two core functions of adjectival deixis: chronotope projection and referent configuration. In doing so, it reveals how referential practice drives intersubjective sensory calibration and rapport-making, co-constituting language-use and materiality.

In this article, we investigate the semiotic practices of Filipino K-pop fans (KpopStans) who supported the 2022 presidential bid of former Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo. Through digital ethnography, we analyze the ways in which fans entextualized and resemiotized signifiers of K-pop (e.g., lyrics, imagery, fancams) to create hybrid political messages that translated familiar fandom aesthetics into forms of electoral participation. We argue these practices constitute “civic stanning”—enactments of fan-based citizenship that leverage the cultural resonance of K-pop to build solidarities around Robredo, exercise political agency, promote values of conviviality and progress, and navigate the restrictive political climate of the Philippines. The study highlights the role of popular culture in mediating transnational flows and shaping emergent modes of political activism.

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I argue, however, that the dictionary’s techniques of linguistic regimentation continue to represent the MESK, even when expressing Korean fandom, as fundamentally aligned with the Koreanist.

Violinists rely on violin crafters, or luthiers, to adjust their instruments’ acoustics. To do so, luthiers not only alter violins’ material forms but also talk with violinists about perceived and desired timbres—qualities of sound that lack standards of measure and are notoriously difficult to describe. This paper undertakes a linguistic anthropological analysis of a violin adjustment session in the Northeastern United States, showing that despite such difficulties, luthiers communicate successfully with violinists about timbre through situated practice. While luthiers sometimes use standard, enregistered cross-modal or synesthetic metaphors for timbre that can be analyzed in terms of lexical semantics, I emphasize that they also improvise on a wider repertoire of emergent and embodied semiotic strategies. By listening beyond the lexical and the enregistered, this paper synthesizes an interdisciplinary approach for research on communication about timbre, sound, and the senses.

In this study, we build on our previous work that examines the creative dancemaking collaboration between choreographers and arborist-dancers as they work together in rehearsals to create a performance featuring the workaday skillfulness of urban foresters. They face unique challenges and contingencies because to step into each other’s professional worlds requires a provisionally shared way of thinking that cuts across their diverse experiences; therefore, the two groups create external representations with their bodies (i.e., marking) to bridge epistemic divides. We extend our previous analysis of this microethnographic context—analyzing a routine where an arborist drives a loader truck to distribute mulch—by further demonstrating the semiotic purchase of Charles Goodwin’s interactional semiotics. Goodwin’s notion of “situated improvisation” is especially helpful for making sense of the embodied diagrams that emerge in marking together—a jointly crafted conceptual world makes perceptual experiences of both groups readable and deployable for dance creation.

This paper explores the emergence of the bolo-player as a robust icon of personhood (Carr (2010)) in urban jiujitsu training rooms between China and the United States. I trace how this figure emerges as a kinesically enregistered stereotype (cf. Agha (2007)and Cohen (2021)) within a contrapuntal ecology of motion texts, from its mass-mediated origo: the berimbolo. Here, the berimbolo, or “scramble” in Brazilian Portuguese slang, describes a combination of movements in jiujitsu that—over a few generations—has mutated from an unintelligible zone of action leading to an inexplicable position of dominance for the player executing it; to a now highly choreographed repertoire of movements that have come to stand for an entire synesthetic ethics and personhood of bolo-ness.

A particular fashion and lifestyle aesthetic called kankokuppo (Koreaish) has gained popularity among young Japanese women in the early 2020s, who increasingly admire what they perceive to embody the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of South Korea. This article examines the semiotic rendering of a sensuous perception of Korea identified as “Koreaish” through aesthetically embodied practices and mediatized discourses. The analysis reveals the centrality of what I call a “soft unity”: softness that arises from ambiguated boundaries, taken up across discrete objects, practices, and social value regimes. Alongside growing calls to change Japanese society from a divisive to a borderless one, this softness is valorized as the quality of idealized sociality despite its association with highly normative femininity. The emergent “Koreaish” is emblematic of the postfeminist reformulation of the feminine ideal in neoliberal Japan, which manifests as a nexus of the demanifestation of differences and the reversion to conservative feminine values.

This article explores the semiotic and embodied dynamics of improvisation by focusing on tactile interaction, risk, and the temporal conditions under which meaning must emerge. Drawing on ethnographic examples from competitive and free solo rock climbing, as well as greeting practices among Swahili women in Lamu (Kenya) and Toronto (Canada), I explore how improvisation operates not as a deviation from routinized behavior, but as a generative force. Through an examination of these disparate tactile encounters, I argue that under high-stakes temporal pressure, improvisation becomes a form of semiotic labor: an interpretive responsiveness to emergent signs that are not only felt in the moment but are also anticipated and evaluated against embodied memory. Rock surfaces and handshakes are treated as communicative environments that elicit the anticipation of qualia and require semiotic attunement when such anticipation fails. In such moments, I argue, improvisation does not simply fill a gap but constitutes a recalibration of meaning through the body.

In Mumbai, the live slaughter of meat by Muslim butchers is an intergenerational caste practice and a source of livelihood and labour, supplying ritually slaughtered halal meat for Muslims, and fresh quality meat for others in the city. Yet in the neoliberal Hindu Nationalist imagination, the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the “world-class” Hindu city. Muslim butchers are further subject to an intra-Muslim caste politics of disdain, in which their contact with blood is thought to render them impure (na-pak) and untrustworthy. At butcher stores and meat markets, economic development, urban sanitation, and ritual ideologies recruit the senses into a politics of disgust and disdain. These affects are reflexively embodied in ways that reveal the intimate relation between individualising forms of Islamic piety, Muslim infrastructural marginalisation, and the making of a sanitised neoliberal Hindu city.

An old improvisational semiotic practice is gesturing by hand. Hand gestures have often been regarded as spontaneous embodiments of psychic processes, and also as a primal and universal mode of human expression. The view not only characterizes some psychological and lay theories, but also schools of modern art, most explicitly Abstract Expressionism. This article is a study of hand gestures by an art historian discussing two Abstract Expressionist painters. It shows how an ideology of gestures and brushstrokes as spontaneous emotion-driven expressions is articulated by the expert’s hand gestures, but also shown to be a calculated effect of the images, a figuration. Following the analysis of the videotaped episode, the construal of gesture as primal and emotional is shown to match conservative ideologies seeking to suppress the alleged wildness of gesture. A review of the art-historian’s own improvisational, kinesthesia-driven gesture practices concludes the article.

As Korean cultural genres circulate globally, they acquire local meanings that may travel back to Korea, generating additional connotations. Drawing upon semiotic theory from linguistic anthropology, this article examines the resemiotization of morpheme “K-”, tracing how it detached from a few lexical items to become a productive morpheme and index of Koreanness in global cultural production. K-’s entextualized iterations take on new meanings across contexts, disrupting straightforward notions of transnational circulation. Global circulation in turn shapes domestic usage, reflecting the iterative relationship between consumers and Korean industry. While terms like K-drama and K-beauty remain relatively stable, newer ones like K-culture and K-wave are more open to negotiation. Ethnographically following K- across online and offline spaces, this study argues the morpheme emerges as a domestic index of outward-facing possibility—a locally global orientation—underscoring language’s pivotal role in shaping and advancing Korea’s national brand.

This paper presents the theory of improvisational emergence, an account of how social phenomena emerge from improvisational processes. I build outward from the small-group improvisational encounter to provide an account of the relationship between individuals, groups, and societies. Social entities, including groups and societies, emerge from people engaged in group improvisation. But even though social entities emerge from individuals in interaction, their study cannot be reduced to the study of individuals, because once having emerged, social entities have causal power over individuals. The theory of improvisational emergence addresses the structure-agency relationship and the micro-macro debate in sociological theory. It moves beyond practice and structuration theories in positing an ontological separation between people and society. Improvisational emergence allows us to explain the relationship between the improvisational creativity of each participating individual and the collective improvisationality of the group. A complete understanding of social phenomena, including social structures, norms, and cultures, must be grounded in the theoretical and empirical study of creative improvisation.

The papers in this special issue, “Localizing Hallyu: The Semiotics of the Korean Wave in Media and Discourse,” observe how Korea-sourced popular semiotic forms recombine anew, and are recontextualized afar, through various pathways of mediatization. The authors analyze commodified semiosis in an era of late interdiscursivity. Under the conditions of late interdiscursivity, the relationship between intertextuality and interdiscursivity is profoundly stretched: tight but simplified intertextuality intersects loose but elaborate interdiscursivity. The ubiquitous presence of Korean cultural forms around the world signals both the continuity of South Korea’s export-oriented economic trajectory, as well as its adaptation to and well-timed entry point into late interdiscursivity’s cultural-industrial conditions.

Texts are defined by their decontextualizability, including decontextualization from the sensory experience of their transmission. Nevertheless, text, like all of language, is always encountered in some material form. This paper explores how readers make use of distinct text modalities to coordinate individual reading activities into a collective experience of textual unity. I present a semiotic analysis of meetings of a Taipei-based reading group alongside explicit metapragmatic talk from readers on the affordances of different text formats, such as audiobooks, e-books, and print. I show how readers leverage differences and similarities between the same text in different formats to achieve degrees of alignment, coherence, and coordination, even in the absence of agreement on truth-conditional propositional content. I argue that the ability of text to serve as an anchor for social life depends upon interactional practices that alternately foreground and background the sensory dimensions of acts of reading.

This essay considers sign-processes in their open-endedness. The concern is specifically the non-purposiveness of semiosis for what it might intimate about the provisional nature of forms and the possibility of a radical openness to self-transformation. Sikh philosophy (gurmat), semiotics, and deconstruction here offer a heterogeneous problem-space for considering the anteriority of non-purposiveness in cosmic play (līlā) and equipoise (sahaj). The study first finds a recurrent commitment to the non-purposiveness of play across diverse approaches in metaphysics, modern aesthetic theory, and the more recent so-called ludic turn, developing from this thread a constructive treatment of cosmic play consisting of latitude, excess, indeterminacy, generativity, and expenditure, or endless textural differentiation. This essay then elaborates an account of equipoise in practical involvement whose pursuit of action is alive to that which is imperceptible amidst this endless textural differentiation, developing an account of action that realizes its own ludic workings in a non-coercive creativity as intimated by Peircean considerations of musement and cosmic love. Findings offer the study of signs an orientation to the un-fore-seen (im-pro-visus) constitutive of semiosis, in doing so heightening for social semiotic analysis a sensitivity to the indexical excess that conditions the formation of any text. In each instance, Sikh philosophy is found to offer key sources for considering semiosis as open-ended, non-purposive, and ludic-equipoisal.

This commentary for the Signs and Society special issue, “Localizing hallyu: The semiotics of the Korean wave in media and discourse,” considers how the contributions reveal the tensions underlying the way signs of the Korean wave are recontextualized through the material and embodied engagement of participants along pathways of its global circulation. It suggests that a transnational analysis of the Korean wave can serve as a useful laboratory for understanding the socially transformative power of semiotic practice.