The authors in this special issue explore the ways in which chronotopes are often gendered and gender performance is chronotopic. Articles examine a diverse range of discourses—tradwives, Chinese beauty influencers, paleofantasy health trends, Kiowa War Mothers, and Swahili-language Islamic marital advice—and unpack the ways that notions of gender rely on particular constructions of the “here-and-now” in contrast to various “theres-and-thens.” As this special issue demonstrates, one is not just a gendered subject; one is a particular type of gendered subject, and those types are embedded in imagined times and places.

In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose to view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure for speeding up and scaling up production and for crafting forms of sociality and subjectivity conducive to capitalist valorization. The articles in this collection ethnographically explore the working of translation across registers, channels, modalities, semiotic fields, and ontological orders (as well as linguistic codes). Our goal is to analyze how translation affords the global circulation of standardized discursive protocols and institutional policy bundles, and enables the formation of politico-juridical networks of corporate personhood and (neo-)liberal governmentality. Furthermore, we investigate how translation can be resisted, sabotaged, or made invisible, showing how its semiotic metamarks can be alternatively disguised or highlighted within the regimes of uniqueness and seriality underlying contemporary forms of commodity production. This Introduction provides the theoretical backdrop underlying these diverse contributions.

This paper examines the poetics and cultural significance of fanfa youth band performances in the rural commune of Limonade in northern Haiti. Drawing on observations during fieldwork in 2010 and 2016, it analyzes how fanfa bands, directed by maestros, create complex sign systems through music, movement, and materialities. Utilizing Roman Jakobson’s semiotic theory and Linda Waugh’s expansion of poetic function, the study explores the interpretive relations between these components and their role in constituting a unique cultural soundscape. By examining the selection and combination of musical pieces, routes, and accompanying elements, the research highlights the dynamic interaction between fanfa bands and their social environment. This semiotic analysis offers insights into the broader implications of cultural landscapes and the poetics of performance in Haiti.

The authors in this collection start with the insight that not all instances of semiotic indeterminacy are produced in the same way, that they can be located differently in the process of semiosis, and this fact shapes how and when semiotic indeterminacy is deployed by formulators and interpreters. The authors explore patterned uses of semiotic indeterminacy in Brazil, Bulgaria, Iran, and the United States to examine the role indeterminacy plays in institutional attempts at control and persuasion.

The specificity of acts of reference emerges from their indexical nature, not from any fixed denotation inherent in referring expressions. Referential indeterminacy is generally not an issue or is easily corrected. But it can be taken advantage of when hierarchic relations are in play: people can deploy the semiotic potential of indeterminacy in ways that covertly index advantageous alignments based on shared values, while seeming to make the same acts of reference as participants in (apparently) the same discourse who are not angling for such alignments. The indexicality of such alignments provides ethnographic insight into the importance of these fields of discourse for those involved, how social actors exercise control or authority, for whose benefit, toward what desired outcome. To this end, I have coined strategically deployable shifter (SDS) as an analytic term for such discursive action, examining its use in higher education as linked to the financial and corporate spheres. I further explore how SDSs can figure into the processes of indexicality and rhematization (as proposed by Gal and Irvine) that are central to the modeling of those status-driven worlds.

This article advances the study of digital identities by integrating the concept of chronotopes, as developed within sociolinguistics, with small stories research and positioning analysis. We put forward a cross-scalar, multimodal, micro-analytical approach and demonstrate its operation by tracing the “pretty girl” as a gendered chronotopic positioning, drawing on makeup tutorial video notes from the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (RedNote). We show how influencers reconfigure the cross-platform storytelling practice of sharing-life-in-the-moment to construct beauty transformation as a communal, everyday experience, diverging from the traditional makeover paradigm. The “pretty girl” positioning is tied to the mobilization of media-afforded chronotopic resources, featuring: (1) present-tense co-temporalization and (2) the semi-professionalization of bedrooms as media spaces. This integrative approach sheds light on how “girls making media” and post-feminism are situated within Chinese socio-culturally historicized yet globally entangled semiotic networks.

Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat, say that Muslims have abandoned religion (din) and been led astray by the world (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). They insist that only their form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) can remedy this situation. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope, or distinct imaginaries of space and time, anthropologists have argued that chronotopes produce a “plot structure” for social interaction that instantiates different social persona and forms of agency. In this article, I argue that dawat is organized around a chronotope of piety that encourages deference to others as well as defers the realization of piety to the future, thereby creating a self-limiting and self-regulating form of pious authority that Tablighis see as the basis for the creation and moral reproduction of the Islamic community. Pious authority takes on political significance as an alternative form of sovereignty against the backdrop of religious and political fragmentation engendered by state- and market-driven Islamization in Pakistan.

Translation is key to the political economy of neorural revival in contemporary Italy. Drawing on fieldwork with neorural farmers, I show how translations across semiotic domains and displays of linguistic and pragmatic untranslatability simultaneously produce capitalist value and temporary disruptions of the subsumption of life under capital. To understand this apparent paradox, I analyze the complex relationship between contemporary neorural revivalists and mid-twentieth-century neodialect poets. Driven by a reaction against the post-war encompassment of regional linguistic varieties within a national standard, the metapragmatics of untranslatability developed by the neodialect literary movement has indirectly provided contemporary neoruralists with semiotic resources to conjure profitable forms of agrolinguistic incommensurability. However, unlike the poets’ nostalgic and anticapitalist sabotage of the collusion between centripetal linguistic standardization and intensive agribusiness scalability, the farmers’ interactional disruptions of pragmatic regimentation and seamless intertranslatability are both a project of capitalist valorization and an exit strategy from unfulfilling wage-labor arrangements.

The semiotic construction of corporate persons in law is key to the contemporary organization of global capitalism. The economic capacities enjoyed by corporations stem significantly from how the semiotics of corporate personhood work within domestic and international legal orders fundamentally designed for human persons. Signs (especially in documents—laws, incorporation papers, tax filings, etc.) construct corporations as legal persons—entities modeled on human persons yet differently bound to human embodiment. Corporations multiply themselves through the creation of legally independent corporate persons (“subsidiaries”), while unifying themselves through their control over these persons. Unlike human offspring, corporations’ corporate offspring are easily created, may take up residence in almost any jurisdiction, and always obey their parents. The paper will discuss the implications of these features of corporations with respect to tort liability, international trade, property, taxation, and private militaries.

This paper aims to explore human beings as language animals, examining how language shapes them in the lifeworld. Biosemiotics and anthroposemiotics are both geared toward studying the relations between life and the environment. This paper thus concerns the semiotics of naming, exploring naming as meaning-making activity based on the interrelation of language and narrative. There are two ways of looking at the language functions in the act of naming. One is “languaging,” which is geared toward producing intimacy with the surrounding world in nature by naming things to establish a relationship with them. The other is “narrating,” which generates a dialogic relationship with fellow human beings by storytelling based on existence and place. This enables humans to cultivate the selves through semiotic cultural activity. Thus, I shall elaborate the semiotic process in naming and narrating things, which leads to culture-making activity, by analyzing the place Ieodo off the south coast of Korea within the biosemiotic perspective which connects language and cognition with the narrative world for culture-making activity.

In the early 2000s, mainstream US wellness culture started to develop something of an obsession with the distant past. These “paleofantasies” (Zuk 2013), such as barefoot running and the Paleo diet, are not based in scientific evidence about prehistoric human behavior or accurate understandings of evolutionary theory. Why, then, do so many people (especially men) find them compelling? In this paper, I argue that the “stone age” chronotope is implicitly masculine and in fact tends to exclude women altogether. Women are largely absent from imaginings of prehistory, whether those imaginings are car insurance commercials, diet and exercise programs, or even anthropological texts. Looking at various popular discourses about the stone age chronotope, I consider how women are effectively rendered invisible, leaving behind what is perceived as a distilled masculine essence. I suggest that the proliferation of paleofantasy in the past two decades has been part of a broader cultural backlash against feminist progress.

This article documents the historical and semiotic factors that have entailed a normative ambiguity of “the internship,” both as an ideological sign and as a participant role that has increasingly mediated the relationships between higher education and careers in the United States. We present comparative life history narratives of two interns drawn from a longitudinal interview study, which illustrate the negotiations, experiences, and consequences that the ambiguity of the internship participant role entails for students attempting to navigate the transition between education and employment. We argue that the stable semiotic ambiguity of the internship participant role is a consequence of a political economy of collusion, in which employers, educators, and students benefit from the emergence and spread of the internship economy, with students finding it uniquely useful to establish credibility in the highly competitive employment market. We point out how students’ class-based resources, networks, and positionalities constrain the possible outcomes for them from this process.

This article looks at how gendered chronotopes of tradition are created in the work of four tradwives, or digital influencers who describe themselves as “feminine not feminist.” It first shows how each tradwie animates a distinct, highly mediatized, chronotope of tradition ranging, from the 1850s homestead to the 1950s suburban wife in pearls. Each uses submissive gender roles to create a unique vision of a past as domestic idyll embodied by a desirable woman: glowing, warm, beautiful, white. In a second step, it looks at how each of these individual chronotopes of tradition are aligned in a higher chronotope of absolute femininity. Like a string of pearls, femininity becomes a thread on which each individual chronotope becomes coeval, tokens of a type of absolute womanhood, atavistic tradition, “pearl nationalism.” In the third section, I explore how a chronotope of femininity is shaped through contrast to chronotope of feminist modernity. Rather than evoking a particular place, tradition means a woman returned to hers. The paper concludes with what a study of tradwives’ feminine chronotopes can contribute to understanding of chronotopes in mass media, and in particular to the growing appeal of the far right.

Semiotic indeterminacy describes the basic observation that signs are always unstable and open to interpretation. As such, semiotic indeterminacy can become a resource for the strategic pursuit and exploitation of political goals. In this article, I examine the role and multiple dimensions of semiotic indeterminacy in nuclear nonproliferation, the global governance project to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Taking as an illustrative example the controversy around the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I demonstrate that when the transparency practices implemented to close down on the semiotic indeterminacy of nuclear materials fail, nuclear verification turns from a techno-rational project into a moral-evaluative one with the aim of uncovering the hidden intentions of a state. This transduction of one semiotic register into another derives from transparency’s dual tradition as both a rationalizing imperative as well as a moralized norm of sincerity. Attending to the semiotic dimensions of liberal forms of governance offers a new perspective on its contradictions.

Preservice teachers are in the process of constructing their own personal and professional teacher identities. In order to explore questions and assumptions implicit to such an undertaking, this study examined teacher images created by preservice teachers over the course of a 15-year case study, focusing (in this essay) on the results of the clothing and color choices attributed to teachers in the resulting images. Semiotic analyses of these images showed that preservice teachers drew images of teachers that were most often clothed in some interpretation of casual professional clothing. The dominant colors of the rendered clothing were most frequently shades of blue and black. Communicative, cultural, and functional dress codes indicate that these clothing and color choices signify that these preservice teachers saw the teaching profession as one that was conformist, service-oriented, chaste, and modestly prestigious. The examination of preservice teachers’ “teacher” and/or “teaching profession” ideologies through communicative non-verbal cues in their constructed teacher images can be an important part of understanding their beliefs and values about the teaching profession, as well as their professional identity development and career choices.

Through a linguistic anthropological analysis of a corpus of storytelling practices that have emerged from interviews that I conducted with Northern Italian executives (2011–2023), I examine how collective, Made-in-Italy branding identities are (co)constructed and translated through the scalar chronotopic stances that these managers take vis-à-vis both the historicity and the contemporary, artistic uniqueness of their companies. More specifically, I describe how the executives in small Northern Italian family-owned firms use their corporations’ histories to associate moral discourses of cultural values, responsibility, and authenticity with the Made-in-Italy brand. Executives’ narrative shifts translate Made in Italy from a national brand that allegedly represents all goods produced in Italy to more localized, town-based branding identities. To do so, I am inspired by an inter-semiotic approach to translation, one that allows me to study these identification processes from a more fluid and dynamic perspective.

Far-right political leaders, supporters, and regular Bulgarian citizens deploy swastikas in ways that play with the indeterminacy of the token-type relationship in strategic ways. As they highlight the swastika as a perpetually unstable token, they work to prevent it from being apprehended as an instantiation of a Nazi type. Such deployments rely on strategically mobilizing semiotic indeterminacy across different contexts. Tracing actors’ deployments of signs like the swastika allows us to better understand how people mobilize token-type relations—and to what ends—within the public sphere of an expanding European Union.

This paper investigates noncommercial slogans, one prevalent type of linguistic signs in China, examining the stances and identities emerging from these signs, and the relevant contexts from which they emerge. Du Bois’ stance triangle model is adapted and employed in the case study of Zhengzhou urban–rural slogans, combining qualitative and quantitative methods via BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2. Results show a higher proportion of evaluative and alignment stances than positioning stance, including affective and epistemic stances, in both urban and rural areas. A notable distinction lies in the proportion of positioning stance, with a relatively lower prevalence in rural areas compared to urban areas. Second, these stances index the identities as an object-centered evaluator, a collectively intersubjectivity-centered aligner, as well as the self-local/translocal identity. Third, the analysis reveals Chinese economic, administrative, cultural, social, and political contexts related to the emergence of the identities within these signs.

Empathy statements are grammatically regular, performative statements used widely in the therapy and medical industries in the United States and adapted to be used by callers in India’s National Capital Region international call centers to navigate the foreign and emotionally heightened situations workers experience while speaking to customers. This paper shows the performative nature of translation by analyzing the training of empathy in a train-the-trainer training program. By identifying the grammatical structure, enregisterment, and strategic use of empathy statements in scripts, this paper shows how semiotic frameworks of emotion play a vital role in the types of translation necessitated by the mass mediation of the international call center.

This study examines Swahili-language Islamic marital booklets (vijitabu) written between 1932 and 2020, focusing on their gendered chronotopes and nostalgic elements. These booklets, written by and for Muslim men, offer advice on marriage, sexuality, and related topics, reflecting societal changes and the influence of reformist Islam in East Africa. The analysis identifies four prominent chronotopic formulations: the contemporary East African context, the time and place of the Prophet Muhammad, the pre-Islamic world (jahiliya), and the modern West. A potential fifth chronotope, the afterlife (akhera), is contingent on adherence to the first four. The booklets valorize the Prophet Muhammad’s era while criticizing other temporal and spatial contexts, advocating for a return to early Islamic gender norms and marital practices to achieve happiness in the afterlife. This study highlights the booklets’ role in shaping gender norms and religiopolitical ideologies, revealing the interplay between nostalgia, religious authority, and sociopolitical context in East African Muslim communities.