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76 results

Page 1 of 4

  • Technique and the Threat of Deethicalization

  • Jack Sidnell
  • Journal:
    Signs and Society / Volume 9 / Issue 3 / Fall 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2025, pp. 343-365
    • Article
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  • Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of āsana (posture, pose) that they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. In a wide range of contexts, teachers and master practitioners insist that these techniques of the body must be executed in particular ways and accompanied by specific mental states if they are to have their intended ethical effects. Yoga is thus understood to combine outwardly observable technique with an unobservable yet essential, inner component. One consequence of this to which students and teachers are pervasively oriented is that the techniques become vulnerable to a kind of deethicalization by which they are “bleached” of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. The paper begins by comparing concerns about deethicalization among yoga practitioners with similar ideas about folklorization among participants in a women’s mosque movement described by Mahmood (2012). I then turn to consider three semiotic processes relevant to the specific case: circumscription, performed demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization.

  • 12 - Action and Accountability in Interaction

  • from Part III - Revisiting Action Ascription
  • Edited by Arnulf Deppermann, Universität Mannheim, Germany, Michael Haugh, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    Action Ascription in Interaction
    Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022, pp 279-296

  • Summary

    What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what an appropriate response would be? We argue: (1) Every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behaviour is goal-directed; (2) Responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; (3) Describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountable. We conclude that interaction does not involve a binning procedure in which the stream of conduct is sorted into discrete action types. Our argument is grounded in data from recordings of talk-in-interaction.

  • Generic reference and social ontology in Vietnamese conversation

  • Jack Sidnell
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 50 / Issue 4 / September 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 August 2021, pp. 533-555
    Print publication:
    September 2021

  • Generic expressions play a key role in the interactional articulation, social circulation, and temporal reproduction of ideology. Here I examine fragments from a conversation between four middle-class participants which took place at a café in Hanoi. After briefly describing the particular grammatico-textual patterns by which specific and generic references are accomplished in Vietnamese, I turn to consider two extended stretches of talk in which these people weave generic reference into the warp and weft of their interaction. I argue that generic reference is intimately tied to social ontology which consists, in part, of ideas about distinct and essentialized ‘kinds of persons’. Deployed in what appears, on the surface at least, as ordinary, mundane conversation, not only does such generic reference serve to position those referred to as ‘ontological other’ (Wynter 1987), it also constitutes an ‘act of alterity’ (Hastings & Manning 2004) by which the participants tacitly characterize themselves. (Reference, Vietnamese, social ontology, alterity, stereotype, essentialism)*

  • 13 - Sign Theory and the Materiality of Discourse

  • from Part III - Discourse Materialities and Embodiment
  • Edited by Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies
    Published online:
    28 September 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2020, pp 282-305

  • Summary

    A consideration of the “materiality of discourse” necessarily implicates a reexamination of some fundamental contributions to sign theory. Here, I first review the theoretical writings of Saussure, Volosinov and Peirce, comparing their various approaches to the problem of the sign and to semiosis. Peirce’s insistence on the importance of “secondness” (i.e. sigsigns, indexes, dicents) suggests a way of thinking about discourse that does not involve positioning it, either as representational medium or as social effect, in isolation from the material contexts in which it is used (and of which it is, in fact, a part). Drawing on some contemporary work in linguistic anthropology, I aim to illustrate this approach through a discussion of a few particularly perspicuous, ethnographic examples.

  • 3 - “Get ’Em Out!”: The Meaning of Ejecting Protesters

  • from Part I - Dividing the American Public
  • Edited by Janet McIntosh, Brandeis University, Massachusetts, Norma Mendoza-Denton, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    Language in the Trump Era
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    03 September 2020, pp 63-73

  • Summary

    This chapter analyzes over fifty cases in which Trump sought to remove confrontational protestors during his campaign rallies. Consideration of the linguistic and semiotic form of Trump’s instructions shows that, most often, they consisted of a grammatical imperative, “Get them out,” addressed to his supporters or to event security. The activity of removing protestors became a tool of interactional messaging which not only allowed Trump to signify about his own self-image but also created opportunities for supporters to embody and enact the political project that Trump advocated. The semiotic notion of “iconicity,” in which a sign represents by way of a resemblance or similarity with its object, provides a key to understanding these events. Trump’s ejecting protestors not only allowed Trump to communicate an image of strong, masculine leadership, but also diagrammed aspects of his proposed policies. The very action of ejecting protestors served as a kind of portrait in miniature of Trump’s promised immigration policy; ejected protestors stood for those persons labelled illegal immigrants who would, Trump promised, be deported. “Get them out” thus came to allude to a large-scale redistribution of power and agency, a new morally righteous populism, that his leadership would bring about.

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