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Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory 1
Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory
Mark A. Sicoli
University of Virginia
Matthew Wolfgram
University of Wisconsin Madison
Contents:
Introduction
The Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology
Philosophical Appropriations into Anthropology
From Symbolic to Semiotic Anthropology
The Semiotic Approach in Linguistic Anthropology
Deixis, Emergent Contexts and Social Relations
Iconicity in Language
Gesture and Embodied Communication
Language Ideology
Language and Commodification
Visual Anthropology and Material Culture
Archaeology
Biosemiotics
Signs of Life and Mind
The Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction
Introduction
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) has had a profound, expansive, and
sometimes unrecognized impact on anthropological research and theory. Part of Peirce’s impact has
been mediated through the work of philosophers influenced by Peirce’s theory of signs, and who were
themselves subsequently taken into anthropological theory. But the impact of Peirce’s semiotic on
anthropologists who have interpreted Peirce directly has also been transformative, in particular, in
developing a surprisingly transdisciplinary theory of meaning in anthropology. This bibliography
documents the role of Peirce’s theory of signs in facilitating a semiotic approach in sociocultural and
linguistic anthropology, and in providing a framework to critically expand research on visual and material
culture, archaeology, trans-species environmental relations, life-systems, and the evolution of language
and culture. The transformative impact of Peirce’s semiotic can be understood against the history of the
dominant structuralist semiotic theory that guided much 20th-century anthropology developed from the
work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure called for a science of signs (termed
“semiology”) which placed at its center an analysis of the arbitrary linguistic sign (constituted by an ideal
binary binding concept and sound-image) and which has value as part of a system of oppositions
(langue), held commonly in the minds of speakers as members of a society. A parallel model of language
was incorporated into American anthropology by Franz Boas who argued that language is a conventional
system of classification for a society, and the dominant focus became the study of such systems of
classification in domains such as botany, zoology, kinship, color, and so on. The structuralist concept of
language as a conventional system also became a dominant model of culture in French and British
anthropology, in particular through the integration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ binary analysis of mythic and
Forthcoming, Sicoli, Mark A. and Matthew Wolfgram. This is a draft of an article that has been
accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology due
for publication in 2018.

mental structures, and which was coordinated with the Durkheimian concept of language/culture as a
public representation of a society’s values to itself. In contrast, Peircean semiosis does not take the
idealist and arbitrary linguistic symbol as the privileged basis of semiotic analysis. Peirce’s semiotic
provides a framework for understanding actions relating signs and their material qualities to their
interpretations by agents (human and non-human) in the habit of making meaning in social-ecological
contexts. Peircean semiosis focusses attention on dynamic interpretive processes and their
consequences, and to the form, diversity, function, and positionality of signs in chains of actions playing
out in time and space to practical, meaningful, productive, or consequential ends.
The Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology

Peirce’s Collected Papers (CP) published 1932-1974 establish his truly polymathic and expansive
philosophical oeuvre of fundamental insights into epistemology (especially pragmatism), as well as
philosophies of mind, language, self, ethics, science, education, and religion; and importantly, the final
volume of the CP and another separate book-length bibliography by Robin 1967 provide a detailed
annotation of Peirce’s large corpus of papers. Peirce is perhaps the most influential American philosopher
in history and thus, there is a robust and expansive literature of philosophical and historical commentary.
The Charles S. Peirce Society is dedicated to the study of Peirce’s thought, and publishes the Society’s
journal, **The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American
Philosophy**. Peirce’s works on semiotics in particular has been taken up into the history of
anthropological theory. Perhaps the most commonly employed source in anthropology for Peirce’s
semiotic theory is “Logic as semiotic,” assembled from various writings by Justus Buchler 1955 in
Philosophical Writings of Charles Peirce, however, other key writings on semiotics are collected in Peirce
1991 Peirce on Signs. In addition, Peirce’s writings on other topics relevant to anthropology, such as
Peirce’s phenomenological categories, abduction, and pragmatism are collected in the two volumes of
The Essential Peirce: Peirce 1992 and Peirce 1998. From among the expansive commentary literature,
there are a number of works that may be useful to help clarify key aspects of Peirce’s thought, such as
Fisch 1986 for commentaries on the theory of signs, Sonesson 2013 on phenomenology, and Melrose
1995 on abduction as a form of cognition.
Melrose, Robin.1995. "The Seduction of Abduction: Peirce's Theory of Signs and Indeterminacy in
Language." Journal of Pragmatics 23(5): 493-507.
This paper reviews Peirce's systems of categorization of signs, phenomenological states, and
modes of cognition, and illustrates how they relate to his concept of “abduction”—a type of quazi-
inductive inference which involves developing a theory based on proximately available evidence
(which can later be evaluated through fully inductive or deductive reasoning). The paper connects
the concept of abduction to other relevant traditions of linguistics and philosophy.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932-1974. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1-8. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press.
Volume 1. Includes writings on his “Principles of philosophy,” Volume 2, “Elements of logic”,
Volume 3 published papers on “Exact logic,’ Volume 4, “The simplest mathematics,” Volume 5,
“Pragmatism and pragmaticism,” Volume 6 “Scientific metaphysics,” Volumes 7 and 8 are edited
by A.W. Burks and include works on “Science and philosophy”, and reviews, correspondence,
and a bibliography.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Selected and Edited by Justus Buchler.
New York: Dover Publications.
An edited collection of Peirce’s essays and compilations of Peirce’s writings assembled by
Buchler into article length essays, such as “Logic as Semiotic” which is commonly cited and used
to introduce anthropology students to Peirce. Logic as Semiotic concisely outlines the three
trichotomies of signs based on Firstness (Qualisign, Sinsign, Legisign), Secondness (Icon, Index,
Symbol), and Thirdness (Rheme, Dicent, Argument), and also presents the typology of Peirce’s
ten classes of signs.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.
This volume collects 21 of Peirce’s essays including works on God, metaphysics, categories,
human cognition, Berkeley, signs, argumentation, James, self, and several essays on
pragmatism.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1897-
1893). Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
First of two-volume collection of Peirce’s writings including works on phenomenological
categories, cognition, logic in science, and writings from the Monist rejecting determinism and
advocating for absolute chance, arguing for mind and nature as processes of growth, the laws of
the universe as acquired habits, and writings on evolutionary love that critique the greed and
individualism of 19th century political-economics as metaphorical ground for Darwinian
evolutionary theory.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-
1913). Edited by Nathan Houser, André De Tienne, Jonathan R. Eller, Cathy L. Clark, Albert C. Lewis,
and D. Bront Davis. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Second in the two-volume collection of Peirce’s writings includes works on synechism, signs,
science, nature, pragmatism, abduction, and excerpts from letters to Lady Welby and William
James.
Fisch, Max. 1986. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J.
W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Volume of essays of Fisch’s biographical engagement with Peirce as a polymath philosopher,
mathematician, semiotician, historian, and working scientist. Essays detail the development of
pragmatism out of dialogues of the “Metaphysical Club”, differences between Peirce and others in
that circle (particularly William James), the logical relationship between pragmatism and Peirce’s
general theory of signs, and draws a parallel between Peirce’s pragmatism and work of 18th
century Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico, both growing out of a dissatisfaction with Cartesian
thought.
Robin, Richard S. 1967. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
This is a book-length annotated bibliography of Peirce’s extensive papers housed in the
Houghton Library at Harvard University. It is divided into two sections: the first includes
manuscripts and the second part is correspondence by and to Peirce.

Sonesson, Göran. 2013. "The Natural History of Branching: Approaches to the Phenomenology of
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness." Signs and Society 1(2): 297-325.
This paper reviews the concepts of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, contextualizes
Peirce’s phenomenology in relationship to Husserlian phenomenology, structuralism, and social
psychology, and identifies relationship between Peirce’s thoughts on consciousness and on
semiotics.
*The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American

Philosophy[http://peircesociety.org/transactions]*.
Transactions is the journal of the *Charles S. Peirce Society[www.peircesociety.org]*, focusing on
research on the history of American philosophy. The journal is a major source of philosophical
and historical commentary on Peirce’s thought.
Philosophical Appropriations into Anthropology

Peirce's impact on the history of anthropological theory has sometimes filtered through philosophers
whose thinking through Peircean semiosis resonate with anthropological questions. The philosopher
Charles Morris 1938, for example, developed Peirce’s semiotic into a framework for organizing and
unifying the sciences (including anthropology, linguistics, and other human and social sciences) “if
semiotic is a science co-ordinate with the other sciences, studying things or the properties of things in
their function of serving as signs,” Morris writes “it is also the instrument of all sciences, since every
science makes use of and expresses its results in terms of signs” (1938: 2). Benjamin Lee 1997 and
Vincent Colapietro 1989 have used Peirce’s semiotic to develop philosophies of language and
performativity important to linguistic and cultural anthropological theory. Jacques Derrida 1976 and
Umberto Eco 1986 drew-upon and developed Peirce’s dynamic and indeterminate characterization of
semiosis, which was appropriated into anthropology as it aligned with literary approaches. And Deleuze
and Guattari 1980 mirrored Peirce’s second trichotomy in their own sign typology, and introduce a
rhizomatic understanding of semiotic chains, which become influential in work of Tim Ingold, Bruno
Latour, and others. In addition to Peirce’s indirect impact on anthropological theory via philosophers,
there is a more capillary but also profound impact of Peirce’s theory of knowledge, call Pragmatism or
sometimes Pragmaticism. Pragmatism states that the value of a proposition should be evaluated in terms
of the practical effects of the knowledge, which contrasted with verificationist epistemologies dominant in
Continental Philosophy that argued the truth value of propositions should be evaluated in terms of their
correspondence to an objective state of the world. Peirce’s pragmatist epistemology had a pervasive
effect on American philosophy, although it has often been mediated by Peirce’s peers and later-
generation philosophers, such as William James 1985, who has also had a large impact on the
anthropology of religion, John Dewey 1974, who has been taken up in the anthropology of education, and
George Herbert Mead 1934, whose social theory of self had a major impact on anthropologists.
Furthermore, drawing on Peirce, Richard Rorty 1979 developed the pragmatic theory of knowledge that in
turn impacted American analytical philosophy, including W. V. O. Quine, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, John
Austin, and John Searle—whose ideas have informed practice in linguistic and sociocultural
anthropological, as well as, theory on evolution and material culture in biological and archaeological
anthropology.
Colapietro, Vincent M. 1989. Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human
Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press

Studies agency and autonomy of the self, arguing that Peirce’s acting subject within a semiotic
mind process of sign development goes beyond Cartesian, structuralist, and post-structuralist
theories of self. As signs mediate between object and interpretant, community provides context
as source of meaning and truth. The developing self involves relations of community to embodied
habits and behavior. Providing for an embodied semiotic consciousness, Colapietro critiques
Eco’s theory of signification which leaves the acting subject outside the scope of semiotics.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
This is a philosophical work exploring assemblages, spaces, becoming, machines of state and
appropriating Peircean sign types with new connotations of territoriality-deterritorialization:
Indexes (territorial), Symbols (deterritorialized), Icons (reterritorialization). Introduces rhizomatic,
connected, understanding of semiosis in critique of autonomous linguistic (tree and root) models.
Like rhizomes “semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding
(biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also
states of things of differing status,” p7.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by GC Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press.
This text draws on Peirce’s dynamic and emergent concept of semiosis to identify an
indeterminacy of signs as always “becoming-unmotivated.” Derrida was appropriated into
anthropology as part of the poststructuralist turn, but Derrida himself understood indeterminacy—
the lack of a stable presence of the sign—as a consequence of the processes of signification as
value produced through difference (the structuralist position), and criticized structuralists such as
de Saussure, Jakobson, and Levi-Strauss for harboring hidden romanticisms, in effect, for not
being structuralist enough.
Dewey, John. 2004. Democracy and Education. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
Dewey’s writings on the philosophy of education, which describe the goals of liberal education
and its relationship to democratic society have been central to social science and critical studies
of education, including the history and anthropology of education. In addition to the work of
William James, Dewey’s philosophy of education is responsible for popularizing Peirce’s
epistemology of pragmatism, and developing the connection between the theory of knowledge
and the project of cultivating just and equitable democratic institutions.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Vol. 398. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
The explicit goal of the book is to show that Saussure’s dyadic sign is compatible with Peirce’s
triadic sign action. Eco subordinates semantics to pragmatics, arguing that signs be disentangled
from coded equivalence/identity of dictionary meaning, and that interpretive process is present in
encyclopedic, textual, meaning. Eco’s argument is, however, less grounded on work of the
seldom cited Saussure, but rather in reading Saussure through Peirce’s notions of abduction and
interpretants through which signs acquire meaning in cultural history.
James, William. 1985. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Vol. 15. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press.

James’ descriptions of mystical experiences—and the analysis of their ineffable qualities—have

been foundational to ritual studies, and the anthropology, psychology, and social science of
religion, demonstrating that such experience could be scientifically studied. Reflecting his
commitment to Peirce’s pragmatism, James argued that in spite of the ineffable quality of such
experiences, there are common patterns in such experiences, and the insights that they impart
are pragmatically useful.
Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity . Duke
University Press.
Lee shows subjectivity to be at the center of new conceptions of identity—the “we” of national
consciousness, produced since the rise of print media and forms of speech in the novel. Lee ends
with a discussion of the performative “we” of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and links
performativity with metalanguage developed through a reading of Peirce’s approach to
quantification as indexes that trigger inferences for interpreters.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mead pioneered work in symbolic interaction theory and social psychology with a pragmatism
seen in a theory of a reflexive self-consciousness: the “I” experienced as an object “me” through a
perspective of others, where for example one speaks in design and anticipation of another’s
response (a Peircean interpretant). Mead’s pragmatism predicted later work in ethnomethodology
and social cognition, and anthropological notions of objectification and recognition as semiotic
processes that depend on the work interpreters bring to interaction.
Morris, Charles. 1938. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Following Peirce, Morris argues that scientific knowledge is both mediated by signs and
communicated by signs, and thus a theory of signs is fundamental to a modernist conception of
knowledge. As a metascience, Morris argued that semiotics could unify various domains of
knowledge. His semiotic unification and classification of these domains of knowledge (syntactics,
semantics, and pragmatics) was influential in linguistics, anthropology, and social sciences, often
without knowledge, or recognition, of this source.
Rorty, Richard. 2009. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Richard Rorty is one of the several prominent American philosophers who developed Peirce’s
theory of knowledge into a full philosophical critique of positivism and verificationism, which Rorty
argued falsely assumed that true knowledge was a “mirror of nature.” This critique became
central to the American school of analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language, which
has had a wide impact in anthropology theory.
From Symbolic to Semiotic Anthropology

Peirce’s semiotics has made a major impact in the history of American anthropology, in particular, by
providing a non-dualistic theory of meaning that expanded and elaborated the narrow focus of
structuralist semiotics on conventional signs, typified by the linguistic sign and cultural symbols which was
a major focus of what became known as “interpretive” or “symbolic anthropology.” Anthropologists have
drawn on Peirce’s philosophy to expand their analysis beyond the interpretation of symbols, to an
analysis of the holistic process of the role of signs in the emergence of value, involving a continuous

process uniting convention (symbol), experience (index), and material qualities (icon). Peirce’s semiotics
was grounded on both the context of the production and interpretation of signs, and the material qualities
of the sign medium, thus transcending the material/ideal dualism that was debated in post-WWII
American and British anthropology. Milton Singer 1980, 1984 and Lee and Urban 1989 introduced and
developed Peirce’s semiotic to frame a holistic social and material semiotic approach to culture, which
formed the basis of what became known as semiotic anthropology more generally, as reviewed by Mertz
2007. Richard Parmentier 2016 has also provided extensive framing and commentary on the
anthropological significance of Peirce’s semiotics, and Stanley Tambiah 1979, 1996 has employed
aspects of this semiotics to develop an anthropological approach to ritual and a resolution to the
“rationality debates” in anthropology. There are also a number of major ethnographic works which
exemplify this transition from interpretive to a more holistic semiotic anthropology. Valentine Daniel 1984,
for example, provides a full exposition of Peirce’s framework, and then develops an analysis of rituals and
practices related to the creation of persons in Tamil Hindu society. And the ethnography of Nancy Munn
1992 on the Kula exchange on the island of Gawa in the archipelago of Papua New Guinea, illustrates
how the material qualities of prestige exchange items are central to the production of value in society and
to the politics of fame central to the local manifestation of personhood. Later work in this tradition has
employed semiotic analysis to identify the sign processes involved in politics, such as Daniel’s 1996
analysis of the signs used to produce historical narratives that foster ethnic nationalism and conflict
between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka (on semiotic processes in politics also see works in sections
*Language Ideologies*; *Language and Commodification*).
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. University of California Press.
The first chapter provides an introduction to Peircean semiotics and phenomenology in relation to
problems in cultural anthropology, such as analysis of ritual, myth, caste, and the dynamics of
personhood, which are applied to Hindu rituals and social practices throughout the text. The book
also contains rich ethnographic description of a temple pilgrimage, which Daniel analyzes using
Peircean phenomenology, as a process that produces an experience of Firstness, or unification
between the pilgrims and Lord Ayyappan in the temple.
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton

University Press.
Studies cultural processes motivating ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Argues that Singala Buddhist nationalists employ traces on the landscape as signs of the
Buddhist past (Buddha’s footprint, or a Buddhist king’s irrigation tanks) to produce nationalist
ideology, which actualize an idealized past in the present through what Peirce termed Dicicigns.
Daniel argues Sinhalese Dicisigns contrast with Rhematic signs employed in Tamil nationalist
ideology, which projects a future from a vague primordialism associated with the Tamil
community.
Lee, Benjamin and Greg Urban (eds.) 1989. Semiotics, Self, and Society, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Volume of essays dedicated to Milton Singer by students, colleagues, and friends and including
an essay by Singer on the semiotic self. Volume as a whole critiques Cartesian models of self
with contributions exploring how language, through pronominal play, communicates qualities of
emotions, senses, and representations of self and in relation to societies.
Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. “Semiotic Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 337–53.

This article describes the role of Peirce’s semiotics in the transition from interpretive-hermeneutic
approach to a social-semiotic approach. Mertz’ tracks 30 years of change in linguistic and
sociocultural anthropology that has permitted a productive dialogue between these subfields
mediated through semiotics. Some themes focused on are indexicality; linguistic ideology and
social interaction; social power and history; agency and linguistic creativity, and shifting units of
analysis from entextualization to globalization.
Munn, Nancy D. 1992. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim
(Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham: Duke University Press.
Munn documents Kula transactions in Melanesia, focused in particular on the role of the
interisland exchange of prestige objects along with food production, consumption, and speech
making in the production of value, self, and the politics of fame. Munn argues that such cultural
practices produce value as signified as a sign on the body (called qualisigns, following Peirce),
and through the extension and management of personhood through space-time.
Parmentier, Richard J. 2016. Signs and Society: Further Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Echoing the name of his earlier volume, Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology,
published in 1994, Parmentier assembles 15 essays spanning his career and divided into three
parts: Foundations of Peircean Semiotics, Critical Commentaries and Reviews, and Comparative
Perspectives on Semiosis.
Singer, Milton. 1980. Signs of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology. American Anthropologist
82(3): 485-507.
Singer works with Peirce’s general theory of signs to ground a theory of the self that is
phenomenological, pragmatic, and non-Cartesian. Singer’s account considers the self as
occupying different positions in semiotic chains as signs, objects and interpretants, and as
subject, participates on both sides of dialogic sequences of becoming in which the self (through
self-talk) can be less than the individual organism, and when in dialogue with others organisms,
can be more than the individual, in an emergence of a “social consciousness.”
Singer, Milton B. 1984. Man’s Glassy Essence Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Builds on Peirce’s triadic semiotic to develop a “semiotic anthropology” arguing that Saussure’s
binary sign is degenerate from the perspective of sociocultural theory, and the source of many
problems of French Structuralism, British Structural-Functionalism, and Symbolic (semiological)
anthropology. Relates ideas of a phenomenological self to Peirce’s fragmentary writings on a
semiotics of self.
Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual.” Proceedings of the British
Academy London, 65:113–69.
This article develops an influential theory of ritual that uses Peirce's semiotics to analyze how
formal features of ritual such as the often high degrees of conventionality and repetitiveness, and
the social effectiveness of ritual utterances (as Austinian speech act), form an index connecting
ritual actions with social contexts.

Tambiah, S., 1996. “Relations of Analogy and Identity.” In Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and
Cognition. Edited by D. Olson, and N. Torrance, 34–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This piece draws on Roman Jakobson’s linguistic interpretation of Peirce's semiotics (see
Jakobson 1957 in section *Deixis, Emergent Context and Social relations*) to identify two
semiotic processes that relate language and the world. Identity relations posit that language has
an essential relation to the world and analogy relations posit a conventional relation to the world.
Tambiah applies these concepts to the moral/legal debates about the protest burning of the
American flag in the 1990s and cases of ethnolinguistic nationalism.
The Semiotic Approach in Linguistic Anthropology

Peircean semiotics has had a major impact of anthropological approaches to the study of language,
which are addressed below under the sub-sections (1) *Deixis, Emergent Contexts and Social Relations*
(2) *Iconicity in Language*, (3) *Gesture and Embodied Communication*, (4) *Language ideology*, and
(5) *Language and Commodification*.
Deixis, Emergent Contexts and Social Relations

Peirce’s concept of indexical signs has been important in understanding linguistic reference,
quantification, performativity, social status, and social interaction. Deixis are features of language which
index features of the communication context, such as space, time, social roles, and the discourse itself
(i.e. inter-textual deixis such as discourse markers and anaphora). Peirce wrote that the deictic “may
require its interpretation to refer to the actual surrounding circumstances of the occasion of its
embodiment, like words as that, this, I, you, which, here, now, yonder, etc. (CP 4.447). Such forms often
presupposed and actually require specific information about the speech context in order for the
propositional content of the talk to be intelligible to an interpreter. The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson
1957 developed and critiqued the structuralist concept of language by incorporating a Peircean concept
of indexicality, demonstrating that such features are both ubiquitous and cross-linguistically universal,
which illustrated the fundamental importance of the social-interactional context of language use to any
analysis of the linguistic system. Steven Caton 1987 has reviewed the significance of Jakobson’s
contributions to anthropology. A great deal of this impact was advanced by the American linguistic
anthropologist and student of Jakobson, Michael Silverstein 1976, who interpreted and framed this
Peircean approach to language for the general problems of anthropology. In particular, he developed a
contrast between two relationships of indices to contexts, one which presupposes a particular context,
and the other which creates an emergent context; and later developed a systematic framework for
interpreting how language is used to produce social reality 2003. Following this approach, anthropologists
have shifted their focus away from formal descriptions of indexicality in language, to indexical creation like
Manning 2001 for analyses of productive nature of indexical forms in managing social relations, Hanks
1992 for establishing sociocentric spatial frames of reference, scales of causation considered in Enfield
2013, the formation of local concepts of self and subjectivity in Kockelman 2007 and 2010, and the
production of authority in ritual speech by Kuipers 1990. William Hanks 1999 has reviewed the concept of
indexicality and its relevance to anthropological studies of language.
Caton, Steven C. 1987. “Contributions of Roman Jakobson.” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1): 223–
60.
This article is a helpful review of Jakobson’s theory of language and metalanguage as influenced
by Peirce, Jakobson’s far-reaching criticism of Saussurean structuralism, and its various impacts
on linguistic and anthropological theory. Jakobson saw form and meaning as inextricable and

language as multifunctional and teleological to involve meaning beyond reference to the indexical
functions pointing to speech situation, and the iconicity and indexicality organizational of the
poetics of parallelism, which Jakobson saw as pervasive at all levels of language, and thus
integral to linguistic research.
Enfield, N.J. 2013. Relationship Thinking: Agency, Enchrony, and Human Sociality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Integrates traditions of conversation analysis, linguistics, and philosophy using a Peircean
concept of meaning as ascribed through an interpreting agent to develop a theory of interaction
involving semiosis, distributed agency and the causal frame of enchrony where two moves, or
signs, are linked through an effective, or prospective relation in which one action gives rise to
another, and, retrospectively, in a relation of appropriateness, relevance and normativity.
Hanks, William F. 1992. “The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference.” In Rethinking Context: Language
as an Interactive Phenomenon. Edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 43-76. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hanks provides a detailed analysis of the use of deictic forms of reference in Mayan social
interaction, and how such forms indexically ground and produce the context of talk. Hanks’
analysis emphasizes the creative nature of such forms, which establish social symmetries and
asymmetries, in the forms of participants’ orientations toward spatial location, time, social roles,
and forms of common knowledge.
Hanks, William F. 1999. “Indexicality.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1/2): 124–26.

This is a review of the concept of indexicality as the context-dependency of utterances including
phenomena like regional accent, deference and demeanor, referential pronouns, demonstratives,
deictic adverbs, and tense.
Jakobson, Roman. 1957. “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb.” Harvard University,
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Russian Language Project. Reprinted in Jakobson,
Roman. 1971. Word and Language, 130-147. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Emphasizes the prevalence and importance of indexical features in human language, such
pronouns, verb tense and other forms of time reference, and deictic forms which reference spatial
location. Deictic reference shifts with the context of the utterance—and such features are known
as “shifters” in the linguistics literature—which Jakobson argued illustrated the fundamentally
indexical quality of speech. This context dependency is evidence that language is fundamentally
organized for social interaction in dynamic temporal and spatial contexts.
Kockelman, Paul. 2007. “Agency: The Relation Between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge.” Current
Anthropology 48(3): 375-401.
Builds on Peirce to define agency along dimensions of flexibility and accountability; and
knowledge and power. Introduces “residential agency,” the degree to which one can control a
sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant, which is distinct from, yet
presupposing of “representational agency,” the degree to which one can thematize a process,
characterize a feature of the theme, and reason with the theme-character relation. Agency is
thematized as a multidimensional, graduated, and distributed semiotic faculty.

Kockelman, Paul. 2010. Language, Culture, and Mind: Natural Constructions and Social Kinds. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Integrates linguistic, social, and cognitive sciences with ethnographic research with Q’eqchi’
Maya using Peirce’s semiosis to synthesize insights of Jakobson, Goffman and Kockelman’s
earlier work on stance. He develops a semiotic and distributed understanding of intentionality and
mind. Intentionality is semiotically distributed across speakers, topics, and addressees where
public and emblematic actions are signs of mental states and social statuses (immaterial objects)
that become knowable through interpretants that are attitudes, responses and reactions to prior
signs.
Kuipers, Joel Corneal. 1990. Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual
Speech. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kuipers documents the role of indexical forms of language in establishing the social efficacy of
Weyewa ritual speech. He found that the authority of genres as divination is based on a
connection to the social context established through a high frequency of demonstrative and
personal pronouns and locatives. In contrast, other genres such as ritual blessings are effective
on account of a separation from social context, represented as the authoritative and poetic “words
of the ancestors.”
Manning, H. Paul. 2001. “On Social Deixis.” Anthropological Linguistics 43(1): 54-100.
Drawing on data across diverse cultural settings, Manning builds on Peircean indexicality and
Voloshinov’s view of a multithreaded intertwining of utterance and contexts to propose a unified
account of both situational (contingent) deixis of the social situation and to argue additionally for
forms of social deixis that index durative (perduring) social relations beyond the contingency of
the situation.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in
Anthropology. Edited by Keith Basso Henry A. Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Argues that some indexical features of language assume the existence of particular social
relations, e.g., mother-in-law registers, honorifics, and kin terms which presuppose preexisting
status relationship between speaker and addresses, and that other indexical features of language
bring social relations into existence by virtue of the utterance as with participant pronouns (I;you)
and performative speech acts. This contrast has been widely employed by anthropologists
because it provides for analyzing the social and political efficacy of language in social interaction.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. "Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life." Language &
Communication 23(3):193-229.
Develops the concept of indexical order, which is the process by which micro-contextual social
interaction and talk indexically presuppose and entail macro-sociological categories and values.
He provides a number of examples of this process from the anthropological literature, and
provides a detailed analysis of the indexical ordering in American English identity-commoditizing
“wine talk” (aka. oinoglossia).
Iconicity in Language

Contrary to the structuralist focus on the purely conventional and unmotivated nature of the linguistic sign,
Roman Jakobson 1965, having become influenced by Peirce’s semiotic, argued that iconicity was so
ubiquitous and so fundamental a feature that research on this topic constituted “the quest for the essence
of language.” For Jakobson, many linguistic universals on various levels of language could be explained
in terms of the iconic nature of linguistic signs. For example, Jakobson documented a number of
morphological universals based on iconicity, such as the markedness relations of
unmarked/comparative/superlative forms (cross linguistically, the comparative form is always marked and
superlative form is always additionally marked, not vice versa). Jakobson 1978 also described how
bundles of phonological features in language tend to iconize particular sets of meanings, thus identifying
the semiotic basis of the process of “sound symbolism” (for a review of subsequent research on sound
symbolism see Nuckolls 1999). On the lexical level, Jakobson 1962 employed the concept of iconicity to
develop a theory to explain the prevalence of “mama” and “papa” forms across historically unrelated
languages. Following Jakobson’s path-breaking work, linguistic anthropologists have documented the
principle of iconicity on various levels of language (reviewed by Mannheim 1999), focusing in particular on
the social and pragmatic effects of iconic sign processes. For example, Mark Sicoli 2010 has documented
how shifting voice features in Zapotec has an iconic relationship with local characterizations of social
“size”; and in cross-linguistic research, Sicoli and colleagues 2015 have demonstrated how pitch level in
discourse iconizes (in particular, rhematizes) pragmatic functions in interaction. Like many uptakes of
Peirce in anthropology and related fields, researchers have tended to focus on Peirce’s trichotomy of
“Icon, Index, Symbol” (how signs relate to their objects). Though since signs only relate to their objects
through the work of interpretation, Sicoli 2014 argues the study of material signs would benefit from
explicit attention to the third trichotomy of “Rheme, Dicent, Argument” which examines the sign from the
perspective of the interpretant.
Jakobson, Roman. 1965. “Quest for the Essence of Language.” Diogenes 13 (51): 21–37.
Jakobson argues that iconicity permeates all levels of language. For example, on the level of
morphology, Jakobson argues that markedness relations between
unmarked/comparative/superlative (big/bigger/biggest; small/smaller/smallest) pattern where the
contrast is likely marked by an increase in linguistic form, and never a decrease in form.
Jakobson identifies many examples of this principle of iconicity in language, and argues that it is
a fundamental and perhaps universal feature of language.
Jakobson, Roman. 1978. Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Jakobson discusses sound systems, arguing that certain combinations of distinctive features
have iconic associations with common particular meanings in language, such as acoustically
open and grave sounds in words for large objects (and thus words for large objects will tend to
have more open and grave acoustic features). Thus, Jakobson identified the linguistic and
semiotic mechanisms of sound symbolism which was itself a phenomenon documented in
American Indian Languages by Edward Sapir and other Boasian anthropologists.
Jakobson, Roman. 1962. “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’?” In Roman Jakobson. 1985 Selected Writings, Vol. I:
Phonological Studies, 538–545. The Hague: Mouton
Jakobson provides a linguistic-semiotic explanation for the high frequency of “mama” and “papa”
forms in historically unrelated languages. He argues that nasal sounds which are produced by the
babies during breastfeeding become associated with nurturance and then with the mother (or
potentially, the wet nurse). The consonant-vowel reduplication of such words is an early form of

babbling. Jakobson argues that such words originate through iconic-indexical processes initiated
by children, and are then conventionalized by a community of users.
Mannheim, Bruce. 1999. “Iconicity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1/2): 107–10.

Explains iconicity where Peirce defined an Icon as a “sign by virtue of its own quality and [a] sign
of whatever else partakes of that quality,” p107, and subtypes of images, diagrams, and
metaphors. While iconicity has often erroneously been taken as natural relation, Mannheim
shows the importance of mediation and that an effect of iconicity can be the erasure of its
mediation by naturalizing the semiotic distinction through reference to another believed to be
outside culture.
Nuckolls, Janis B. 1999. “The Case for Sound Symbolism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1): 225–
52.
This is a review of research on sound symbolism as a cross-cultural feature of language,
documenting the prevalence of the phenomenon, and discussing the semiotic, socio-cultural,
acoustic, and biological mechanisms involved in sound symbolic processes.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2014. “Ideophones, Rhemes, Interpretants” Pragmatics and Society 5(3): 445-454.
Observes that Peirce’s uptake in anthropology and linguistics is often limited to the second
trichotomy (Icon, Index, Symbol) which considers signs in relation to objects; e.g., icons can
resemble their objects, like portraits. Argues this “naturalizes” iconicity and that cultural analysis
should attend to Peirce’s third trichotomy (Rheme, Dicent, Argument) which examines signs from
the perspective of their Interpretants. Rhemes for example, take an Icon as their interpretant
revealing, rather than erasing, the cultural conventionality of signs.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2010. ”Shifting Voices with Participant Roles: Voice Qualities and Speech Registers in
Mesoamerica.” Language in Society 39 (4): 521-553.
Argues that voice qualities can be the primary signs of linguistic registers termed “voice registers”
and illustrates registers of falsetto voice, harsh breathy voice, whisper voice, and creaky voice
that function in Zapotec, and across Meso-America, for respect, authority, direct
address/exclusion, and commiseration, respectively. Posits iconic metaphorical relations: the
falsetto voice described by speakers as “speaking small” depicts one as socially smaller in a
participation frame, the harsh voice described as “speaking big” depicts one as interactionally
larger.
Sicoli, Mark A., Tanya Stivers, N.J. Enfield & Stephen C. Levinson. 2015. “Marked Initial Pitch in
Questions Signals Marked Communicative Function.” Language and Speech 58(3) 204-223.
Examines how the initial pitch of utterances functioning as questions can provide a frame for
inferential interpretation drawing on Peircean semiotics to explain how a phonetic pattern where
initial pitch deviated from a speaker’s median initial pitch was predictive of questions with
functions that deviated from common “information seeking” use to a “socially evaluative” use that
require a listener to go beyond the literal meaning. The inference is grounded on an iconic
relation where exceptional form cues exceptional meaning.
Gesture and Embodied Communication

Classifications of gesture and embodied communication practices by linguistic anthropologists and

cultural psychologists are explicitly based on Peircean semiotic framework. The first of these was
anthropologist Adam Kendon’s 1972 continuum of gesture behavior ranging from indexical-iconic
“gesticulations” tied to the co-occurring speech, to conventionalized “emblems,” such as the “middle
finger” in American gesture or some Italian “quotable” gestures, many of which both co-occur with speech
but are also detachable from speech on account of their highly conventionalized meaning. Cultural
psychologist and pioneer of the psycholinguistic approach to gesture studies, David McNeill, developed
“Kendon’s continuum” into an explicitly Peircean semiotic categorization of gesture behavior (McNeill
1992). Anthropological research on gesture has transitioned from classifications of gesture behaviors
based on semiotic considerations, to analyses of the roles of gestures and the other forms of embodied
communication in the management of interaction in social-spatial ecologies as in Enfield 2009 and
Goodwin 2011, and in Wolfgram 2014 who examined gesture in larger social-ideological processes.
Enfield, N.J. 2009. The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances. New York:
Draws on Peircean semiotics, researches speech-with-gesture with critique of focus of
mainstream linguistics on competence and static representational meaning to motivate meaning
as performative, interactive and dynamic. Examines the semiotics of speech, gesture and
composite utterances, which combine multiple signs of multiple types (e.g., speech with gesture)
in dynamic moves that present themselves for interpretation. Component signs can only make
sense as part of a larger composite of which they are an increment of a developing sequence.
Goodwin, Charles. 2011. “Contextures of Action”. In Embodied Interaction: Language and the Body in the
Material World. Edited by Jürgen Streeck, Charles Goodwin and Curtis LeBaron, 182-193. New York:
Building from insights of communicative ecologies including an aphasic man with a three-word
vocabulary who none-the-less becomes a powerful speaker through building action in concert
with the other participants, Goodwin draws on Peirce and Deacon 1997 (see section below, *The
Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction*) to argue that speaking requires
cooperative semiosis in which human action is constructed through signs that are public,
embodied, and multi-modal, and which “mutually elaborate” each other and the world they are
tied to.
Kendon, Adam. 1972. “Some Relationships between Body Motion and Speech.” Studies in Dyadic
Communication 7 (177): 90.
A pioneering classification of gesture behavior including deictic (pointing gestures), beat gestures
(which resemble prosody), and iconic gestures (representational gestures) which are based on a
similarity between the hand-shape-and-movement and the concept. Gestures are arranged on a
continuum from those that are tightly timed to the speech, such as beats and other forms which
resemble the prosody and/or meaning of the talk, to highly conventionalized emblems (symbols)
which can function independently from language.
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of
Chicago press.
McNeill further developed Kendon’s Peircean work on gesture classification, which has been
highly influential in anthropological, psychological, and linguistic research on gesture. McNeill

added important psychological dimensions including metaphorical gestures where an iconic

similarity relates to an abstract concept, such as container metaphors used in some Western
speech communities, in which knowledge is contained within metaphorical containers formed by
the hands, and abstract points, when a person points to a concept which is imagined in empty
space.
Wolfgram, Matthew. 2014. “Gesture and the Communication of Mathematical Ontologies in Classrooms.”
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (2): 216–37.
Employs a Peircean framework to analyze the role of gesture in math classrooms, which
communicates an implicit and highly authoritative ontology of the nature of mathematical
knowledge. Math teachers’ gestures and patterns of bodily activity in the classroom ecology form
an iconic diagram--a metaphor of participation--which represents examples of mathematical
knowledge as Platonic “abstract objects.” The process communicates an ontology to socialize
mathematical knowledge which is associated with the social authority of math to model and
communicate truth about reality.
Language Ideology
Language ideologies are beliefs about languages and their speakers which are coordinated and reinforce
social and political positions. Like all ideologies, ideologies about language clarify some aspects of social
reality, and at the same time, they misrecognize, obfuscate, and erase other aspects. Thus, the
development of the concept of language ideology in linguistic anthropology is part of the expansion of a
political economic perspective about language use more generally (review in Woolard and Schieffelin,
1994). The early development of the concept by linguistic anthropologists incorporated Peirce’s theory of
signs, in particular because of the processual quality of Peirce’s concept of semiosis which makes visible
the social-political nature of signification. Peirce is sometimes read as being a typologist. But, he argued
that his semiotic categories were ideal types, never realized as such and only made visible with
considerable philosophical mediation. And so, while he employed typology as a philosophical method, on
a fundamental level Peirce viewed semiosis as a process, and later linguistic anthropologists documented
the political consequences of that process. Also, Peirce’s semiotic theory emphasizes that signs are
always interpreted by particular interpreters—contrasting with the structuralist concept for language as a
property of a speech community—which is a feature that highlights the social positionality of meaning.
Following the Peircean focus on semiotic process and positionality, Silverstein 1979 identified the
semiotic processes by which speakers become aware of their own language, a prerequisite for the
production of language ideologies. Then, Irvine and Gal 2000 identified a set of constituent semiotic
processes which speakers use to transform this potential of linguistic awareness into language ideological
projections. The majority of work on language ideologies that followed either directly referenced or
assumed these analyses of the fundamental semiotic processes involved in language ideologies. Irvine
2001 developed language ideological analyses that employ this semiotic perspective have been
developed to analyze the systems of contrasts involved in speech styles and Kuipers 1998 argued for
historical processes involved in the transformation of ritual speech genres. Keane 2003 has argued that
for language ideological and other ideological processes which cause an objectification or naturalization
of social relations—via iconization, for example—it is necessary to contextualize that analysis within local
cultural assumptions or “semiotic ideologies” about what are the qualities and values associated with
“objects” or “nature.”

Irvine, Judith T. 2001. “’Style’ as Distinctiveness: The Culture and Ideology of Linguistic Differentiation.” In
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Edited by Penelope Eckert and John Rickford, 21–43. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Argues that “styles” are part of systems of contrast in which distinctiveness is created and draws
on Peirce to point out that “indexes” as commonly referred to in sociolingusitics, require an
interpretant, informed by participants’ understandings as positioned in their social and semiotic
worlds. Distinctiveness and interpretation works alongside an iconicity of aesthetic consistency in
the semiotics of style.
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language ldeology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of
Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35-48. Santa Fe, NM: SAR
Press.
This paper identifies three semiotic processes involved in the production of language ideologies,
which involve the projection of a resemblance (i.e., iconicity) between language and some other
socio-cultural domain (i.e., fractal recursivity), which highlights certain feature of the
sociolinguistic scene and obfuscates others (i.e., erasure). These three semiotic processes
coordinate in the production socially authoritative and effective ideologies of language. Further
research has found these semiotic processes to be a common—perhaps universal—feature of
language ideological representations.
Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication
23 (3): 409–25.
This article describes the semiotic consequences of signs mediated by material objects. Keane
argues that when anthropologists—following a Marxist analysis—argue that a sign process
produces an objectification or naturalization of social relations it is necessary to contextualize that
analysis within local cultural assumptions about what are the qualities and values associated with
“objects” or “nature.” Keane refers to these broader cultural assumptions about local sign
processes as “semiotic ideologies.”
Kuipers, Joel C. 1998. Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual
Speech on the Island of Sumba. 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In this book Kuipers develops a language ideological and semiotic analysis of factors that have
transformed the practice of ritual speech on the island of Sumba in the Indonesian archipelago.
Silverstein, Michael. 1979. "Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology." In The Elements: A Parasession
on Linguistic Units and Levels. Edited by R. Cline, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer, 193-247. Chicago:
Chicago Linguistic Society.
This paper identifies the semiotic features of language that are conditions of metalinguistic
awareness, and thus, the features of language that can be ideologized. Features of language that
are continuous (vs. discontinuous), segmentable (vs. non-segmentable), and presupposing (vs.
creative) are more accessible to speakers to serve as a basis of language ideological
representations.
Woolard, Kathryn A., and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1994. “Language Ideology.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 23 (1): 55–82.

This is a review of research on language ideology, which includes discussion of a number of

edited volumes that have impacted this line of research.
Language and Commodification

The role of language and other semiotic processes in the production of the commodity form is a central
problem and anthropological theory, and relates to research on the political economy of language (see
section *Language Ideologies*) and on processes of objectification in material culture (see section *Visual
Anthropology and Material Culture*). Judith Irvine 1989 identified the social semiotic conditions by which
language itself can be alienated and exchanged within a particular political economy of value. Following
Irvine, research on the sign processes involved in commodification is addressed in Kockelman 2006 and
with particular attention to the way semiotic thirds mediate changing values in response to NGO activity,
in Kockelman 2016, semiotic processes of objectification by Keane 2003 (cited in *Language
Ideologies*), Pederson 2013 who examined semiotic processes in the production of value in the
transnational networks, and Maurer 2005 who studied the signifying role of the materiality of alternative
currencies in the production of value. A particularly robust line of research stemming from research on
language and commodification are analyses of the role of language, image, and text—often in
combination with images and packaging materials—in the creation of “brands” which circulate with
objects and both produce and authenticate the regime of value which motivates the commodity’s
circulation and consumption exemplified in Manning 2010, Moore 2003 and Urciuoli 2014.
Irvine, Judith T. 1989. “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist
16 (2): 248–67.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with rural Wolof in Senegal, Irvine argues that linguistic signs
play many simultaneous roles in political economy, including serving as an objective exchange
itself. Irvine draws on Peircean semiotics and Jakobson’s multifunctional linguistics (through
Silverstein) to show language as part of political economy dissolving the false dichotomy between
idealism and materialism.
Kockelman, Paul. 2006. “A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16
(1): 76–102.
Uses Peirce’s sign-object-interpretant trichotomy to deploy a theory of meaning that can handle
linguistic meaning and commodities as types rather that conflating economic value and linguistic
meaning as in Saussurean semiology. Kockelman grounds a reanalysis of Marx’s ontology of the
commodity, expanding commodities from goods to the value of affects, acts, and relations.
Grounded in ethnography in Guatemala he focuses attention on how a Peircean semiotic
ontology of the commodity illuminates neoliberal governance through semiotic processes of
commensuration.
Kockelman, Paul. 2015. The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurable Ontologies and Portable Values
in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest. Durham: Duke University Press
A semiotic ethnography of relations between ecotourism and NGO desires to protect the cloud
forest and Quetzal birds and the Q’eqchi’ Maya community of Chicacnab Guatemala. Kockelman
traces semiotic paths linking desire and NGO ideas of value and measurement, with chainsaws,
entrepreneurship, materials generation, the changes in housing they afforded, and the negotiation
across incommensurate ontological worlds they demanded.

Manning, Paul. 2010.”The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 33-49.
Reviews literature on brand semiotics, much of which draws on Peircean concepts of qualisigns,
icons, indices, and symbols, and critiques “dematerialization” of brand in research that opposes
brand to material properties of products for erasing contingency and hybridity in the material
semiosis of brands. Manning moves to follow Moore (2003) in overcoming such schismogenesis
by attending to “semiotic moments of brand” modeled as dialogues between producers
(speakers), consumers (addressees), products (referents), and brands (messages).
Maurer , Bill. 2005. Mutual Life Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
This is an ethnographic study of two alternative currencies, an international system called Islamic
Banking and Finance which is based an Islamic theological priority to avoid “interest” in social
relations, and a democratizing currency system used in the university town of Ithaca New York
called HOURS. The study employs anthropological interpretations of the Peircen semiotic which
foreground the generative nature of the materiality of signs, to illustrate how the alterative money-
forms are transacted in a moral project to produce value.
Moore, Robert. 2003. From Genericide to Viral Marketing: On “Brand.” Language & Communication 23 (3-
4): 331-357.
Approaches phenomenon of “brand” in Peircean semiotic to show how events, experiences, and
communication can be ‘branded’ as things where the objectification of diffuse and unstable sets
of practices or products become visible things to purchase, consume, and talk about through
semiotic processes in which a Firstness is produced in Qualisigns of design features,
Secondness of how products fit consumer activities, and Thirdness positioning Brand
characteristics in relation to other brands.
Pedersen, David. 2013. American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United
States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pedersen draws on Peirce’s synechism to examine continuities connecting Intipucá, El Salvador
with Washington D.C. examining forms of value embodied in labor, services, and remittances in a
framework using Peirce’s notion of the continual development of signs into new signs, such as
transformations of stories in new environments, exported commodities into the labor of migrants
sending remittances to El Salvador, and US counterinsurgency in El Salvador with subsequent
mobilizations of this strategy in the middle east.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2014. “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircean Look at the
Commodification of Liberal Arts Education.” Signs and Society 2 (1): 56–83.
Draws on Peirce and semiotic processes of branding developed in Moore (2003) and Manning
(2010), and objectification in Keane (2003). Urciuoli argues that the branded object commodified
in liberal arts education is formed in the objectification of “the Good Student” as visual image and
value carrying product of higher education represented in visual qualisigns (student and logo
images) which bundle with indexical messages of captions and narratives. These signs are
rhematic in projecting possible futures for consumer families.
Visual Anthropology and Material Culture

A central feature of Peirce’s semiotic and a key innovation over structuralist and other approaches is that
his framework incorporates the material qualities of the sign medium into the framework for analyzing the
process of signification. So, icons and indices signify in part because they incorporate (or are interpreted
to incorporate) the qualities of the object or concept to which they have a signifying relationship. Such
qualities that enter into semiosis are included under Peirce’s phenomenological concept of Firstness; the
perception of peer qualities (this aspect of Peirce’s semiotic is described extensively by Sonneson 1989).
This incorporation of materiality into a holistic semiotic theory has been particularly generative for visual
anthropologists, material culture specialists, and archaeologists (addressed in the section *Archaeology*).
The transdisciplinary framework for such a semiotic theory of material culture integrates linguistic
anthropology, material culture studies, and archaeology and has been contributed to by Parmentier 1997,
Keane 2005, and Keane 2003 (see section *Language Ideologies*) which emphasizes the role of
language and other semiotic processes in the creation of objects and the semiotic and social
consequences of sign processes that are mediated by object forms. In an ethnography, Semiotics of
Drink and Drinking, Manning 2012 developed theory of material culture which employs Peirce’s semiotic
to analyze practices of consumption. Prominent examples of the indexically agentive quality of art and
visual-material culture were developed in Art and Agency by Alfred Gell 1998, and work of the
archeologist Carl Knappett 2002 (see also Knappett 2005 in *Archaeology*). The philosopher Gilles
Deleuze’s 2003 extended Peircean semiotics in an analysis of cinematic perception. And an example of
the transformative nature of the introduction of visual signs into a society is developed by Brian Rotman’s
1987 analysis of the semiotics of the mathematical form Zero during the European late Renaissance.
Deleuze, Gilles (2003), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Uses Peircean categories to create a typology of cinematic imagery where Firstness corresponds
to Affection-image, Secondness to Action-image, and Thirdness to Relation-image. He also
defines additional sign types of Impulse-image between affect and action, and Reflection-image
between action and a relation involving a transformation reflecting another image with its own
reference (a chain of semiosis). This and later work of Deleuze explores the temporality of
semiosis constituting motion pictures and their relation to viewers.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Uses Peirce’s concepts of “index” and “abductive” reasoning to analyze social relations objectified
in material art forms. Gell excludes more commonly studied iconic and symbolic dimensions of art
to focus the reader on how art objects become social participants as indices of agency with
causal agentive effects on interpreters. These insights on agents for interpretation would, in a
more holistic uptake of Peirce’s semiotic, be approached from the perspective of interpretants of
material dicent signs.
Keane, Webb. 2005. “Signs are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In
Materiality: Politics, History, and Culture. Edited by Daniel Miller, 182-205. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Starting from the haunting problem of persisting ancient dichotomies that infect thinking about
materiality Keane considers how the semiological lineage running from Saussure to
poststructuralism has reified a divide between things and ideas, and dematerializing signs.
Focusing on the example of clothing, Keane draws on Peircean concepts of indexicality and
iconicity, and semiotic ideologies to rather approach how things as signs have a practical and

contingent character, with social and historical dimensions in continuous relations to

communication and thought.
Knappett, Carl. 2002. Photographs, Skeumorphs and Marionettes Some thoughts on mind, agency and
object. Journal of Material Culture 7: 91-117.
Knappett argues that while “material culture” in archaeology and material culture studies is often
treated as “symbolic,” in fact, such objects are often, in Peircean terms, indexical and iconic.
Knappett describes how different forms of material culture involve particular icon-index composite
profiles which affect the meaning and agency of the object in contexts of production and
consumption.
Manning, Paul. 2012. Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. New York: A&C Black.
Studies drinking as embodied semiotic in which the materiality of drinks are media of sociality.
Drinks and brands are treated as participants in interactions. Manning builds upon Peircean
qualisigns, specifically in the bundling of qualisigns (Keane 2003) and draws a parallel between
their “potentialities” and the “affordances” of materials in science and technology and perception
studies to the end that he describes semiotic processes through which material qualities and
specific drinks become conventionally invested with social meaning.
Parmentier, Richard. 1997. The Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture. Semiotica 116(1): 1-114.
Published series of lectures first describing the development of semiotic anthropology interpreted
as a “fusion” of insights of Peirce and Saussure in Linguistic Anthropology, then presenting takes
on semiotic cultural analysis, and finally developing a semiotic analysis of style and material
objects, artefacts, images and the use of semiotic typology in cross-cultural comparison.
Rotman, Brian. 1987. Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Historian, philosopher, and sociologist of science Brian Rotman analyzes the semiotics of the
concept and inscription of the mathematical form Zero, during the European late renaissance, as
a novel and paradoxical sign of an absence, which was adopted and transformed social domains
as desperate as science, banking, and art.
Sonneson, Göran. 1989. Pictorial Concepts: Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and its Relevance to the
Interpretation of the Visual World.
Focuses on pictorial signs considering iconicity of perceptual experience, the indexical
connections between visual signs and world, and the production of “surplus of meaning” relying
on symbolic modalities of language and inference.
Archaeology
Things have effects on their worlds and those who interpret them. Peirce’s theory of signs is well suited
as a framework for the interpretation of material culture in the archeological record because it
incorporates the material qualities of the sign medium in the theory of signification. Like Singer’s earlier
attempt to show that the ontological differences between Saussurean and Peircean conceptions of the
sign are consequential for anthropology, archaeologists have come to argue that the Saussurean
conception of sign as the coding of preexisting message, where meaning is encapsulated in the binary,
and ideal, signifier-signified relation, is inadequate for archaeological interpretation of material culture.

Theorizing archaeology’s relation between objects and cognition Shelley 1996 applies Peirce’s theory of
abduction as explanatory visual-based reasoning involved in positing hypotheses in archaeological work.
Preucel and Bauer 2001 argue that Saussurean approaches have hindered postprocessual approaches
to archaeology that aim to focus on “symbolic, structural, or practice-oriented meanings” and advocate
that rethinking archaeological interpretation through a Peircean lens is transformative for the science. The
call has been taken up productively in work of e.g., Bauer 2002, Crossland 2014, Joyce 2008, Knappett
2005, Lele 2006, Preucel 2006, and Wallis 2013. Archaeologists have drawn on Peirce directly and on
interpretations, specifically important has been Keane 2003 “Semiotics and the social analysis of material
things” (see *Language Ideologies*) and 2005 “Signs are not the garb of meaning” (see *Visual
Anthropology and Material Culture*) in which Keane draws on Peircean semiosis to argue for
understanding signs through the meaningful interpretations of things affected through historical process,
and also through Gell 1998 (see *Visual Anthropology and Material Culture*) who explicitly drew
examples of the agentive effects of art and material culture. The interpretive and inferential processes of
meaning making with things is foregrounded in archaeological materials and methods where Peirce’s
semiotic—uniting sign, object and interpretant—is seen as an opening that goes beyond reading signs or
texts to interpreting embodied and material cognition.
Bauer, Alexander A. 2002. Is What You See All You Get? Recognizing Meaning in Archaeology. Journal
of Social Archaeology 2: 37-52.
Argues for a discourse-centered approach to interpreting the meaning of symbolic and functional
artifacts arguing that rather than draw from Saussure-inspired linguistic models, archaeology
should draw on approaches to meaning through practice, or language as social action, as has
been developed in contrast in American linguistic anthropology. Bauer uses Peirce to engage
how archaeologists, as knowing agents, take artifacts as signs to produce knowledge and how
contexts mediate meanings.
Cameron, Shelley. 1996. Visual Abductive Reasoning in Archaeology. Philosophy of Science 63 (2) 278-
301.
Applies Peirce’s theory of abduction as explanatory reasoning involved in positing hypotheses, or
new ideas, in scientific work. Cameron contrasts focus on visual modality with the application of
linguistically centered semiotics in archaeology demonstrating visual abductions in archaeology
based on shape or structure and the processes that can generate or use artifacts as a cognitive
tool of explanation for archaeologists. Shelley works to provide a framework for grounding
understanding of how abduction as creative process may be better understood.
Crossland, Zoë. 2014. Encounters with Ancestors in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of
the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Studies how ambiguous signs of the dead are interpreted by the living and how the presence of
the dead in landscape and material culture changed in the colonial history of Madagascar.
Crossland bases analysis on a Peircean semeiotic framework for its engagement of both material
and immaterial dimensions and effects of sign relations, and for its perspective on sign processes
where the absent can become present, and remain mutable through the iterability of multiple and
varied interpretants.

Joyce, Rosemary A. 2008. Practice in and as Deposition. In Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material
Practices. Edited by Barbara J. Mills and William H. Walker, 25-39. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced
Research Press.
Joyce draws on Peirce’s semiosis to argue that the work of memory is continuous and interpretive
as people engage with things to form concepts that are linked with other people, other things, and
related concepts through history and material practices.
Knappett, Carl. 2005. Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Works to dissolve a pervasive Cartesian dualism in archaeology that has hindered theory of
material culture. Cognitivist views of symbolism as mental operations assume causal sequence of
thought-action-object. Rather Knappett draws on Peirce to theorize objects with the humans who
produced and used them as connected through dynamic networks of agency and personhood,
cognition, and perception. Saussure’s sign is seen as inadequate for material culture studies and
motivates a rethinking of archaeological semiotics through the potentiality of Peircean semiosis.
Lele, Veerendra P. 2006 Material Habits, Identity, Semeiotic. Journal of Social Archaeology 6:48-70.
Builds on Peirce’s interest in overcoming the Cartesian division between mind and matter and
claims that archaeology is well positioned to forward this argument and benefit from the
dissolution. The material world and its habitual effects are bound together. Matter affects habit but
matter also is habit. Lele identifies that the Peircean continuity between thought and semiosis is
helpful for archaeology’s aim to understand how persistent social identities emerge in relation to
artefacts and are interpretable through material habits.
Preucel, Robert W. and Alexander A. Bauer. 2001 Archaeological Pragmatics. Norwegian Archaeological
Review 34:85-96.
Asks to what extent semiotics is an appropriate model for understanding material culture
meaning, and, more specifically, what kind of semiotics is appropriate for archaeological methods
and questions. Argues that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches that informed
Postprocessual archaeology are incomplete and misfitted to archaeological inquiry and argue for
an Archaeological Pragmatics based in Peircean semiosis and informed by the anthropological
pragmatics of Peircean linguistic and semiotic anthropology.
Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Develops a theoretical account of material semiosis and the interpretation of material culture
based on Peircean indexicality, synechism (continuity of the universe increasing in complexity
through semiosis), and pragmatism. Synthesizes approaches to material culture (objectification,
materialization, and the social life of things) and reviews semiotics in anthropology including
Saussurean structuralism, Russian formalism, Prague linguistics, and their relations to structural,
symbolic, and cognitive anthropologies, and their archaeological parallels in processual, post-
processual, and cognitive archaeology.
Wallis, Neil J. 2013. “The Materiality of Signs: Enchainment and Animacy in Woodland Southeastern
North American Pottery. American Antiquity 78(2): 207-226

Explicitly contrasts with approaches to Signs based on Saussure to draw on Peirce’s semiotic
process to examine symbolism expressed in pottery that relies on iconicity and indexicality for
potential and particular social effects.
Biosemiotics
Peirce’s holistic and trans-species framing of semiotics has inspired biosemiotic approaches to
anthropology, which are addressed below under (1) *Signs of Life and Mind* (2) *The Evolution of
Language and Capacity for Social Interaction*.
Signs of Life and Mind

Biosemiotic approaches focus on how the interpretants of semiosis are involved in varied phenomena
ranging from the phototropism of plants leaning toward light and animal cells moving toward or away from
objects, to the evolutionary figure-ground iconicities of camouflage, and to animal cognition and
communication, trans-species assemblages, consciousness, metacommunication, and human language
and culture as phylogenetically evolved and ontogenetically developed. For Peirce, semiotics is inherently
connected with life process. Peirce provides an architectonic framework for analyzing the origination of
simple signs from the habits of biological, ecological, and temporally recurrent processes. “Every symbol
is a living thing...it’s meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones” (CP
2.222). This view itself grows out of Peirce’s notion of synechism “that all that exists is continuous” (CP
1.172) and which has been extended into arguments that the semiotic-nonsemiotic divide is itself
coterminous that of life-nonlife as developed in Hoffmeyer 2012, Deacon 2011, and others. Much of the
foundation for contemporary biosemiotics was laid by Sebeok, whose primary research and service
convening scholars in discussions is seen in the 1992 volume building explicitly on Peircean semiotics.
Explicit connections between Peirce’s corpus and Biosemiotics is also explored in volumes edited by
Romanini and Fernández 2014, and Favareau 2010, who gathered many foundational papers
biosemiotics. Other fundamental influences engaging a transhuman semiotics is seen in Jakob Von
Uexküll’s umwelten as the diverse meaningful relations of life perspectival niches, and importantly in work
of anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Bateson 1979) whose own influence from Peirce made use of
Peirce’s idea of abduction as involved in recognizing the “pattern that connects” biotic, cybernetic, and
symbolic processes and which parallels Peirce’s synechism. A biosemiotics grown from Peirce’s
philosophical writings has become important in shifting anthropological focus from human perspectives to
relations beyond humans involving perspectives from and of other organisms and nature. Reno 2014 for
example draws on a Peircean biosemiotics to expand our understanding of waste products as signs of
life, and Kohn 2013, How Forests Think, works toward an anthropology beyond the human.
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton.
Bateson thinks through Peirce’s process of abduction—the fitting of observations through
hypotheses, often analogy, to rules absent of evidence, and which for humans can provide
comfort and connection. Thought would be impossible without abduction which involves “double
description” of assumed reflections. Evolution and learning both fit the same regularities of
thought, connected in ways of knowing common to all life. Bateson’s ideas resonate with Peirce’s
views on synechism and a dialogic mind not limited to brains inside bodies.
Deacon, Terrence. 2011. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company.

Deacon argues that while processes of mind, like language, culture, and evolution, demonstrate
emergent levels of causality distinct from physical and chemical systems, there is also continuity
with lower order systems. Universal types of emergent organizations are Homeodynamics
(involving thermodynamics), Morphodynamics of self-organization, and teleodynamics of self-
reproducing life and semiotic systems. Incomplete phenomena he terms ententional including
meaning, value, purpose, function, agency, reference, and sentience exist in relationship to, or
become constituted by something non-intrinsic.
Favareau, Donald. 2010. Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary. New York:
Springer.
Favareau assembles and introduces 24 essays on biosemiotics sketching as many beginnings of
biosemiotics highlighting works of Jakob and Thure von Uexküll, Peirce, Morris, Lotman, Sebeok,
Thom, Deely, Rothschild, Bateson, Deacon, Hoffmeyer, Brier, Barbieri and others.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2012. “The Natural History of Intentionality: A Biosemiotic Approach.” In The Symbolic
Species Evolved. Edited by Theresa Achilhab, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon, 97-116. London:
Springer.
Describes “semethic interaction” as a kind of co-evolution where habits can become signs and
individuals of one species acquire the capacity to interpret other species habits as signs.
Discusses how causality in life systems differs from non-life systems because life involves
interpretive processes organized according to semiotic dynamics. Semiotic Freedom is the
capacity of a cell, organism, or species to act through interpretation of sensible surrounding or
biological state.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Towards an anthropology “beyond the human” Kohn’s ethnography of Runa of Amazonian
Ecuador builds on the openness of Peircean semiosis, biosemiotic concepts of emergence and
incomplete natural phenomena from work of Terrence Deacon, and the ontological and
multispecies turns in anthropology to critique social science that places humans at an exceptional
center and to theorize the agency of objects and the relational thinking of environments in ways
that are not projecting “all too human” traits on ecologies.
Reno, Joshua O. 2014. “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter Out of Place’ to Signs of Life.”
Theory, Culture, and Society 31(6): 3-27.
Argues the western conception of waste as ‘matter out of place’ and distinctly human traces of
culture are anthropocentric. Reno turns to biosemiotics and cross-species scholarship to ask
what theories of waste emerge when beginning with e.g., trans-species encounters with scat, as
material signs that allow for interpretation of life, as semi-biotic, spatio-temporal continuation. This
revisioning of waste through its material and semiotic conditions can be applied the management
of mass waste of human societies.
Romanini, Vinicius and Eliseo Fernández. 2014. Peirce and Biosemiotics: A Guess at the Riddle of Life.
New York: Springer.
Edited volume explores semiosis as living process and the science of signs “as” living systems
with each chapter starting from an excerpt from Peirce’s corpus covering the ground of triadic

relations, chance, continuity, indeterminacy, habit, causation, intelligibility, instinct, abduction,

living symbols, mindless signs, and proto-propositions.
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. (Eds.) 1992. Biosemiotics: The Semiotic Web. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Volume brings together papers in biosemiotics on topics ranging from the semiotics of nature, life,
disease, diagnosis, evolution, and ethnography.
The Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction

Peirce did not view human language or the linguistic sign as the basic fundamental sign-form, against the
model of which other types of signs could be evaluated and considered (unlike Saussure, who considered
the linguistic system as the prototype of a semiology placing humans at the center of a science of signs).
Peirce provides an architectonic framework for analyzing the origination of simple signs from the habits of
biological, ecological, and temporally recurrent processes, and thus, his semiotic has been central to
biosemiotic accounts of the evolution of language and interaction. Complex symbolic systems of
language are explored in Deacon 1997 and furthermore in the volume The Symbolic Specie Evolved,
edited by Schilhab, Stjernfelt, and Deacon 2012. Semiosis is continuous with life processes back to the
dawn of life prompting scholars to transgress classical ontological divisions between humanities and
sciences. Favareau 2008 works with theory from anthropology, conversation analysis, and linguistics in a
biosemiotic approach to develop an approach to language in use grounded in the temporality and
sequencing of semiosis. Favareau 2008 and Sonneson 2007 make important biosemiotic critiques of
linguistics and cognitive science, which are paralleled and elaborated in Goodwin 2017. Urban 2002
developed a linguistic anthropological theory of metacommunication into a theory of language origins and
Sicoli 2015 argued for the phylogenetic relevance of voice registers as metacommunication distributing
topic and comment or predicate and argument across semiotic modalities.
Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton.

Synthesizing neuroanatomy, biological anthropology, cybernetics, and linguistics, Deacon argues
for a theory of language evolution in which symbols emerging from more biologically common
icons and indices. Deacon’s emergence thinking brings together Bateson’s notions of logical
types with Peirce’s trichotomy of Icon, Index, Symbol. Rather than an innate language acquisition
device, it is the capacity for symbolic reference that distinguishes humans, developed in a
dynamics coevolutionary path involving social relations, brains, thought, and communication.
Deacon, Terrence. 2012. Beyond the Symbolic Species. In The Symbolic Species Evolved. Edited by
Schilhab, Theresa, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon, pp 9-38. Netherlands: Springer
Deacon addresses prominent criticisms of his 1997 Book The Symbolic Species and proposes
future directions. Critiques simplistic notions of symbolic interpretation as having hindered
progress in the study of language, language evolution, neural processing, and language learning,
and describes the indexical and iconic infrastructure for symbolic interpretation important for
understanding universals of grammar, and looks toward a better understanding of the role of
relaxed selection and self-domestication in language evolution.
Favareau, Donald. 2008. Collapsing the Wave Function of Meaning: The Epistemological Matrix of Talk-
in-Interaction. In A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to biosemiotics. Edited by
Jesper Hoffmeyer, 169-212. London: Springer.

Develops interaction analysis within a biosemiotic framework drawing from Peirce and Bateson
and Conversation Analysis. In this view interacting agents provide each other with the grounds for
an immediate connected next action in a chain of semiosis. Favareau critiques generative
linguistic theories of language as computation and their speakers as autonomous agents and
argues the efficacy of language involves the co-participation of speakers creating contexts of
relevance, constraint, and possibility that shape their worlds.
Goodwin, Charles. 2017. Co-Operative Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Building on insights in biosemiotics, conversation analysis, and multimodal interaction, Goodwin,
develops a framework for studying how humans create action and shared knowledge “in concert”
by reusing the artifacts of prior actions. The accumulation of culture and language through co-
operative action is demonstrated through video analysis arguing for an intertwined and dialogic
semiosis in embodied interactions that distributes meaningful resources in the actions, tools, and
landscapes of copresence.
Schilhab, Theresa, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon. 2012. The Symbolic Species Evolved.
Netherlands: Springer.
This volume compiles contributions from Symbolic Species Conferences that took place in 2006,
2007 reflecting on the impact of Deacon's influential 1997 book The Symbolic Species and
surveying research on language evolution and evolutionary cognition in the decade that followed.
Scholars engage Peirce’s semiotics in evolution and biology, biosemiotics, neuroscience and
embodied cognition and take on themes of self-control, intentionality, cooperation, knowledge,
and emergence.
Sicoli, Mark A. 2015. “Voice Registers” The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Second Edition, edited by
Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 105-126. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & sons,
Ltd.
Review of work on voice qualities in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Voice qualities
that conventionally frame the content of speech in relation to situations, stances, and participant
roles, are seen as living fossils of language form illustrated to have metalinguistic functions
important for both language ontogeny, as when configuring “one word” utterances as multi-sign
emotional predicates, and in language phylogeny, as neuro-laryngeal control would evolve
through the global application of voices over utterances as antecedent to the fine motor control
that configures voicing at the sub-utterance scale of segments.
Sonneson, Göran. 2007. “From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning: A study in
Phenomenological Semiotics.” In Body, Language, and Mind. Edited by Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev,
Roslyn M. Frank, 85-127. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Critiques Cognitive Linguistics and Biosemiotics for not distinguishing meaning in a general sense
from sign functions which require differentiation. Argues “image schemas” are kinds of bodily
meaning produced in a phenomenology of what Husserl called the Lifeworld involving the way
things tend, which Sonneson relates to Peircean Thirdness, abductions, and Gibsonian
affordances, and umwelten as described by Von Uexkill.
Urban, Greg. 2002. "Metasignaling and language origins." American Anthropologist 104(1): 233-246.

Theorizes metasignal-signal relations as involving iconicity, where signals are like other signals
that are given new meaning through distinctiveness, in which they are unlike the like signal.
Argues that linguistic anthropological theorizing of metadiscourse and metasignaling producing
sociability has importance for understanding the evolutionary origins of language. In this view, an
instinctive limbic vocal signal becomes the model for a neocortically managed metasignal where
strategic vocal manipulations in hominins may be precursors to cultural metasignals and
language.
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Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory

The Peircean Corpus and Commentaries for Anthropology

*The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American

Philosophical Appropriations into Anthropology

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by GC Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

James’ descriptions of mystical experiences—and the analysis of their ineffable qualities—have

From Symbolic to Semiotic Anthropology

Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton

The Semiotic Approach in Linguistic Anthropology

Deixis, Emergent Contexts and Social Relations

Hanks, William F. 1999. “Indexicality.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1/2): 124–26.

Mannheim, Bruce. 1999. “Iconicity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1/2): 107–10.

Gesture and Embodied Communication

Classifications of gesture and embodied communication practices by linguistic anthropologists and

added important psychological dimensions including metaphorical gestures where an iconic

This is a review of research on language ideology, which includes discussion of a number of

Language and Commodification

Visual Anthropology and Material Culture

contingent character, with social and historical dimensions in continuous relations to

Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Signs of Life and Mind

relations, chance, continuity, indeterminacy, habit, causation, intelligibility, instinct, abduction,

The Evolution of Language and Capacity for Social Interaction

Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton.

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