This article proposes the concept of “nationalness” to account for the persistent circulation of national labels as a tool of distinction. We argue that the concept expands on the traditional conception of nation as country of origin to include cultural notions of sensuous and aesthetic qualities that are semiotically tied to national “essence.” Nationalness connects products to nations not only through indexicality but also iconicity. It is made possible through “rhematization,” the process of appropriating signs whose interpretants are taken to be iconic. Talk of nationalness enables consumers to make sense of national labels in today’s world where the both ends of capitalism—manufacturing and consumption—are thoroughly global. Instead of confining our analytical focus to top-down national branding projects, we examine how consumers invoke the idea of a nation to describe their uses of industrial products. Our case study is the popular concept of “British sound” circulated among audiophiles. Drawing on online discussions of an internet community, the article shows that audiophiles refer to Britishness as a key mechanism to distinguish their consumption experiences from mass market consumption. We further show how the label “British sound” can be used to describe the experiences of consumer products that are no longer manufactured in Britain.

This article documents the debates surrounding the policing of the brand “Switzerland.” It demonstrates that debating nation brands—particularly within the framework of a state policy of economic expansion—seems to be about who gets to produce and consume the desires that nations are imagined to stand for as much as about who gets to capitalize on the imagined value that these nations seem to have in specific markets. I also argue that if brands effectively seem to be precious sources of added value that can be exchanged with other forms of capital, not everybody is considered to have equal access to this capital. Because of their capability to produce and naturalize hierarchies between commodities, nation brands—and the entire institutional apparatus within which they are anchored and regulated—have also to be understood as key technologies of a state infrastructure governing the distribution of capital under current capitalistic conditions.

In this article, I offer an account of the “linguistic landscapes” associated with the commodification and purchase of internet services in southern Peru. Through an account of public signage deployed by internet lounges in this area as well as the ideologies that make sense of it, the analysis reveals one of the ways in which moral panic over digital gaming gets semiotically mediated. To do this, the article develops a theoretical machinery that makes sense of the ways in which public signs—relative to their infrastructural contexts—come to project channels for their uptake. When these relationships are considered relative to the ideologies that target them, what gets revealed are the moral contours of Southern Peruvian public life. The analysis ultimately shows how the concept “linguistic landscape” can be useful for the semiotic study of infrastructure as well as the forms of the public life that it helps to mediate.

The designation of Catalan culture as guest of honor at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair raised controversy over whether Catalan culture is expressed in one language or two. This was an opportunity for elites to promote Catalan industry internationally but also to compete over visions of Catalonia for domestic political purposes. An analysis of media texts from the controversy shows that national branding emerged as a key trope in the official defense of emphasizing Catalan over Castilian-medium literature. As a discourse sanctioned in the global political economy, branding was strategically revoiced by Catalan officials to parry Castilian critics’ free-marketeer accusations of illiberal essentialist protectionism. This analysis uses Silverstein’s concept of indexical order to argue that branding functioned not only as a sign of Catalonia’s distinctiveness in the global marketplace but also at a higher order as a brand in itself to index the Catalan administration’s cosmopolitan, contemporary, and rationalist character.

Colors play an important role in the social landscape of Mauritius. First and foremost, they help to distinguish the separate identities of the island’s major religious faiths. But that is not all, as they also serve to reinscribe cultural differences between the island’s various ethnic groups. And there is also evidence to suggest that this ethnoreligious color symbolism is exploited by the island’s major political parties to mobilize the support of voters. So saturated is the Mauritian social landscape with these color schema, that is hard to see how the society can overcome its ethnic divisions and foster a sense of national unity until these cultural practices are attenuated. Indeed as long as the state continues to allocate subsidies to religious organizations on the basis of their ability to objectify their respective cultural differences, it is unlikely such practices are going to disappear anytime soon. The aforementioned issues are explored using a variety of anthropological theories and methods, with particular emphasis laid in the article on the benefits of adopting a more nuanced symbolic approach to the construction of ethnicity in Mauritius to that which is currently available in the literature.

The evolution of monotheism within a polytheist culture is strictly connected with the institution of the dialectics between “monolatry” and “idolatry.” On the one hand, one divinity among many becomes the center of an increasingly exclusive cult; on the other hand, this exclusivity unfolds in parallel with the stigmatization of any alternative veneration. The establishment of monolatry is substantiated both in sacred texts, which designate the only god, forbid all others, prescribe the legitimate cult, and condemn deviations, and in liturgy that avoids any reference to multiplicity of transcendence. The liturgical work of monolatry, however, is not only positive, since in addition to regulating the material, verbal, and actional signs of the cult, it also entails a destructive tension. Thus, in establishing monolatry, determining formulae for evoking the only transcendence is as essential as destroying any signs that might contaminate it by representing a rival divinity.

In this essay I examine gold’s semiotic claims in the context of perceptions of gold in global financial markets, beginning with an intriguing parallel drawn by my informants between gold and Bitcoin. I make several interrelated arguments: (1) that in a variety of cultural contexts, gold has become a site for a very particular semiotic claim—that of not signifying at all; (2) that in the contemporary instance of physical gold in relation to other assets based on gold, this is expressed in an attention to gold’s material, tactile qualities (represented both iconically and indexically), and its extrasocial character; (3) that similar claims are made for Bitcoin, often drawing on a “digital metallism,” and idiom of gold; and (4) that the self-reflexive semiotic properties of gold have a long and diverse cultural history. In concluding, I speculate on how gold’s particular semiotic stance reflects one possible articulation of nature and convention as sources of meaning.

Country-of-origin appeals create national identities for brands, thereby exploiting positive country-specific expertise. As a result of such marketing discourses, which utilize essentialized territory-language linkages, such practices become enregistered for consumers, and these linguistic fetishes are available as semiotic resources for the national identity branding of products. Contemporary consumers can play a role in creating, maintaining, and possibly challenging the national identity branding of products. This article reports on a recent campaign by brewer Stella Artois that used French to emphasize the brand’s Belgian origins and on consumers’ disputing this usage in a discussion of the campaign on YouTube. The case illustrates the stability of the semiotic resources of national identity branding and who is and is not allowed to use them and for which purposes. This becomes apparent when transgressing these unwritten rules is sanctioned by the audience for the ad, who seek restoration of predictability and stability in relation to borders and branding.

What is the relation between wishes and witches, between Grice and Freud, between political repression and scientific rendering? What is the relation between ideational and affective phenomena (such as desire and jealousy) and material processes (such as particle scattering and diffusion barriers)? This article demonstrates the broad similarities underlying conversational implicature and dream interpretation, focusing on the use of communicative intentions and repressed wishes as grounds for motiving inferences. It describes a variety of other hermeneutics that evince a similar logic, albeit with different grounds—witch trials among the Azande, and taboo-reckoning among the Maya. And it details the intimate relation between such hermeneutics and the techniques scientists use to produce and interpret laboratory phenomena, and thereby render the real. It foregrounds the affective nature of such processes: the pleasures and pains of laboring in productively constrained, and phenomena-creating, inferential spaces.

Prehistoric archaeologists generally treat early body ornaments, such as the Blombos shell beads, as inherently symbolic artefacts that were created by symbolically capable brains. Essentially, they treat material signs in strictly linguistic terms and view them as the epiphenomenal products of internal representations that were used as templates. Yet material signification is neither inherently symbolic, nor the a priori product of innate neural structures. We must thus opt for a pragmatic semiotic theory that can describe the physical qualities and relations of material signs, and an enactive theory of cognition that can explain the anchoring of novel concepts to the material world. In synergistically fusing these strands, this article puts forth a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics. By applying this evolutionary epistemology to the case of early body ornamentation, this study traces the prehistoric process of semiotic scaffolding that eventually led to development of symbolic artefacts and practices.

This article analyzes the forms of metasemiotic regimentation that are inherent to any nation-branding project and examines their implications for the organization of publics and governance. Focusing on a state-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in the Republic of Macedonia, the article argues that nation-branding strategies are best understood as interventions within and across public spheres. As illustrated in the article, the nation-branding project that developed around Skopje 2014—a spectacular urban renovation plan that transformed Macedonia’s capital—included both a public relations effort that targeted several external publics and also a campaign to shape how Macedonia was represented internal to the Macedonian public sphere. This inward-facing aspect of nation branding in Macedonia manifested through metapragmatic discourses that ascribed meaning to public speech and conduct based on their imagined impact on the nation-branding project. In analyzing how government-produced media sought to interpellate Macedonians as responsible for “living the brand,” the article interrogates how logics of nation branding can organize new demands on how and to whom one performs national identity and argues that such coordinated efforts to regulate public communication constitute a wider program of economic and social governance that can be glossed as a “nation brand regime.”

This article examines how a discourse of nationhood has developed and evolved in Acadie since the nineteenth century. It describes the important role played by language ideologies in the construction of competing discourses in the Francophone world. The discursive changes that have occurred since the 1960s in relation to the distribution of material and symbolic resources will be explored, with a specific focus on the resemioticization of French vernaculars in artistic creation and tourism. Finally, the authors will illustrate how the Acadians have transformed a discourse of stigmatization into a discourse of differentiation by rejecting the standard language ideology that has traditionally defined the Franco-Canadian community. The examples of artistic production and tourism will be used to illustrate how Acadians have profited from the adoption of this discourse in national and international markets.

Classic Whorfian work has explored the relationship between grammatical features and cognition, but how languages can also influence thought through discursive patterns remains a largely unexplored topic in the neo-Whorfian agenda. In this article, I conduct an ethnopoetic analysis of a Chol traditional story to investigate the relationships between Chol “fashions of speaking,” in the Whorfian sense of the term, and cognitive patterns. I revisit a classic Whorfian topic—how speakers of different languages conceptualize time—but through close examination of how temporal relationships between events are deployed in narrative contexts. I argue that Chol narratives possess a nonlinear plot structure, which exemplifies the kind of non-iconic, nonlinear presentation of sequential events that is characteristic of Chol discourse and thought.

This article analyzes how under conditions of crisis certain social actors shift the metasemiotic frames through which minority languages may be approached in order to suit place-branding purposes and to make them more widely accessible for business usage. In the cases we investigate in Shetland and Western Ireland, the new meanings associated with language are connected with how crises are framed and constructed in discourse. We thus examine two types of crises in which certain social actors view language as part of the solution to ward off specific trouble: economic recession (Ireland) and depopulation (Shetland). With the branding potential of these languages then positioned as part of the solutions to “crises,” new indexical alignments exemplify the neoliberal metasemiotic framework through which all elements of social and cultural life may be strategically made marketable—in this case on the intra- and international markets on which people themselves are vied for.

This article argues that a late-night television infomercial displays the structure of a ritual rite of passage. It tracks how the infomercial creates a state of ideological liminality that is redressed by a series of poetic (linguistic) parallelisms. This culminates in a trope of incorporation that transforms the social identity of the viewer from “unsuccessful” to “successful.” Ritual in form yet electronic in medium, the conclusion relates the ritual merging of consumer and new product type in processes of commodification to the ways in which cultural analogy, ideological and otherwise, moves certain kinds of social meanings into new arenas of practice.

This article explores the mediatized nature of the circulation of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by focusing on psychoanalytic talk and listening practices, inside and outside the clinical setting. It shows that mediatization processes, which link institutional practices to processes of communication and commoditization (Agha 2011a), are key for understanding how psychoanalytic knowledge (including its lexical register) and its therapeutic practice get reproduced in fractionally congruent forms within everyday interactions across Buenos Aires. Specific emphasis is placed on the many uptake formulations of psychoanalytic practice that are observed today, on the scale-changing effects of mediatization, and on changes in the propinquity of interactants in psychoanalytic encounters.

In 2007, Belfast City Council contracted with a London-based branding consultancy to develop a new brand identity for the city. The result was a new logo (a heart-shaped letter B), a bespoke typeface, and a set of brand guidelines designed to reflect “Belfast’s coming of age, the turning of a new page and the new shared enthusiasm which is palpable to all those who experience the city.” A key element of the rebranding was an official palette of sixteen colors to be deployed in association with the logo. Nonprimary hues with low saturation predominate in the new color scheme, which is overlaid upon a complex preexisting system of vivid sectarian color contrasts that mark, among other things, the partitioning of space in a “divided city.” Drawing on recent work in the semiotic anthropology of branding, the article shows that the rebranding of Belfast is part of a larger effort to frame recent histories of ethno-sectarian conflict in terms of “cultural” diversity.

The multicharacter biographies of hip hop artists, consumers, and distributors in post-Yugoslav spaces (ex-YU) straddle a period of seemingly never-ending, teleologic ‘transitions.’ The business models of regional music industries have also dramatically changed after the emergence of new forms of digital distribution. These transformations each occur within broader, often violent shifts from self-managed state socialism to clientelistic neoliberalism. I analyze artists’ discussions of professional limitations and the debates surrounding brand acts, or artists’ symbolic range of ambivalent, critical, and pragmatic stances toward media industries. Artists often compare the precarious present of a marginal position within the record business in ex-YU using frames that reference foreign and past elsewheres, including an era of ‘good life’ socialism. A debate has emerged as to whose future a new present laden with brands and industry regulation best serves.