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- Convenors:
-
Tatsuma Padoan
(University College Cork)
Lijing Peng (Trinity College Dublin)
Julia Sonnleitner (University of Vienna)
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- Discussant:
-
David Malinowski
(San José State University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the reciprocal production of place and language: How do places create specific subjectivities and temporalities through linguistic practice and material agency? And how do discourse and language ideology constitute space and endow subjectivities with differing degrees of agency?
Long Abstract:
In their recent work The Anthropology of the Future, Bryant and Knight (2019) have strongly connected Aristotle's notion of "potentiality"—described as the possibility of the future inscribed into the materiality of the present, as an immanent anticipation of what might or might not be—to Ernst Bloch's definition of hope centred on the "not-yet" (Noch-Nicht). In this panel, we would like to stimulate discussion on the potentialities of semiotic landscapes, not only by ethnographically exploring the prospective temporalities inherent in places—using notions like chronotope, semiosphere, affect, etc. to investigate spaces of hope—but also by pushing the concept of semiotic landscape itself further, exploring its "not-yet-realised" theoretical potentials. The concept of semiotic landscape, dealing with the textual and discursive construction of places and the use of space as a semiotic resource (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), has cast light on the interplay between language, visual discourse, spatial practices, and the spatial dimension of culture.
In this panel, we wish to extend such interplay by looking more closely at the role of language practices, language ideologies and material agency generated along spatial transformations. We welcome papers from linguistic and social anthropology (and related fields) to present ethnographic and theoretical discussions that enrich the study of semiotic landscapes. By connecting language practices, material agency, and language ideologies to the study of semiotic landscapes, we wish to draw attention to the potentialities of places to produce specific subjectivities and temporalities, but also to orient our potential actions, plans, future expectations and hopes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
A harsh future is inscribed into the landscape of Joshua Tree National Park. Nonetheless, the landscape embodies a geography of hope. Peirce's "mediational" semio-genetic sign illuminates the semio-ethical potentialities that inspire hopeful, responsible subjectivities in Joshua Tree visitors.
Paper long abstract:
Joshua Tree National Park, located at the interface of the Mojave and Colorado deserts in the interior of Southern California, is one of the largest federally-designated preservation areas in the United States. A harsh future is inscribed into its nearly 800,000 acres of mostly barren, arid wilderness environment. The parched, stoney, often hellishly hot landscape offers a potent experience to millions of visitors every year of what might or might not come to pass for the planet as a whole. Despite its post-apocalyptic features, however, the semio-ethics of Joshua Tree are not entirely or even predominantly dystopic. On the contrary, the park's popular discourse, which dates back nearly a century, represents it as a place of cosmic regeneration, eternal peace, and enduring, unending life—terrestrial and otherwise. As such, the Joshua Tree landscape serves as a stage for the continuous re-enactment of what the American landscape writer, Wallace Stegner, famously identified as "the geography of hope" in relation to the US National Park System and what the philosopher Jonathan Lear has characterized as "radical hope" in relation to the Crow Native American experience of genocide. Charles Peirce's post-1900 doctrine of the "mediational" sign, and his "Third branch" orientation to semio-genesis illuminate the processes by which the semiotic potentialities emplaced in the Joshua Tree National Park landscape inspire hopeful subjectivities in visitors, even in the face of increasingly catastrophic future-more-vivid signs of global warming.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores somatic spaces through the use of materials as communicative devices. What is the potential of reaching beyond one’s own perceptive world? Invoking Laruelle’s non-philosophy, I ask: How can shared environments provide more-than-human material thinking spaces?
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Soiot herder-hunters of southern Siberia, this paper highlights ways in which aspects of our environment have the potential to become non-verbal communicative devices. Drawing on an affordance perspective, I look at how human and other species identify available materials in different ways, resulting in multi-layered somatic spaces. These layers of species-specific meaning beg us to explore the extent to which diverse natures are capable of reading each other’s signs in the landscape. But going beyond acts of non-verbal inter-species communication, I am interested in exploring landscapes and their material potentialities as more-than-human thinking spaces. I invoke Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy to see how useful this approach might be for anthropologists studying animal-human relations in shared spaces. To what extent can humans and other animals engage in joint acts of material thinking?
Paper short abstract:
Through ecosemiotics and non-human ontology this presentation discusses the concept of potentialities, changing landscapes, and interactions with different environmental agents in the process of production of space and place names among Siberian Ewenki.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation proposes to discuss the process of production and change of place names based on field data collected in 2017 among the Okhotsk Ewenki, one of the easternmost Indigenous hunting and herding communities in Siberia, Russia. This presentation demonstrates that place names are not simply reproduced, but rather generated and transformed through empathic contact and engagement within a semiotic circle of shared knowledge and praxis among humans and other beings. Through ecosemiotics and non-human ontology it further shows how the concept of changing landscapes and interactions with different environmental agents, especially animals and spirits, contribute to the production of space and place names and their changes. Place names are considered here as complex signs which evolve from landscape, mobility as a spatial practice, and relationships with non-human beings. The concept of potentialities is utilised to describe the ability of landscape to produce new meanings which are yet to be presented in contrast to affordances or what is already available for perception and use. This concept explains the fluid nature of Ewenki place naming strategies, when place names are transformed to reflect the nuanced name-landscape relationships. It also suggests that along with a conventional understanding of Indigenous place names as stable there is a dynamic model of place naming to be found in nomadic societies, which is based on the potentiality of the landscape to produce new semiotic relationships.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that abandoned cemeteries in Algeria are semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—places that can’t be classified within a cultural category of meaning and identity. Ambivalence allows for new subjectivities, actions, and imaginaries to emerge through colonialism’s mortal remains.
Paper long abstract:
In 1962, nearly a million Christian and Jewish French Algerians fled Algeria after 132-years of settler-colonial rule. Sixty years later, abandoned Christian and Jewish cemeteries still litter the Algerian landscape. Cross-culturally, anthropologists have analyzed graveyards as places where societies remember themselves; however, cemeteries can also contain the material traces of discontinuity, rupture, and incoherence in the stories people try to make landscapes tell about their past, present, and future. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that abandoned cemeteries constitute semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—places that people cannot or refuse to classify within a culturally recognized and/or hegemonic symbolic category of meaning. Ambivalence foregrounds the irreducible complexity and undecidability of meaning-making and identity that link people, places, and language in complex and uneasy temporal relations. By analyzing the conflicting semiotics of Christian and Jewish cemeteries in postcolonial Algeria—places that are often abandoned but left in place—I expose the sentimental, political, and poetic potential of spatio-temporal disorder for transforming social imaginaries, rooted in how people sometimes fail to create coherent, unified narratives of what "this place" means in relation to "who we are." Semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—as signs that fall between knowable categories or cannot be understood within the parameters of any system—can allow for new subjectivities, future actions, social imaginaries, and even hope to emerge through the potential for agency in the materiality of colonialism’s mortal remains.