Paper short abstract:

Despite the strong presence of the Swahili language in Gulf countries today, ‘the loss and dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that linked these territories’ across the Western Indian Ocean, as Abdulrazak Gurnah laments, points to potentialities defining of a semiotic seascape.

Paper long abstract:

As Abdulrazak Gurnah (2015) has emphasized, Kiswahili – the ‘language of the coast’ and the most widely spoken African language today – is less prominent for also being a first language across the sea in, for example, Gulf cities like Muscat and Dubai. There, the existence of whole districts of Swahili-speakers – what Gurnah describes as ‘enclaves of people from the ocean’s Western shores’ – tells a story of the spread of Swahili across Western Indian Ocean societies. Despite the strong presence of Swahili in places like Oman or the UAE today and these places’ co-constitution through it, ‘the loss and dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that linked these territories’ across the Western Indian Ocean, as Gurnah laments, is also real. Among other reasons, this is a result of the confinement of this specific linguistic affiliation to private spaces amid a dominant Arabic language ideology.

I propose to think with the idea of a Swahili semiotic seascape as dealing with the discursive constructions of place and space across a network of Swahili-speaking communities along old routes of trade and empire in order to consider how longstanding oceanic connections continue to generate meaning to everyday life in the Arabian Peninsula. I follow some potentialities inherent in Swahili language practices, space and matter in the Gulf today by drawing on exploratory ethnographic research conducted in Oman between 2018-2022. I engage with subjectivities and temporalities that result from this linguistic scenario, and reflect on existing hopes and expectations of Omani Swahili-speakers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates the crucial role that affect plays in communications among Chinese migrants in Zambia. Chinese migrants not only use affect as contextualization cues to interpret each other’s intention but also actively use body and speech to co-produce an affective atmosphere for bonding.

Paper long abstract:

This article illustrates the crucial role that situational affect plays in every interaction among Chinese migrants in Zambia and their communications with local Zambians. Via two ethnographic vignettes – one on banquet and the other on labour management – I unpack the meaning of a repeated phrase, ‘Zambians are difficult to communicate with’, which is widely shared by Chinese migrants. It reveals the social significance of situational affect in Chinese sociality. That is to say, not only do Chinese migrants use situational affect as contextualization cues to interpret each other’s intention, they also actively use bodily movements and speeches to co-produce an affective atmosphere for bonding. It is the dissonance to affect that hinders interactions between Chinese and Zambians. Furthermore, this cultural practice on situational affect could also shed a light on how affect as an analytical concept can be improved in social anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper foregrounds absences in semiotic landscapes as they result from the processes of destruction, erasure, and extermination. Paying attention to what is ‘already not’ and ‘not yet’ in semiotic landscapes, it attends to absences as revealing complex invisibilized histories of violence.

Paper long abstract:

Feelings of isolation and loss, occasionally described in interviews as ‘cropping someone’s tail’ or ‘life in a shell’, characterize the taste of the realities in Crimea since its annexation by Russia in 2014. Deprivations of such fundamental human rights go hand in hand with the erasure of any material sign of belonging to Ukraine from the surface of Crimea.

This paper foregrounds absences in semiotic landscapes as they result from the processes of destruction, erasure, and extermination. Building on critical sociolinguistic research, it centers on non-representation as a semiotically rich and meaningful mode (Bennett, 2013; Perini, 2020). Paying attention to what is ‘already not’ and ‘not yet’ in semiotic landscapes, this paper attends to absences as revealing complex invisibilized histories of violence. It thus challenges the traditional approach in semiotic landscapes that focuses on visible representation. Processes of the production of absence are interrogated through an analysis of their material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls in the landscape of Crimea. Photographic data from ethnographic fieldwork illustrates traces of the erasure of Ukrainian statehood, its languages, and peoples by the Russian regime temporarily occupying the peninsula.

In sum, the paper seeks to show how an ontologically different view at semiotic landscapes, in which absences are agentive, enables richer perspectives on meaning and representation. Disentangling the absences in/of semiotic landscapes, we may come closer to the richness of the social phenomena hidden behind the deceptive nothingness and indicate new perspectives for understanding the afterlives of violence and destruction.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates scalar projections in online and offline semiotic landscapes, in which discourses about the murder of a gay black student on a university campus in Rio de Janeiro are located. This focus springs from our Brazilian socially-fascist times.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates scalar projections (Gal & Irvine, 2019; Carr & Lempert, 2016) in online and offline semiotic landscapes, in which discourses about the murder of a black gay student on a university campus in Rio de Janeiro are located. We have in mind how such projections construct semiotic landscapes as “places of affect” (Jaworski & Turnlow, 2010) and as assemblages of signs (Wu & Karlander, 2021), indexing hope and a new futurity (Bloch, 1986; Mattingley, 2010). This focus springs from our Brazilian socially-fascist times (Santos, 2016), which have been incremental in the spread of hate towards black and LGBTI+ populations. The interconnectivity typical of our times increasingly makes it necessary to account for how these two types of landscapes converse with each other (Seargeant & Giaxoglou, 2020) in meaning performance. This theoretical import also constitutes our first ethnographic move by carrying out what Blommaert (2008) has termed textual ethnography. As researchers, we reconstruct writers’ and landscape designers’ scale projections. Scales semiotizing affect and the need for creating new meanings about who we can be co-exist with scales which blame the victim, on the part of extreme-right wing anonymous groups in online semiotic landscapes. In our second ethnographic move, we interview three students and two professors as they walk into the offline semiotic landscape on our faculty building. Scales of affect and social trasformation are indexically projected as participants talk about the landscape and their performative effects. Spatial change may contribute to the rehearsal of new modes of futurity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between engaged morphology and language practices in the temporalities of religious rituals. I focus on how Tibetan villagers creatively construct senses of hope and meaning in life through perceiving the transition of spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the study of engaged morphology in religious practice, as it ‘opens up fundamental questions about how we can situate ritual action, when places start to be considered as sacred and why, and what kind of role the environment plays in the religious construction of social life’ (Padoan 2021). My study focuses on the townscape of Wutun village in Rebgong area (Qinghai, China), as well as the morphology of the mountainous areas surrounding the village to understand the ritual of harvest festive in the sixth lunar month very year. One perspective is to study the long term dynamics of Buddhist beliefs and older mountain deity beliefs, and how the rituals reflecting them are projected onto the townscape and morphology in the surrounding mountainous areas. The other aspect is to study the different public and private speeches uttered in various morphological units, so as to understand how people perceive the spaces and creatively interpret the meaning of them according to their real world situations.

My study focuses on how Tibetan villagers locate their rituals in various morphological units, and accordingly recognise and contest visible and invisible authorities and their relations to places; and how they creatively construct senses of hope and meaning of life in the religious practices in shifting engaged morphological units. In an era of tourist economics and state supervised cultural heritage preservation, studying morphology of the area and how it relates to ritual practice greatly facilitates rethinking the role of religion and place-making in state-local relations.