The phrase "semiotic anthropology" was first used by Milton Singer (1978). Singer's work brought together the

semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for ...

and Roman Jakobson with theoretical streams that had long been flowing in and around the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, where Singer taught. In the late 1970s, Michael Silverstein, a young student of Jakobson's at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, joined Singer in Chicago's Department of Anthropology. Since that time, anthropological work inspired by Peirce's semiotic have proliferated, in part as students of Singer and Silverstein have spread out across the country, developing semiotic-anthropological agendas of their own.

Overview

Semiotic

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

has its precursor in Malinowski's contextualism (which may be called anthropological semantics), which was later resumed by John Rupert Firth. Winfried Nöth (1995) ''Handbook of semiotics'
p.103
/ref> Anthropological approaches to semantics are alternative to the three major types of semantics approaches: linguistic semantics, logical semantics, and general semantics. Other independent approaches to semantics are philosophical semantics and psychological semantics. Elizabeth Mertz has recently reviewed the burgeoning literature in semiotic anthropology (2007). The freshest research in the field refer to the theory of sign setting the aim for the scientific program: "Semiotic anthropology, as a research program, sets itself several goals. The first is the establishment of a “cultural theory of signs” as a hypostatic object functioning in higher-order ontologies. The second is reduction of the paradigms of the research on culture to one, merging the philosophical-philological and anthropological-ethnographic perspectives in order to unify methodology and specialize research techniques. In this sense, semiotic anthropology ought to perform an auxiliary function; in other words, semiotics is always the semiotics of something .. The third goal is the development of an effective analytical tool for cultural messages such as architecture, painting, eating habits, or fashion, which constitute material reflections of the systems of values of a certain community. Cultural messages have recorded the “world of culture” of people who perceived reality in a certain way. The interpretation of this closed “world of culture” is a difficult but also useful task, as it enables one to better understand the people who created this world." (Boroch 2018: 222).

Notes

References

*Singer, M. B. (1978). "For a Semiotic Anthropology," in Sight, Sound and Sense. Edited by T. Sebeok, pp. 202–231. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. *{{cite journal , author = Mertz, Elizabeth , title = Semiotic Anthropology , journal = Annual Review of Anthropology , year=2007 , pages = 337–353 , issue = 1 , doi = 10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094417 , volume = 36 *Robert Boroch (2018) "Rethinking Milton Singer’s Semiotics Anthropology: A Reconnaissance". ''Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies''. Vol. 224, p. 222.

Overview

See also

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References

Further reading