Semiotic analysis in folkloristics usefully centers on iconicity, ostension, and indexicality as modes of representation active in performances of expressive culture. In this essay I focus on the semiotic mode of ostension, wherein a thing is used to represent itself, which I have found helpful in thinking about the efficacy of artistic performances at the heart of my ethnographic research over the years. Here I draw on my previous work with a child’s fantasy play and with verbal narrative performance to signal the enormous analytical potential that lurks in this somewhat neglected member of t ..read more

This article analyzes the gestural dimensions of a performance of the folktale known as “The Pope’s Three Questions” (Alexander-Frizer 2007). This tale is an apt candidate for close attention to gesture, as gesture is thematically central to its plot. It is part of a widely distributed international tale complex. The tales in this complex have in common a plot element in which a person of low social status must submit to a test consisting of three enigmatic, apparently opaque questions posed by a powerful figure, the successful outcome of which turns on differential understandings of the quest ..read more

This article attempts to reconcile the semiotic model of ostension with the markedly different folkloristic use of the term. In semiotics, as well as linguistics and philosophy, ostension may be glossed as showing, rather than telling. Yet in the field of folkloristics, most invocations of ostension have regarded it as a kind of interaction with traditional narratives. Despite the significant differences between these types of ostension, we suggest that both have at their heart a concern with res ipsa, the thing itself. We first discuss the historical breadth of the concept of ostension, befor ..read more

This article shows how constitutive news media displays of contrasting chronotopes (i.e., peopled time-space imageries), both major and small, engendered an interpellative politics to channel white virtue while also flipping the script of U.S. imaginaries constructing who belongs within small-town Midwestern America. It examines the mediatized image politics of internal immigration border enforcement back when the Bush Administration was scaling up militarized tactics and experimenting with expedited legal procedures that sought to erase the lines dividing immigration from criminal law. It wei ..read more

In this article I examine the perspectives of Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Nelson Goodman on diagrams in order to assess the variety of meanings of diagrammatic reasoning, form, and manipulation. I argue that diagrammatic reasoning may not only guide the understanding of the functioning of schemas, graphs, and chains of equations, but also—as I show in this article—the functioning of scientific images, photographs, and artistic paintings. More precisely, I focus on the relationship between the concept of diagram, the composite photographs by Francis Galton studied by Charles San ..read more

Cuban popular religious altars command attention with their elaborate presentations of statues, dolls, figurines, photographs, vessels, and offerings to a host of spirits and saints. The altar is cosmogenic: any given altar in all of its inventive particularity is a diagram that figures a world of relations between the living practitioner and the constellation of spirits who work with that practitioner. The concept of scopic regimentation, adapted from what Christian Metz (1975) and Martin Jay (1988) call the scopic regime, describes how the location, arrangement, and qualities of altars and t ..read more

I start with a premise that you may disagree with: a lot of the transcripts that discourse analysts publish are bad. I explain that what I mean by this, and then propose a solution: let’s make published transcripts good, in the hopes of devising new possibilities for growing discourse analytic knowledge. I offer four provisional and interrelated principles that I argue are critical for developing a new kind of transcription aesthetics, along with some ideas and examples for how to employ them. The first principle sets the stage for those that follow: treat transcription not as a “word process ..read more

Drawing on ethnographic research in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project (ODP), this article explores the ways in which engagement with pictorial images in the ODP helped deaf elders cultivate the physical, semiotic, and pragmatic skills that underpin the reception and reproduction of conventionalized Nepali Sign Language (NSL) forms. This pedagogy emerged in part because local understandings of NSL as a named and objectified language have been grounded in pictorial illustrations of signers performing standardized lexical items in sign language dictionaries, posters, and primers ..read more

This article explores photography as a colonial state technology during the early years of American empire in the Philippines. It centers on the image sequence, its enregisterment across the second half of the nineteenth century, and its use at the turn of the twentieth century to depict Filipino evolution as the result of American imperial intervention. The analysis reveals how the image sequence advanced the temporal conception of a one-type racial logic of the “wild” Filipino, while Philippine elites asserted the spatial conception of a two-type racial logic, which distinguished “civilized ..read more

On December 17th, 2018, an adult content ban was enacted on Tumblr, a microblogging and online content-sharing platform. The ban enforced the removal of all so-called adult content through the use of a censorial algorithm designed to flag or remove images. This paper traces the discursive negotiations between Tumblr and its users that emerged after the ban, a process centered on the very terms of what defines obscenity and constituted by competing pragmatics for sorting obscene images. This article outlines the history of obscenity law in the U.S. and its use of both inherentist and performati ..read more