Suomen Semiotica

Like kinship studies, semiotics can encompass vastly different sorts of analysis and description. Both veer between the logical and literary, sometimes in competing schools, sometimes across the corpus of the same writer, and sometimes in the very same text (e.g., The Elementary Structures of Kinship). Compare Barthes and Greimas. Anthropologists of kinship can get caught up in a severe (rigorous or obscure) formalism, although the sort of analysis that yielded insights from the imaginative working out of the permutations of structure(s) has been out of favor for a while — as we keep hearing. Analysis of kinship often relies on a special technical vocabulary that many anthropologists of my generation (educated in the 1990s) have not mastered (quick: what’s the difference between ‘descent’ and ‘filiation’?).

Likewise, semiotics can be tough-going for the uninitiated. Fortunately, philosophers at Helsinki University have put together a dictionary of one of the founding fathers of semiology, C. S. Peirce. Their handy site is copiously citationed and nicely put together. Readers thumbing through the pages of Fame of Gawa, for example, might find some of the entries convenient:

“As it is in itself, a sign is either of the nature of an appearance, when I call it a qualisign; or secondly, it is an individual object or event, when I call it a sinsign (the syllable sin being the first sillable [sic] of semel, simul, singular, etc); or thirdly, it is of the nature of a general type, when I call it a legisign.” (A Letter to Lady Welby, SS 32, 1904)

“… a Qualisign is any quality in so far as it is a sign. Since a quality is whatever it is positively in itself, a quality can only denote an object by virtue of some common ingredient or similarity; so that a Qualisign is necessarily an Icon. Further, since a quality is a mere logical possibility, it can only be interpreted as a sign of essence, that is, as a Rheme.” (‘A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic’, EP 2:294, 1903)

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.