Whenever languages and other, perilinguistic semiotic ... · knowledge anchoring cultural concepts is always implicit and is even sometimes part of largely abstract cultural patterns

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004� 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4505-0003$10.00

“Cultural” Conceptsand the Language-Culture Nexus1

by Michael Silverstein

Events of language use mediate human sociality. Such semioticoccasions develop, sustain, or transform at least part—some haveargued the greater part—of people’s conceptualizations of theiruniverse. Reserving the term cultural concepts for such socio-centric aspects of human cognition, this article sketches linguis-tic anthropology’s methods for discovering truly cultural concep-tualizations, illustrated at the polar extremes of ritual efficacy(Christianity’s Eucharistic liturgy) and of everyday conversationallanguage games. Knowledge schemata structuring cultural con-cepts, here termed -onomic knowledge, turn out to be “in play”in interaction, made relevant to it as interactants use verbal andperilinguistic signs in the work of aligning as relationally identi-fiable kinds of persons. In interactional experience, -onomicknowledge anchoring cultural concepts is always implicit and iseven sometimes part of largely abstract cultural patterns only in-directly experienceable by people such as the cultural “edibility”of fauna in Thai villagers’ cultural concept invoked by use ofterms denoting animals. Furthermore, beyond unique micro-con-textual occasions of interaction, one discerns a macro-sociologyof -onomic knowledge. Privileged ritual sites of usage anchorsuch a multiplex social formation; their emanations constitutepower—frequently politicoeconomic— to warrant or license us-age of particular verbal forms (e.g., American English “wine-talk” register) with particular meanings germane to certain inter-ested ends of self- and other-alignment, closing the circle ofanalysis.

m i c h a e l s i l v e r s t e i n is Charles F. Grey DistinguishedService Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguis-tics, and Psychology and the Committee on InterdisciplinaryStudies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago 1126 E.59th St., Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.. Born in 1945, he was edu-cated at Harvard College (A.B., 1965) and Harvard University(Ph.D., 1972). His recent publications include “Dynamics of Lin-guistic Contact,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol.17, Languages, edited by I. Goddard (Washington, D.C.: Smith-sonian Institution Press, 1997), “Translation, Transduction,Transformation: Skating Glossando on Thin Semiotic Ice,” inTranslating Cultures, edited by P. Rubel and A. Rosman (Oxfordand New York: Berg, 2003), Talking Politics: The Substance ofStyle from Abe to W (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003),and “Boasian Cosmographic Anthropology and the SociocentricComponent of Mind,” in Significant Others: Interpersonal andProfessional Commitments in Anthropology, edited by R. Han-dler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). The presentpaper was submitted 6 xi 02 and accepted 23 iii 04.

[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of thisissue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/home.html).]

1. A somewhat truncated version of this article was presented atReed College, Portland, Oregon, on April 18, 2002, under the title“How the Culture in Language Puts Language into Culture.” I par-

Whenever languages and other, perilinguistic semioticsystems are used in their ubiquitous human habitats,cultures as well as people can be said to be communi-cating. In discursively mediated interaction, whether as“native” users or as analyst-investigators, we perceiveourselves to be sending and receiving messages to andfrom so-called real or fictional individuals; we commu-nicate about states of affairs concerning all manner ofexperienceable and imaginable things. But we are at thesame time experiencing culture by communicatingthrough this exemplar, medium, and site: language-in-use. I want to demonstrate here how linguistic anthro-pologists “listen to” language analytically in this secondmode in order to “hear” culture.

I want to point out, in particular, that we can “hear”culture only by “listening to” language in a certain way.This channel, I would maintain, is made available bycontemporary semiotic pragmatism in its theorizing the“conceptual” nexus linking language to culture, for suchstudy, in passing, investigates and clarifies the nature oftruly “cultural” concepts, as I hope to explicate here.

To be sure, all human activity centrally engages con-ceptualization in one or another respect. And, further,language is a semiotic complex most visible to our in-dividual reflexive gaze precisely for its instrumental rolein explicit, task-oriented conceptualization. Yet the ar-gument here is that there is a realm of what we mightjustly term “cultural” concepts to be discerned fromamong concepts in general and specifically among otherconceptual codings manifested in language. These “cul-tural” concepts define and reveal what is culturally spe-cific about human discursive interaction, seen both asitself human activity and as mediating semiotic “relay”(Barthes 1968:11) of all other human activity.

It is a truism that cultures are essentially social facts,not individual ones; they are properties of populationsof people who have come to be, by degrees, tightly orloosely bounded in respect of their groupness, theirmodes of cohering as a group. Cultures are historicallycontingent though, as experienced, relatively perduringvalues and meanings implicit in the ways people do

ticularly thank Robert Brightman for collegial hospitality in ar-ranging the invitation and, of course, for a lively Reed audience.Yet earlier versions, entitled “From Culture in Language to Lan-guage in Culture,” were presented to the Departments of Anthro-pology and Linguistics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, on De-cember 8, 2000, at the invitation of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney; to theDepartment of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, on Feb-ruary 25, 1999, at the kind invitation of Gregory Possehl; and tothe Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berke-ley, on November 16, 1998, at the invitation of Stanley Brandes(the two last-named at that time respective department chairs). Ithank all of them for those opportunities to synthesize this ma-terial. Questions and comments from all these audiences have stim-ulated much revision, as have insightful comments by Alan Rum-sey accompanying an invitation to submit this revised and recastversion for consideration by CA. In further revising, I have incor-porated excellent and extensive stylistic suggestions of RobertMoore, encouraged further by four (of five) anonymous reviewersand by the editor, Ben Orlove, to whom readers’ gratitude shouldbe directed for whatever small ease they may find in their entex-tualizing encounter with this text artifact.

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things and interact one with another. Such doings, asevents, have value and meaning only insofar as they arepatterned—the textually oriented word is “genred”—sothat even as they are participating in them, people ineffect negotiate the way that events are plausibly and(un)problematically instances of one or more such pat-terns. So, culture being manifest only in such sociohis-torical facts, anything “cultural” would seem to dependon the contingencies of eventhood that, in complexways, cumulate as genred norms of “praxis” or “prac-tice.” Yet, in the event culture is always presumed uponin the course of that very praxis, even as it is alwayspotentially transformed by people’s very doings andsayings.2

And yet, we feel—do we not?—that cultures, like lan-guages, are fundamentally ideational or mental—or con-ceptual3—insofar as in communicating people seem (atleast at first) to be giving evidence of knowledge, feeling,and belief, even creating, sharpening, and transformingknowledge, feeling, and belief in themselves and others.What, then, is the sociological condition of existence ofsuch—as we should term them—“cultural concepts” ofwhich cultures are constituted in the face of the veryindividual-centric assumptions that our own culture per-sists in having about knowledge, feeling, and belief? Howcan we see that language as used manifests such culturalconcepts, ones specific to a sociohistorical group, not-

2. On this sentence’s bland statement of the issue, perhaps mosttheorists could agree. Things become immeasurably more conten-tious when one tries to say how, precisely, “practice” (plus or minushuman “subjectivity,” “intentionality,” or “agency”) relates to“culture” (as “system,” “structure,” or “norm”) in the real-timefunctioning of social action. Structuralists and structural-function-alists, for example, have tended to see practice merely as a workingor “execution” of the underlying or immanent system (thus Saus-sure’s [1916] parole and langue in respect of language itself). Bycontrast, praxis theorists from ethnomethodology to deconstruc-tivism have tended to see normativity and/or systematicity as amere emergent, even as an epiphenomenon of instances (or, inco-herently, of genres) of practice. As to the dynamics of how, over alonger real time, cultures or languages (langues) change, even aSaussurean structuralist would be forced to admit that diachronicsystem change begins in the synchronic functioning of the system,in actual practices (parole). Yet it is never clear, within the termsof this framework, how such changes in practice in effect accu-mulate and percolate “up” to the norm level (langue) of languageor culture change. (Various dei ex machina, to be sure, populateaccounts in this style.) Similarly, in pure praxis approaches, theselectivity and seemingly structured “drift” of historical cumula-tion and normativization are left completely unaddressed exceptby invoking—circularly, it turns out—such Hegelian (often misreadas Marxist!) essences as “power.” The dialectical semiotic prag-mati(ci)sm espoused here as a positive project, I think, avoids theworst of these dead ends, both that of the pure structuralist andthat of the pure praxiologist or reductive functionalist.3. I intend this term to be inclusive, thus not making the distinctionbetween “cognition” (“ideas”) and “affect” (“passions”) that seemsto be a very local sociocultural legacy of European, especially(post-) Enlightenment, discourse about the mind, the first beingequated with ultimately formalizable representationality, the sec-ond with perturbations in organic physiological pharmacology andsuch. A group’s concepts, furthermore, are manifested through anyand all semiotic arrangements through which members participatein events, not, of course, just through language and language-like“codes.”

withstanding the “freedom” we think we manifest insaying what we want, as a function of what we, as in-dividuals, “really” believe we want to communicateabout? Is there, in short, a sociocultural unconscious inthe mind—wherever that is located in respect of the bi-ological organism—that is both immanent in and emer-gent from our use of language? Can we ever profoundlystudy the social significance of language without under-standing this sociocultural unconscious that it seems toreveal? And if it is correct that language is the principalexemplar, medium, and site of the cultural, then can weever understand the cultural without understanding thisparticular conceptual dimension of language?

The reorientation of linguistic anthropology over thepast few decades has made real progress in these mattersin good part by comprehending three lessons heretoforescattered in many literatures about language and culture,following them out and integrating them into its analyticapproach to revealing the “conceptual”—hence, “cul-tural”—in language.

The first of these lessons is that discursive interactionbrings sociocultural concepts into here-and-now con-texts of use—that is, as I hope to explain, that interactionindexically “invokes” sociocultural conceptualiza-tions—via emergent patternings of semiotic forms thatwe know how to study in the image of the poetics ofritual. Precipitated as entextualizations (by-degrees co-herent and stable textual arrays) in relation to contex-tualizations (how texts point to a framing or surroundfor the text), such “text-in-context” is the basis for allinterpretative or hermeneutic analysis. Both the com-prehensibility and the efficacy of any discursive inter-action depend on its modes and degrees of “ritualization”in this special sense of emergent en- and con-textuali-zation (see Silverstein and Urban 1996).

The second lesson focuses on the underpinnings andeffects of the denotational capacity of the specific wordsand expressions we use that gel as text-in-context. Thisis the complex way in which, on occasions of their use,words and expressions come specifically and differen-tially to “stand for,” or denote, things and states of affairsin the experienced and imagined universe. Yet integralto the very act of denoting with particular words andexpressions, it turns out, is the implicit invocation ofcertain sociocultural practices which, in the context ofdiscourse, contribute to how participants in a discursiveinteraction can and do come to stand, one to another, asmutually significant social beings. The most interac-tionally potent components of denotation seem to func-tion in at least two ways: first, to be sure, as contextuallydifferential characterizers of some denotatum but secondas indexes of users’ presumed-upon (or even would-be)relational positions in a projective social distribution ofconceptual knowledge. So individuals in effect com-municatively “perform” a here-and-now interactionalstance in relation to such knowledge by the phraseologyand construction in which they communicate the sub-stance of what is being “talked about.” We read suchinteractional stances (cf. Goffman’s [1979] notion of“footing” and Bakhtin’s [1982] of “voicing”) as ritual fig-

s ilverstein “Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus F 623

urations of social identity come to life, interactionallyactivated in the here-and-now of discourse for the inter-subjective work of creating, maintaining, or transform-ing social relations.

Given these first two points, the third lesson is thatthere are wider-scale institutional “orders of interac-tionality,” historically contingent yet structured. Withinsuch large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect ritual cen-ters of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-con-ferring influence on any particular event of discursiveinteraction with respect to the meanings and signifi-cance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it.Any individual event of discursive interaction occurs asa nodal point of a network of such in a field of potentiallyconflicting interdiscursivities across macrosocial spacesthat may be simultaneously structured by other (e.g.,political and/or economic) principles and dimensionali-ties as well. Viewed in such a space, every discourseevent manifests, by degrees, authoritative, warranted, orheretofore uncountenanced or even contested entex-tualizations licensed from centers of value creation.Here, human subjectivity and agency come to their po-tential plenitude. The flow of value thus comes to bemappable as a felt effect or adjunct of interlocutors’ stra-tegic positionalities—presupposed or entailed—in suchcomplex macrosocial space and of people’s stasis in and/or movement through its ever-changing configurations.

In showing how the cultural concept is key in bringingtogether these three cumulative insights of contempo-rary linguistic anthropology, I hope to elaborate, in turn,on all three. Let us focus first on the matter of interactionritual, to use the late Erving Goffman’s (1967) term, andshow how the reorientation of linguistic anthropologyover recent decades—what we can call the pragmatic-poetic turn in its study—provides the entry point to anaccount of specifically cultural conceptualization.

Discourse as Interaction Ritual

We can engage the problem of the kinds and degrees oftextuality in discourse by considering an example of astaged though nonscripted conversation.4 Figure 1 showsa minimally adequate, standard-orthography transcript

4. I have treated this at some technical length in two earlier papers.One (Silverstein 1985) presents a construction-by-constructionsyn-tactic and lexical analysis of the poetic form in the denotationaltext (p “what has been/will have been said” in the way of referenceand modalized predication). This is shown to facilitate an inter-pretative theory of what is happening, segment by segment, on theintersubjective plane. A second paper (Silverstein 1998) shows thatthe denotational information appears to be metricalized—given po-etic form in a dimensionalized measure-space—by deixis, the var-ious categories by which one “points” to things and situations fromthe ever-moving discursive here-and-now that the interactional par-ticipants inhabit. Such a metricalization allows us to map the un-folding denotational text into a maximal interactional text(p“what has been/will have been performed-in-talk” in the way ofinteractional “moves” in genred discursive social action). Asser-tions made here about the interaction thus presume upon thesetwo prior, somewhat technical accounts, to which the methodo-logically interested reader is referred.

of a snippet of a conversation videotaped in ca. 1974between Mr. A, then a second-year student at the Uni-versity of Chicago Law School, and Mr. B, then a first-year student in the same university’s School of SocialService Administration. Mr. A was, in other words, the“future lawyer,” we might say, and Mr. B the “futuresocial worker.” Each had been instructed by my col-league Starkey Duncan, then interested in “nonverbal”communication, to have a conversation with anothergraduate student whom he had not before encountered.

This bit of conversation reveals Mr. A to be in themiddle of a (lawyerly?) line of questioning. Like all“questions,” Mr. A’s is the first of a two-part, basic rhyth-mic unit of alternating conversational participation—theso-called adjacency pair in conversation analytic terms(Levinson 1983:303–8, 332–39). In and by the currentspeaker’s utterance there is strongly entailed a symmet-rical, interactionally coherent “reply” or “response”5

from the original addressee, subsequently become asender (as the original sender becomes an addressee, ex-changing roles). The first turn-at-talk in the transcript isMr. A’s sixth question to Mr. B about where Mr. B “camefrom” “before.”6

Before when? What is the culturally relevant frame-work of temporalization and of sequential relationshipswithin it? And what kind of a stipulation of a “there”in Mr. B’s past would satisfy the line of first pair-partquestions about “coming from” someplace as suffi-cient—even satisfying—second pair-part answers? Inother words, what is the relevant framework of spatial-ization—physical and/or institutional—that correspondsto the temporal sequence? To what degree is each of Mr.A’s conversational moves, as a phase in an ongoing socialpraxis, constraining, in any cause-and-effect way, of Mr.B’s moves (and vice versa)? How do such linkages allowMessrs. A and B interpersonally to create before our tran-scriber’s very eyes a precipitated text (-in-context) thatwe can understand to be culturally coherent? My pointis that the problem of informational “relevance” and theproblem of how discourse comes to some kind of seg-mentable textual “form” as effective social interaction

5. See Erving Goffman’s (1976) brilliant demolition of conversationanalysis and its attempts to consider “responses” as units of un-interpreted interactional “form” or mere earlier-to-later sequentialposition. Goffman showed both the defeasibility of any particularpragmatic entailment as such as well as the unlimited possibleevent-defining meanings of “next turns-at-talk” in culturally gen-red but innovatively nuanced ways.6. Each of these (type-level) expressions is inherently deictic (i.e.,its characterizing effect for denotation presumes upon the contex-tual conditions under which a token of them occurs). Come fromindexes an end point of “movement-to-which” that is relativelyclose to the here-and-now stipulated in co-occurrent text or, bydefault, presumed to be the here-and-now of the communicativecontext of the sender. Similarly, (temporal) before again indexes anend point aligned either in or relatively closer to the now explicitlystipulated or, by default, pragmatically presumed.


Fig. 1. Transcript of a conversation between two American university students (Silverstein 1998:283, fig. 12,�1997 by the Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, reprinted by permission).


are interrelated and cannot be either productively statedor solved independently.7

Most important, how would we go about achieving andjustifying our “reading” of the interactional text abuild-ing here between Messrs. A and B? It appears at first tobe an instance of “getting to know you,” a familiar genre,or recurrent schema, of interactional text. Indeed, allbourgeois Americans have indulged in this genre withotherwise unknown people, for example, in airplanes orto more pointed purpose in clubs, bars, and similar wa-tering holes. Messrs. A and B seem to be playing it inthe immediate context of Mr. Duncan’s video cameralens on that day in 1974, in the small room behind theLaw School auditorium, south of 60th Street, on the cam-pus of the University of Chicago, in the South Side neigh-borhood of Hyde Park, in the city of Chicago, in theCounty of Cook, dot-dot-dot—as Thornton Wilder sowell set out the limitless possibilities of nested contex-tualization in Our Town some decades ago.

It is context, we can see, all the way out from themicroscopic here-and-now. But which part of the context“counts,” as it were, is “relevant” to moving this inter-action along? How are culture and hence the interac-tional participant’s mind as informed precisely by cul-ture central to giving this verbal happening its distinctiveform as genred interactional text?

Just as those familiar with the culture recognize theinteractional text to be an instance of “getting to knowyou,” the more subtle amongst us will also recognizethat we have happened upon an instance of a game ofone-upmanship in the process of being embarrassinglyfoiled or undone by the antagonist’s own hand (ptongue). What is the role of our involvement in more orless the same culture as the two participants in our com-ing to this recognition of interactional genre? And howdoes the specific cultural system of value that an analystmay lay bare in working from the transcript help to in-dicate something of the interactional form that Messrs.A and B seem to be inhabiting? Let us look more closelyat the interactional form that is emerging.

Down to segment 3 in our transcript, Mr. A has beenthe question initiator and Mr. B the respondent. Indeed,the denotational text, the “information structure,” thatthey have generated between them has come to constituteMr. B’s interaction-relevant biography. It is in the form ofa schematic of how he moved from “there,” “then” to“here,” “now” in various domains of what we might termdescriptors of personal experience, attributes of social in-dividuals constituting aspects of their narratable identi-

7. Note, by contrast, the at best culture-internal and post-hoc re-constructions of interlocutor intentions that go into Gricean doc-trines of “relevance” (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1986, following onGrice 1989 [1967]). The starting point of such analyses is the com-munication of a propositionally valuated grammatical sentence, anAustinian (1975 [1962]:109) “locutionary act.” This necessitatespostulating convoluted would-be chains of (logical) inference, in-cluding the ad-hoc reconstruction of (propositional) descriptions of“context,” to map what is said in a turn-at-talk onto what is com-municated in and by it—all with a rudimentary and rough-and-ready concept of interactional acts and events, if any.

ties. As Mr. A anxiously presses on with the inquiry, theflow of such biographical information about Mr. B in theemerging denotational text is congruent with the obvioussocial-structural status asymmetry between them—law-yer versus social worker—at the moment of the discursiveinteraction—“here,” “now,” that is, at the University ofChicago. Mr. B’s emergent biography augments that asym-metry in the past and projects it out to their respectivefutures, for it turns out that the current interactionalstatus asymmetry of future lawyer/future social workerin fact continues the terms of a comparable schema oftheir respective “old school ties.” Mr. B’s college, “Loyola[University of Chicago]” (RB8), contrasts with Mr. A’s,“Georgetown [University], down in Washington” (RA1),from their respective pasts. The status-relevant asym-metrical structure of what is indicated as the interactants’pasts and presents thus remains a constant over the courseof biographical time from the narrated past up to the pre-sent moment (and implicated future).

Things change, however, in turn 5, when Mr. A makesthe interactional move of “opening up” a bit—or so atfirst it seems—to reveal seemingly highly personal infor-mation: that he is drowning at the University of ChicagoLaw School, which he describes with the vernacular pe-jorative “different,” whereas he had sailed along as a happyundergraduate at Georgetown. Whether consciously ornot—consciousness being, in fact, a somewhat irrelevantdimension for seeing cultural form-in-motion—Mr. Bseizes on this revelation of Mr. A’s “opening up.” He pres-ents a denotationally incoherent but interactionally subtleand effective description of changes over time at LoyolaUniversity of Chicago, the erstwhile declasse urban com-muter school, the institution from “then” to “now” goingin a contrariwise, “bad” to “good”—even “better”—direction.

Interactionally—note, not denotationally—Mr. B hasregistered the undoing of any witting or unwitting suc-cess Mr. A may have gained at one-upmanship up untilturn 5. In fact, it seems that Mr. B begins after this turn-ing point to inhabit in earnest the identity of socialworker, asking all further questions to the end of thevideotape recording of the conversation. He seems totreat Mr. A somewhat like a client in distress asking forhelp at an intake interview: in effect, “Do you think youcan handle the rough-and-tumble of corporate law afterthis?”—seeming almost mercilessly to twist the knifeby exaggerated concern.

But how do we know that this is a plausible—even, Iwould claim, the best—interpretation of the dynamiccultural form of this interaction (not, note, of each in-dividual’s actual momentary motivational and other sub-jective states) of which the transcribed snippet preservesa denotational record? To answer this theoretical ques-tion, we move to a slightly different kind of text, the oldanthropological chestnut “ritual text.” When we under-stand ritual text, we understand the principles under-lying the way in which every interactional text—in-cluding that of Messrs. A and B—mobilizes cultural signsto discursive effect. We ask, then, what really charac-terizes ritual text, universally?


The Semiotics of Explicit Ritual

The presumptively shared knowledge and beliefs of agroup are accessed in a society’s rituals under dynamicgestural (indexical) figuration. Ritual works in a kind ofpictorial or iconic (specifically, diagrammatic) mode.8

Ritual as enacted traces a moving structure of indexicalgestures toward the knowledge presupposed to be nec-essary to its own effectiveness in accomplishing some-thing. In ritual, participants spatiotemporally manipu-late signs of these beliefs and areas of knowledge in theiruttered words and their actions with each other and withobjects. And it is the overall “poetry” as well as theparticular forms of such manipulation of signs that counttoward performing a ritual correctly. What is performedin this way—though always at the risk of misfire or otherfailure—is the culturally specific “competence” orknowledge that renders the context of performance ac-cessible to someone we might term the believer or groupadherent—whose adherence to a particular belief may ofcourse be a normative presumption only.

Ritual can be verbal or nonverbal or, as is usually thecase, a combination of multiple modalities of figurationplayed out in an orderly—the technical term, as in po-etry, is “metricalized”—space-time envelope of partici-pation. The very hypertrophic orderliness of multiplemetricalizations thus bounds the performed text of rit-ual, giving it a semblance of formal plenitude-in-itself.In and by this property of seeming to self-entextualize,to stand as formally autonomous totality, a ritual textas a whole traced over space-time projects as its contex-tualization that which it dynamically figurates along a“cosmic axis,” an axis of knowledge or belief. Such dy-namic, directional spatiotemporal movements in ritualentail in this fashion the causal (re)ordering of cosmicconceptualizations as figurally indexed, such as aspectsof sacred or foundational knowledge, feeling, and belief,made figurally “real” in the here-and-now of experi-enceable semiosis.

A person officiating at the service of the Eucharist, forexample, bounds off a ritual space of objects at a table,an altar in the space-time of liturgical rite—wine pouredfrom a cruet into a chalice, wafers or pieces of bread ona paten or ceremonial plate, both comestibles at a ritualtable between him- or herself and a congregation of co-participatory onlookers. He or she begins to tell the story

8. We have already been using the Peircean notion of “indexical”semiosis in the sense of a “pointing-to” relationship between a signand some co-occurrent thing that it stands for. Here, we move moredecisively into the Peircean scheme (see Peirce 1931–58:2, 134–73),in which, among the types of “iconic” signs (that is, signs in virtueof a “likeness” to what they stand for) are “diagrams,” analogiesof structured relations of parts, as in the floor-plan of a house inrelation to the actual spatial division experienceable in the dwellingin other modalities (e.g., by walking around). All analogies, insofaras they are representable by the formula A1 : A2 : . . . :: B1 : B2 :. . ., feature diagrammatic relations between the two sides of theequation. For this whole area of study, see the brilliant systema-tizations of Peirce in Parmentier (1994:1–44 and 1997).

of The Last Supper of Jesus and the Apostles,9 specificallyquoting in the transposed here-and-now of first-personfigural narration and, at the appropriate places for osten-sive reference (pointing to the objects of the congrega-tion’s perception and the officiant’s narration), gesturallyholding up in turn the ritual objects: the congregants areinformed that “This is my body,” and instructed “Par-take ye thereof!” and likewise “This is my blood,”“Drink ye of it!” just as were the Apostles, according tothe liturgical order of the fateful Passover Seder that con-stitutes, by belief, actually the first or authorizing oc-casion of the ritual in which the officiant and congre-gants are participating in unbroken (indexical) chain. Thediagrammatic figuration thus is [In the here-and-now]Officiant : congregant :: [At the sacred initiating mo-ment] Jesus : Apostles. The first is experienced, the sec-ond part of the cosmic order of sacred belief.

The specific figurational equivalences—the ritual bap-tism of objects with names—will have been stated bysomeone whose authority goes back—“indexically,” aswe say—in presumptively unbroken line to Jesus himselfvia a causal chain of authorization. The ritual action tofollow with these now figurating signs has thus also beengiven figurational value within the bounds of the ritualform. And, ritually “transubstantiated” as these comes-tibles now have become,10 to eat and drink—to consumeor incorporate, we should say—is mystically followed byan equal and opposite or greater incorporation. As oneconsumes or incorporates the host in turn, first the of-ficiant him- or herself and then the totality of individualcongregants figurationally resacrifice “the lamb of God”in the “new covenant” so as to be incorporated throughthe figure of mutual participation into the body-and-blood of Jesus made institutional on earth, to wit, thechurch and its spiritual corporation. The individual actof faith, incorporating so as to be incorporated, figuratesan aggregate becoming a collectivity “in Christ,” as onesays with a pregnant metaphor of containment made lit-eral—as is the case for metaphor in all ritual—in theEucharistic mystery.

This central ritual of Christian faith, moreover, is abrilliantly compact structure of action; it is chiastic asclassical rhetoric would see it, named for the Greek termfor a marking with the letter chi, chiasmos, a criss-crossreciprocation figurating, of course, the cross. Here, the

9. In the Gospels, one finds the parallel narrative passages at Mat-thew 26:26–29, Mark 14:22–25, and Luke 22:17–20. John 6:48–58articulates the mystical equivalences that underlie the liturgicalfiguration in the Eucharistic service. For example, “And as theywere eating Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it tothe disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ Then he tookthe cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink fromit, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which isshed for many for the remission of sins. . . .’ ” (Matthew 26:26–28).“Then [Jesus] took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them,saying, ‘This is my body which is given up for you—do this in myremembrance.’ Likewise he took the cup after they had eaten andsaid, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is pouredout for you’ ” (Luke 22:19–20).10. Of course, the precise nature of such transubstantiation hasbeen a theological doctrine of some controversial nature over thecenturies over which churches have split.


90-degree perpendicularity of the iconic cross is dynam-ically figurated by reciprocal action, a back-and-forthwhereby a small ingestion figurating incorporation istantamount to (i.e., results in) a large counterdirectionalincorporation into a mystical corporate union or fellow-ship. This is literally an act—as in “social act”—of re-newal of individual faith in the divine, selfless, self-sac-rificing agency of Jesus who became the sacrifice on thecross, this act the foundation for the faithful of Chris-tianity-as-lived.

The point for analyzing ordinary, everyday discursiveinteraction—relating to others through the medium ofthe most ordinary-seeming language—is this: An inter-action—even everyday, ordinary conversation—is to beanalyzed as the “ritual” event through which its variousparticipants are allocated ascriptions of adherence to orat least role-alignment with the cultural beliefs that un-derlie and thereby provide the stuff of sociality. This isfiguratively accomplished through the entextualizationof patterns of usage of words and expressions in the con-text of interaction. We as analysts “read” the interac-tional text of what is (denotationally) said in the socialcontext of role relationships in the same way that we asparticipants “understand” what “social text” is beingenacted (above and beyond what is being denoted). Thusto “read” or “understand” is in effect to reconstruct apiece of text as the realization of one or more genres oftypically “ritualized” triangulation: denotation—dy-namic figuration—context of sociocultural knowledge.The text of what is said (p denotation) gesturally figur-ates a framework of cultural values (p “cosmic” context)associated with denotata. Dynamically this constitutesthe crux of the social relationships of participants overthe (real-time) course of interaction. This more inclusive“text”—the “interactional text” of social relationshipsin progress here-and-now—is what we read from thefigurational dynamics of denotational material, thewords and expressions of discourse.

Discourse is a by-degrees “cooperative” (cf. Grice 1989[1967]:26–31) activity or praxis insofar as participants,whatever they intend, manage to precipitate an inter-personal, intersubjective, denotational text-in-context.With respect to such an emergent, real-time structure ofmeaningfulness, participants can mutually align theircontributions so as to align their personae in a sociallysignificant event. Such text-in-context is what we canartifactualize in a transcript, ready for in vitro (as op-posed to in vivo) study as a record of an interaction. If,however, the participants in an interaction are informedby disparate and only implicitly metricalized genres,events can fail by degrees to achieve such intersubjectivecoherence. By contrast, official ritual is authoritativelyeffective at figurating terms from a system of culturalbeliefs because it is highly—even hypertrophically—andexplicitly metricalized into a “poetic” organization suchthat to participate at all is to participate metrically.

For example, in figure 2 one cannot help but be struckby the poetics of the ritual text transcribed some yearsago by James Fox (1974:74) among speakers of Rotineseon Roti (Indonesia). It is (internally) structured as a de-

notational textual message, in terms of a tight poeticsof parallelism around the terms goat, front, neck, hairand cock, rear, tail, feathers as oppositional sets intro-duced in parallel in lines 1–2 and 3–4, respectively, alongwith personal and place names. The dynamic figurationhere—the diagram emergent over the real time in whichthe message is articulated—is, of course, what makesthis ritual text “work” as effective social action. Theparallel, dyadic messages about the cutting or pluckingof the animal’s valued beauty (lines 5–6 and 9–10) arefollowed by the regeneration of the value (lines 7–8,11–12), “still perfect as before/and ordered as at first”(lines 13–14). It is the ritual text of a speech that occurredat the moment when, on the death of an old politicalleader of the clan village, a young successor (lacking anachieved glory of beard or plumage, we might say) wasinstalled. “Don’t worry,” the ritual speech soothes;“things will right themselves to the status-quo-ante.”

Dynamic figuration in ritual, then, depends on a tightmetricality within the “literal” or denotational text toeffect its goal or end, to bring about something in thefield of socially deployed symbols. In transcript, and es-pecially as the chart of parallelisms that graphs it, yousee the diagram (the type of Peircean icon involving anal-ogy of parts) of that which the denotational language is“doing” at this very moment, namely, bringing into thisspatiotemporal envelope of interactional context thelonged-for reality of authoritative soothing because, fig-uratively speaking, one’s inhabiting a “severed” socialcondition leads inevitably, the speech observes, to one’sreinhabiting a resumptively “regenerated” one. Theiconic diagram applies to this context, here-and-now:over discourse time, the time of talk, it indexes (i.e.,invokes as contextual parameter) the political situationfaced by the people of the group as going from “needingsoothing” to “soothed,” we might say. The literal formof ritual text is always such an iconic index—a picturemade real in the here-and-now—of that which it accom-plishes, patently or transparently mapping the diagram-matic figuration of its denotational language in what wemight appreciate as its “literal” interpretation into itsinteractional import, or effect.

Interaction Ritual in Virtual MetricalizedDiscourse Space

The interaction ritual of Messrs. A and B may not seemtransparent to us in its formedness, though we can in-tuitively interpret or understand what is going on. How-ever, to model the interactional text here is the meth-odological problem. It requires us to recognize that eachof the operative semiotic forms—each quantal coding ofcommunicated denotational or conceptual informationthat plays a semiotic role in the interactional story line—does not just occur by itself; the units of effective se-miosis are not, for example, simply words or lexicalforms given in advance, as folk analysis might assume.Nor does any interactionally relevant sign occur purely


Fig. 2. Dynamic figurational structure of a Rotinese oration (bini) for a situation of succession (Fox 1974:74,reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press).

as a function of the linguist’s sentence grammar or theone-sentence-at-a-time reconstructions of denotationaltext done by linguistic philosophers or conversation an-alysts (though of course everything can be nicely parsedaccording to English syntax and sense semantics [see Sil-verstein 1985]). Each contributory bit of information,rather, fits into an emerging multidimensional array ofrepetition, comparison, and contrast, an organization ofdenotational information that is interactionally effectivebecause it comes to entextualized formedness in a par-ticular way in the course of conversation.

But the operative structure in such ordinary conver-sation is not a transparent poetic organization of the de-

notational text, as in our two “real” ritual examplesabove. In ritual poetics, the semiotic material is simul-taneously measured out into foot, line, verse, and otherrecurring chunks, allowing us to locate every operantsign with respect to every other along dimensions of fi-gurated interactional meaningfulness. This creates acomplex “space” akin to a multidimensional crystallinestructure through which the interpreter of an entex-tualization must move to “get the [ritual] point” beinginscribed through the metrical semiosis of participants.

In everyday conversations like this one, by contrast,the operative structure occurs in an immanent concep-tual poetics—the conceptual material organized into a


virtual metricalized space of points that are themselvesdenotationally created as the referents of deictic cate-gories and otherwise indexed by systematic categorialforms. These include such pragmatic operators as lexi-cally coded paradigms of opposed deictic spatializerssuch as English here versus there and adverbs such asEnglish now versus then, the inflectional expression ofcategory paradigms such as English “tense” categoriesof “present” ( p “nonpast”) versus “past,” and so forth.These organize information into a conceptual metrics,in addition to the explicit poetics of metrical repetition,constructional parallelism, and lexical ligature. Lookingat the transcript in figure 1, we can observe, thus, howin QA8 (“An’ you went to undergraduate [school] here,or” –) in 2, Mr. A uses the “past tense” of the verb go-in the idiomatic phrase go- to [school] that predicatesthis relationship between “you” (pMr. B) and some“here,” a “place” category deictic being used, in the flowof discourse, for “Chicago” (cf. RB7). QA8 is straightfor-wardly a propositional schema of the rough-and-readycanonical form “f(x,y)”, “go-to-undergraduate-school(Mr. B, [Chicago])” within the spatiotemporal frameworkof Mr. B’s dialogically elicited biography-in-progress—and of his life, including the moment of interaction!—that is explicitly deictically signaled by “here” and “pasttense,” schematically hereB–thenB.

Figure 3 presents the results of such a retranscriptionof the explicit metrical transcript in the framework ofwhat we might term the deictic metricalization of prop-ositional (denotational) content. A rough schematizationreconstructing the propositional information in eachturn is presented in the lefthand column, while in therighthand column are listed the deictically anchored spa-tiotemporalizations seemingly in discursive focus at thatvery utterance interval of the conversation. At RB8, Mr.B has introduced a distinction between a university-in-stitutional framework of location, coded with small cap-ital letters (thus: “thereB” for Loyola University of Chi-cago), and a city-geopolitical framework of location,coded with lower-case letters (thus: “hereB” for the cityof Chicago). At the bottom of the retranscription, I sche-matize the denotational content of Mr. A’s first pair-partin turn 5 and its corresponding second, Mr. B’s turn 6.It will be immediately seen that in turn 5 Mr. A describesa situation that, for him, goes from good to bad; by con-trast, Mr. B in 6 describes a situation that, for him, goesfrom bad to good, an overall reverse direction along anevaluative dimension that is, nevertheless, closely par-allel to Mr. A’s earlier statement.

In figure 4 I have charted what is intersubjectivelyshared between Messrs. A and B about the roles and bi-ographical attributes of each of them at two points ininteractional time, according to the various frameworksthat are contrasted along “there” : “here” and “then”:“now” deictic differentiations of role inhabitance anddenotational information emergent in the transcript.The first point is where our transcripted snippet begins;the second is where it ends.

The various frameworks, it will be noted, are realmsof knowledge about the world and about the interaction

ongoing. In each frame are grouped together the piecesof intersubjective biographical knowledge that haveemerged by that phase of interaction. There are fullerand more precise propositional descriptions of curricularparticipation and of university affiliation for each par-ticipant by the conclusion of the transcribed interval.The talk has been directed to, in effect, filling in theboxes for Messrs. A and B within the deictically andlexically differentiated frameworks. Further, at the con-clusion of this segment the interactional roles of initiator(of questions) and respondent (to them) have decisivelyreversed (something that would, in fact, become clearonly by examining the rest of the transcript). This createsa multidimensional array of information—here aboutMessrs. A and B themselves, as it turns out, because thedescriptive content is frankly about these two people’snarratable relationships of “living in,” “attending or ma-triculating at,” etc., with reference to certain named en-tities such as states and cities and universities that in-habit shared cultural space.

Down through turn 4, Mr. A and Mr. B have beenconstructing conversationally usable biographies, first ofMr. B under Mr. A’s relentless questioning and secondof Mr. A as Mr. B reciprocally obliges by asking for hisundergraduate institution. When, in 5, Mr. A, elaboratingon his answer, ventures a negative comparison of hisexperiences at Georgetown and Chicago, Mr. B, in 6,launches into a description of all of the changes for thebetter that his undergraduate institution, Loyola, has un-dergone in the five or six years since he matriculatedthere. But what we can describe in this merely sequentialfashion is densely structured into pieces of informationorganized by “placing” each with respect to other piecesof information through the use of syntactically co-oc-curring deictics implying dimensions of comparison andcontrast in various cultural realms of knowledge.

The conversation is organized in this way into threeparts, the first, starting even before the stretch in thetranscript, building up the biography of Mr. B, the secondever so briefly giving the interactionally relevant biog-raphy of Mr. A, and the third composed of the two de-notationally disconnected evaluative judgments thatcount, however, as the moment of real interactional re-versal for Mr. A and Mr. B, as shown.

The more general principles of interaction ritual are,then, in a way the same as those in “real” ritual. In eachcase, our interpretations or understandings of and stra-tegic self-alignments to interactional text—in short, ourinterested modeling of it—are always through the lensof available denotational form. Certain partials of de-notational text—what one is saying—“count as” (or atleast contribute to “counting as”) instances of perform-ing a certain kind (or genre) of socially consequential actin emerging interactional text—what one has (or willhave) socially done or accomplished in and by sayingsomething. And any determinacy in accomplishing thisdepends on the dynamic—though orderly and intersub-jective—indexical-iconic figurative value of verbal de-scriptors set into frameworks of knowledge structuredin the here-and-now by deictics and other indexicals. In


Fig. 3. “Objective” and deictic components of propositional information communicated in the conversation offigure 1, with schema of dynamic figuration at turning point. To represent the propositional content of talk, aschematic “predicate-argument” is followed in the lefthand column, roughly “predicate-about (referent/topic).”[ ], material not uttered in the turn at talk but carried over from prior turn(s); A, B, indexes of participants’explicit sentence-subjecthood or implied subjectivity; X, as yet unspecified propositional argument; HERE/THERE, university differentiated as deictic object (versus here/there, all other place-deixis).

the case of explicit ritual, the hypertrophied formalmetricalization of denotation makes it transparent to theaccomplishment of “acts” relative to frameworks ofknowledge, including beliefs. In the case of everyday in-teraction ritual, the figuration depends on deictically me-diated orderings of denotation that have the force of con-ceptual metricalizations. The semiotically operativefigurations of relational stance of participants in inter-

action are conceptually metricalized along dimensionsgiven by deictic usage in addition to the way they maybe explicitly metricalized by cotextual structures of par-allelism, repetitions, etc.

Thus, for Messrs. A and B, Mr. B’s nonsequitur in 6,his denotationally—that is, logically or propositionally—incoherent description of the reverse direction of changeof Loyola University, his emblem of identity, interac-


Fig. 4. Transformation over conversational time of al-ready intersubjectively shared information about par-ticipants laid out in deictically differentiated frame-works (Silverstein 1998:290, fig. 12.2, �1997 by theGreenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, re-printed by permission). [ ], information not uttered inthe turn at talk but carried over from prior turn(s) orfrom nonverbal context; A, B, deixis within the bio-graphical spacetime of participant indicated.

tionally comes to “count as” a third phase of the inter-actional segment transcribed here. It is the registrationof foiled one-upmanship and the beginning move in hismetaphorical self-transformation into the participantholding the better interactional position—truly a role-relational reversal from what had been good-naturedlygoing on up to this point.11

Verbalized Knowledge and SocialPositionalities

Occasions of talk like the chat of Messrs. A and B makeconceptual information intersubjective (“on record”) inreal time through layers of form of organized text. Suchform, we have seen, mediates how participants come tostand one to another and how an interaction is a dynamicof assuming and transforming relational stances. But wemust go farther and ask of the conceptual informationcommunicated and made intersubjective, what is its na-ture? How is it anchored to language? Where, as culturalknowledge, does it “live,” so to speak, in society?

In addressing this issue, we come to the second im-portant differentiating dimension of contemporary lin-guistic anthropology, for we have discovered that inter-actionally relevant concepts indexed (cued) by wordsand expressions in text are cultural concepts that have

11. The methodological importance of this analytic focus via whatI term the “sign’s-eye view” of ritualization cannot be overesti-mated. It unites the traditional linguist’s concern for formednessof messages (utterances, texts, . . .) with concern for the contex-tualization conditions of messages—semiotically, their indexical-ities or conditions of co-occurrence with various factors of the com-municative situation. From the sign’s-eye point of view, in asituation in which, at any moment of interactional time, there aremultiple interpersonal possibilities “in play,” the gradual cominginto being of a determinate text-in-context is the gelling of onespecial kind of indexicality, cotextuality, of a privileged set of signswith respect to the rest of what is significant. Cotextuality deter-mines a special, central cohesive structure, the “text,” in a largerand dynamic field of indexicality, namely, all that the occurrenceof that text points to in the way of its surrounding contextuali-zation. Ritual proper (as anthropologists no less than its practi-tioners would identify it) and interaction ritual differ, of course, inthe degree—not kind or mechanism(s)—of compulsive obtrusive-ness of cotextuality for both participants and analyst. In our ownculture, this cotextuality is first and foremost understood—by par-ticipants no less than by analysts within the culture of language—to center around the “what is said” aspect of semiosis, what weterm the denotational text. Therefore, it is our task to open up thisdenotational text in interactional terms to show that Messrs. A andB’s interaction one with another, like that of all people within thisculture, is not direct but mediated by the denotational text thatemerges between them as an intersubjective fact about structured—and in particular, mostly deictically structured—information.Thus, “understanding” a discursive interaction such as that be-tween Mr. A and Mr. B is, in effect, being able to model it as adenotational text-in-context that, as interaction ritual, figurates theinteractional doings between them as it entails them, such figu-ration always summoning to context cultural values as the stuff-at-issue of social interaction. To study the effective form of inter-action, then, we work through its mediating denotationaltextuality. This is why all cultural study is hermeneutic (and di-alectic) in nature, seeking to interpret the interactionally significant(i.e., efficacious) “meanings” of denotational text.


a special status among the several components of mean-ingfulness of language. (Hilary Putnam [1975] termedthem stereotypes about the world.) It is important to seethat such cultural concepts, as opposed to all the otherkinds of meaningfulness associable with the words andexpressions used by Messrs. A and B, play the decisiverole in bringing this conversation to formed significanceand effectiveness.

In effect the participants’ use of certain expressions inparticular metrical positions of a developing textual formindexes—invokes—structures of knowledge about theworld. For example, use of names such as “Georgetown”in parallelistic relation to “Loyola (of Chicago)” in-dexes—brings to the intersubjective denotational textualmicrocosm—nodes in the “taxonomy” of Jesuit univer-sities in the United States, just as the juxtaposition ofthese names of institutions concurrently invokes thedenotata (for the cognoscenti) as an ordered set, or “serialstructure,” by their rank on a scale of institutional pres-tige giving value to their graduates’ credentials (or de-grees). Any time one uses a word or expression it indexesspecific values or nodes within such knowledge sche-mata. Each such schema of conceptual information isnow made “relevant” to discursive interaction as aframework projected from it (as well as now indexicallyanchored to it here-and-now); in other words, it is spe-cifically indexed (pointed to, gestured at) as the in-playfocus of figuration (in our sense of ritual[ization]) in theinteractional work being done.

What type of person, with what social characteristics,deploys such knowledge by using the expressions thatnormatively and actually index (invoke) it in a particularconfiguration of cotext? With what degrees and kinds ofauthority do interactants use expressions (reflectingknowledgeable familiarity from the social structural po-sition of the user with respect to ritual centers of au-thority that “warrant” their use)? To whom is authori-tative knowledge ascribed, and who can achieve at leasta conversationally local state of authority with respectto it, if not a perduring authority stretching beyond theinstance of interaction? In such ways the variability oflinguistic usage presumes upon—and points to (in-dexes)—the nonuniformity of knowledge within a com-munity. Importantly, nonuniformity in what peopleknow or are at least allowed to manifest knowledge ofis a function of numerous types of social categorizationsof people and people’s membership in groups of varioussorts, of which, then, using certain words and expres-sions becomes a direct or indirect indexical sign.

We understand what is going on in the conversationbetween Mr. A and Mr. B as we can discern the centralityof the participants’ predicating the “went-to-school (pcollege)-at” relationship between, respectively, Mr. Aand Georgetown (oldest, richest, almost Ivy—thoughCatholic—Jesuit university at the center of nationalpower), and Mr. B and Loyola of Chicago (located in aMidwestern manufacturing and commercial center, in1974 a generic, commuter school with not much of atraditional campus). Such associations become intersub-jective facts at particular points in interactional time

through the verbal accounts of the biographies of theinteractants, in effect placing Mr. A and Mr. B in seriallystructured value positions within the overall taxonomyof Jesuit institutions. Their respective social selves havebeen in effect wrapped in these culturally widespreademblems of identity (Singer 1984:esp. 105 and referencesthere) with entailments for dynamic figuration; indeed,such emblems are “old school ties” in American male,bourgeois professional society.

Of course, there is a process of essentializing that un-derlies and results in the emblematic power of such in-dexed positionalities, as I shall show in detail in the lastsection below (since emblems are “naturalized,” that is,essentialized icons indexically deployable). Various com-plex and dialectical institutionalized processes yield sim-ilarly emblematic values for their own sorts of signs inidentity politics, priestly incumbencies of expertise,“brand”-allegiance groups, and other forms of group for-mation around emblems at least deictically locatable onor in respect of persons and even bodies (think, further,of people even wearing school insignia or colors on theirclothing, of the class-differentiated wearing of gang col-ors, of the flying of national flags on the portals of homesand even on vehicles).

The interactional text of what Messrs. A and B have“really” been doing in the way of a cultural event as theywere talking about this and that thus becomes clear. Mr.A has, we can now infer, been providing opportunities,through relentless first pair-part questioning of Mr. B atthe outset of their conversation, long before and up untilour snippet begins, for Mr. B to predicate in second pair-parts of adjacency pair structures such a “went-to-school(p college)-at” relationship for himself, so as toreveal his emblem of identity; and finally, in adjacencypair 2 at RB8, with some hesitation, Mr. B accedes, ex-plicitly disambiguating “hereB,” that is, Chicago, fromLoyola of Chicago (p “thereB”), his university alma ma-ter (“in Chicago at, uh, Loyola”). Then Mr. A has hismoment “one-up,” announcing—note the descriptiveframework of taxonomy he explicitly invokes as now “inplay” for self-other comparison!—that he, too, is a “Jes-uit” college product (for in stratified American society,below the level of the traditional male prep-school WASPrich, it is generally one’s undergraduate [Bachelor’s de-gree] institution that counts).

In the flow of talk, this creates an asymmetry of char-acterization between participants in the co-constructedintersubjective space, for they both now know Mr. B’sbiographical emblem of Jesuit-institutional value but donot know Mr. A’s. The gap can only be filled by Mr. B’sasking his now good-natured return question QB1,“Where’d you go [to school]?” This will open the spacefor Mr. A to predicate the equivalent information abouthimself. While all he needs to do from a denotationalpoint of view is to give the institution name as descrip-tor, he makes his formulation symmetrical with the oneMr. B has earlier used. In response RA1 he predicates ofhimself having gone to “Georgetown [University] (p“thereA”), down in Washington (p “thereA”).” (Mr. Bdoesn’t even wait for this last piece of locational infor-


mation before launching into his next turn at utterance,it should be noted, so superfluous an added specifier isit in the in-group universe of “old Jesuit boys” that bothhe and Mr. A belong to.)

Deploying such biographically contingent culturalknowledge—here, for example, knowing about namedJesuit institutions—constitutes the central modality ofestablishing and transforming qualities of social rela-tions. Having such cultural knowledge is group-relative:it is, as Hilary Putnam put it in a famous 1975 paper,echoing Durkheim (1893), based on a sociolinguistic “di-vision of labor” in which the fact of social distributionof conceptualization is an essential characteristic ofwords and expressions insofar as the way in which theybecome meaningful identity signs deployed in interac-tion underlies their very capacity to denote—just as wasmy writing “Durkheim” and not “the great master ofFrench sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917),” in theimmediately preceding passage.

Thus, particular words and expressions emerge inmetricalized text as indexical differentiae of a discourseparticipant’s having—or seeming not to have—certainconceptual structures and distinctions, which arebrought to bear on denotation at that point of discoursetime precisely as a function of the use of a certain form.This is, as we shall see below, tantamount to indicatinggroup or category membership of participants in a dis-cursive interaction, both as a presupposed fact about asocial world indexically anchored to the here-and-nowand as a fact entailed (performatively created) for such aworld in and by the very textually organized use of cer-tain words and expressions at that moment. As Putnamand others have pointed out, for any denoting word orexpression the preponderance of its “meaning” lies injust such concepts as are revealed in usage and itsco(n)textual indexical patterns, somewhat independentlyof the meanings signaled by formal grammatical aspectsthrough which sentence constructions are shaped.

The use of certain words and expressions at a partic-ular point in discursive real time therefore does morethan contribute straightforwardly to denotational text.It marks (indexes) the user as a member of a certain groupor category relative to the groups or categories of persons,things, etc., already in play through contextual and co-textual indexicalities up to that point (see the conceptof “membership analysis” in Schegloff 1972). It therebyindexes—points to—an in-group including that userwithin which one can presume a sharedness of specificconceptual schemata such as taxonomies, partonomies,paradigms, seriations, etc., that begin and end in occa-sions of talk and their intertextual, interdiscursive qual-ities in a whole economy of verbal usage in social life.12

12. The study of such structures in a number of practical domainsof conceptualization has long been the province of self-styled “cog-nitive anthropology” and congeners, though with a dubious un-derstanding of “meaning” and virtually no understanding of gram-mar (see the collection of papers in Tyler 1969 and, notwith-standing, the very useful discussion of “ordering functions and vo-cabulary structure” surveying the types of knowledge schemata inTyler 1978:255–300; see also the oddly triumphalist account of

Consequently, when I have had occasion to talk tointernational audiences about Messrs. A and B (see Sil-verstein 1998)—recognizable, highly locatable social per-sonae of American bourgeois culture—it has necessitateda vast labor of explication on my part of the frameworkswithin which what the two men are saying is culturallyinformed and culturally coheres in figurating an inter-actional text that can be made analytically transparent.I have had to become, in other words, a cultural inform-ant revealing what is communicatively specific here inthe way information-bearing words and expressions, thevery denotational currency of this interpersonalexchange, index group memberships that come to inter-actional realization in the instance.

It is clear that at least some interlocutors in theseinternational audiences had enough competence in Eng-lish to follow the denotational text of what Messrs. Aand B were saying and my own exposition. However, thefact that they missed all this indexical meaningfulness(or at least needed laborious explication of it to show itssystematicity in frameworks of knowledge about partic-ular worlds) is, of course, the demonstration par excel-lence of “culture” immanent in language. Messrs. A andB appear to be operating with—pointing to and identi-fying each other with positions within—these schemataof cultural concepts without losing a cotextual beat, sosmooth is the interactional textuality with which theychat. But one can imagine an outsider’s seeing nothingof the nature of this interaction because knowing noth-ing of the stereotypic knowledge schemata indexed bythe use of specific words and expressions from culturallyloaded pragmatic paradigms of not merely denotationalbut indexical and emblematic value. Messrs. A and Bdeploy this knowledge like identity-linen by hanging itout interpersonally and intersubjectively not only in ex-plicitly metricalized poetic turn-taking but in a second,more subtle layer of deictically structured conceptualspace—“here’s” Chicago; “there’s” Loyola; etc. Theythus surround their respective conversational personaewith these emblems of personal identity, negotiating andcoconstructing a deictically denoted field with the polar-coordinate geometry common to any such indexed re-

D’Andrade 1995, written against all the gains in epistemologicalsubtlety won in the postpositivist study of language and other cul-tural phenomena and resolutely set against all of it). Within thecognitive anthropology literature, Frake (1969 [1964]), in particular,has succeeded in showing how discursive coherences involvingwords and expressions over sequential adjacency-pair (Q;A) routinesfind their explanation in various “-onomic” structures of knowl-edge that are, by hypothesis, presupposed by the responding con-sultant to be the conceptual frameworks giving coherence to suchdialogue—hence his “notes” on the suitability of various types ofdomain-specific “queries” (and their responses). At the same time,the -onomic structures invoked are creatively useful to the an-thropologist by virtue of the apparent ability of speakers relationallyto structure various denotational terms at issue by such metase-mantic descriptors as “is a type of,” “is a part of,” and the like.The way in which particular words and expressions substituting insuch diagnostic frames of conceptual relations in coherent pairingsof dialogic (Q;A) discourse metricalizations of various sorts revealsinteresting networks of terminological—hence, cultural-concep-tual—relations.


gion surrounding an origin point (here-and-now) in theperson or persons communicating.

Now, such stereotypic or cultural concepts are invokedin and by the use of tokens of words and expressions towhich they are attached. Arrayed in deictic-poetic realtime, these concepts constitute the denotational spaceof play that gets figurationally mapped in the practicalwork of interactional textuality, of inhabiting and “de-fining” this social event as starting in some state of socialrelations and winding up in another. Such culturalknowledge lives and dies in textual occasions. We createit on occasions of use of particular words and expressionsin particular cotextual arrays one with respect to an-other, as much as, on subsequent occasions of use ofthem, we try to presume upon the knowledge previouslyexperienced and, perhaps finding our presumption beingquestioned, have to create it again or modify it for somenew interlocutor. The doing of all this denotational tex-tual work, at the same time, figurates interactional tex-tuality, the participants coming to stand in social rela-tion one to another, and therefore the culturalconceptualization on which interaction turns can neverbe neatly abstracted from its dimension of interaction-ality. Rather, such textual occasions—occasions for lan-guage to be used to describe phenomena in the universeof experienceables—are occasions when people (indexi-cally) associate specifically patterned words and expres-sions with specific, valuated pieces of conceptual knowl-edge that people invoke as interlocutors in such-and-such kinds of social event. Interlocutors thereby bringthat knowledge into interpersonal social space and makeit relevant to their ongoing interactions, all in the verymoment of seeming to fashion an individual thought.

The use of some particular word or expression at amoment in denotational text-time thus comes differ-entially to invoke—to summon to the here-and-now—some specific cultural concept in a schema of such. (Iwill return later to the issue of whose indexical associ-ations and schemata “count.”) But it does so in a waythat is dependent on sociocentric and interactionally lo-catable patterns of language use both as themselves con-stituting social action in the way I have demonstratedand as associable with other modalities of social action.[The distinction between these and other aspects of theconceptual content of language is clarified in the elec-tronic edition of this article on the journal’s web site.]

Lexically Explicit “-onomic” Structuresversus Cultural Concepts beyondLexicalization

The way we denote what we consider “real-world”things by lexical expressions reveals at least one kind ofknowledge, for example, that certain plants and animalsare members of a category and that members of thatcategory have certain properties. These denotata are orcan be conceptually interrelated in various by-degreessocially shared and/or perduring schemes of discursive

knowledge about them; they “go together” in a classi-fication that can be revealed in explicitly metasemantic(sense-characterizing) discourse. The fact of such clas-sificatory knowledge can be revealed by special kinds ofmetalinguistic conversations with (Q; A) participant-rolestructure. Consultants as respondents can coconstruct“-onomies” in response to the query-based stimulationof a friendly anthropologist: “A T-shirt is a kind of shirt”within the domain denoted by “clothing,” of which“shirt,” to be sure, is a kind, and so on.13

Such induced lexicalized -onomic structures are pre-cisely what, more explicitly, underlie an older philo-sophical view of Western “science.” Stipulated networksof scientific terms are interrelated by in-essence term-defining theory the fashioning of which constitutes,then, a privileged, in-essence “ritual” site of discourse.One should thus be able to measure the coherence ofany denotational discourse that emerges under such atheory by whether or not the critical terms defined orentailed by theoretical texts are used consistently withwhat the ritual center prescribes or at least does notproscribe. It is not difficult to see the analogy long lurk-ing in studies of culture-as-mentality that a culture islike a totalizing folk-scientific “theory”—or implicit“view”—of the world (Weltanschauung) that providesfolk-scientific terms to its users (the culture-bearers),methodologically systematizable in terms of -onomiesthat one can explicitly induce in the metalinguisticmode.

To investigate a culture’s concepts, in this approach,one tries to extract or induce the semantic consistenciesin such lexical usage and model them in terms of -on-omies. If one can, one tries to give the intensional prin-ciples of conceptual classification that lie behind suchan -onomy’s structure, more or less identifying theseprinciples with the conceptual meanings—senses—ofthe critical theoretical terms, the lexical labels of thesystematizable culture. Unfortunately, cultural conceptsof the kind we are focusing on here just do not work inthis fashion; they are indexically invoked in and by theuse of certain language forms in context, but the con-cepts will never be systematizable by the approach thatsees culture as a “(folk-scientific) theory of the world.”

A revealing example of the difference between struc-tures of lexically explicit -onomization and actual cul-tural conceptualization appeared some years back in oneof Stanley Tambiah’s (1985 [1969]) contributions to thelong-running though in my opinion ill-conceived “de-bate” on other peoples’ rationality in classification by

13. See Frake’s (1969 [1964]) demonstration of the method. Thisexercise, if metasemantic (i.e., truly sense-characterizing), dependsentirely on discovering a language’s privileged set of text-formingmetasemantic operators such as “is a kind of (X,Y)” (for X,Y de-noting lexical expressions of some language), which, transitivelyiterable across pairs of expressions, generates a so-called taxonomy.From this term, I have generalized the term “-onomies,” intendingto include all types of knowledge structures thus revealed or gen-erated in these and other metasemantically regimenting textualoccasions, for example, partonomy, paradigm, and serial (linearlyordered) structure.


table 1Edibility Ascriptions of Domesticated and Forest Ani-mals among Thai Villagers

Sad baan (DomesticatedAnimals) Sad paa (Forest Animals)

Wild counterparts of Sad baan:Khuay (buffalo)—edible

with rulesKhuay paa (wild buffalo)—

edibleNgau (ox)—edible with rules Ngua paa (wild ox)—edibleMuu (pig)—edible with rules Muu paa (wild boar)—edibleMaa (dog)—not edible

(taboo)Maa paa (wolf)—not edible

Maew (cat)—not edible Chamod (civet cat)—edible(ambiguous)

Kai (chicken)—edible Kai paa (wild fowl)—ediblePed (duck)—edible Ped paa (wild duck)—edibleHaan (goose)—edible but

rarely eatenOther animals:

Kuang (deer)—edibleFaan (barking deer)—edibleNuu paeng, nuu puk (forest

rat)—edibleKahaug (squirrel)—edibleKadaai (hare)—edibleLing (monkey)—not edible

Animals of the deep forest,rarely seen:Saang (elephant)—not

edibleSya (tiger)—not edibleSya liang (leopard)—not

edibleMii (bear)—not edible

source: Tambiah (1985:table 5.1, Copyright � 1985 by thePresident and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted bypermission.)

cultural concepts.14 Tambiah described the apparent—practically evidenced and verbalizable—beliefs of Thaivillagers about differences of “edibility” of the universeof lexically nameable faunal types. Each time a particularfaunal nominal expression is used in discourse, fromamong an elaborately taxonomized set of such, such be-liefs are, of course, potentially cued as contextually rel-evant cultural concepts about the named fauna (in Put-namian terms, differentially indexed as stereotypecultural beliefs about the denotata of fauna terms). Theproblem for us in a curious way is that local ascriptionsof “edibility”—a projected “property,” to be sure, pred-icable as true or false of every type of named creature inThai villagers’ belief—seem to be askew from two pointsof view.

On the one hand, as shown in table 1, when we con-struct careful taxonomies of types of animals accordingto the Thai villagers’ own verbalizable “is a kind of”relationship, this categorial structure bears no transpar-ently direct relationship to the ascribed property of “ed-ibility.” If such a property is shared stereotypic knowl-edge, it is communicated indexically, constituting in thisway—but not as a taxonomic principle of discourse co-herence—much of the direct as well as figurative dis-cursive rationality of text-making use of animal names(in unproblematically smooth discursive interaction fo-cused on human relations to potential faunal foodstuffs,for example). Among nonhuman creatures (tua) and inparticular animals (sad), some domesticated animals (sadbaan) are “edible” and some not; some forest animals(sad paa) are “edible” and others not (and similarly forwater animals [sad naam]). At the same time, “edibility”proscriptions, restrictions, preferences, or prescriptionshave little “natural” basis beyond local cultural beliefs.For example, there seems not to be a relation to what isin some physical sense readily “available” or biochem-ically “harmful” or explicable by any of the myriad West-ern a priori optimizations or minimax calculi that informvarious crypto-rationally reductive theories such as percapita protein capture or energy expenditure as the “re-ally real” meaning of the only apparently (mystified) cul-tural concept of “edibility.”

As Tambiah’s data show (table 2), the concept of “ed-ibility” is a degree concept that peaks in the middle ofan abstract cultural structure of homologies across in-habitable and indexically anchored role relations withfauna and others. This homology draws together ste-reotypically conceptualized animal habitat and stereo-typic animal behavior with two other systematizations

14. The debate is framed in precisely the same terms as the questionof the universality versus “cultural relativity” of various aspectsof linguistic form and function, to wit, the universality versus “cul-tural relativity” of “rationality,” “moral sentiment,” etc. Are everyculture’s classifications of the phenomena of the experienceableworld “rational” in some sense? Note, among others, the lines ofphilosophical and anthropological worry in the twentieth centuryfrom Boas and Levy-Bruhl on through to Sahlins and Obeyesekere.Notable way stations, in terms of which Tambiah’s involvementcan be construed, include Leach (1964), Levi-Strauss (1966), Douglas(1972), Wilson (1970), Hollis and Lukes (1982), and Tambiah (1990:84–139).

of inhabitable domains of Thai village life. One is kin-ship, articulated in terms of ascriptively legitimated ver-sus performatively legitimatable marriageable persons inan exogamous though cognatic kinship universe. Theother, anchored to a local, house-centered understandingof concentric social and cosmic spaces, is the stereotypicspatial perquisites of humans of various classificatorycategories.

“Edibility” as an implicitly communicated conceptthat Thai villagers have about nameable fauna turns outto be (1) indexically anchored in the cosmos via a pointof connection in this world, (2) the reflex in animal-typeascriptive projections of a more abstract structure of con-ceptual relations across a number of domains, and (3) adegree concept much like “incest” and other seriouslyrelational matters. Whatever it seems to those who in-voke the concept, “edibility” is clearly not merely a prop-erty to be projected as inherent in objects themselves—not a property of the individuable denotata of a lexiconof folk-scientific fauna terms. And whatever taxonomyor other kind of semantic structure can be induced onthe set of such terms, these orderings are independent


table 2Parallelism across Rules of Human Exogamy, Rules of Human Domestic Access, and Rules of Edibility of Ani-mals among Thai Villagers

Human series Blood siblings First cousins (sec-ond cousins areambiguous)

Classificatorysiblings beyondsecond cousins

Other people Outsiders

Marriage and sexrules

Incest taboo Marriage taboo;sex notcondoned

Recommendedmarriage(and sex)

Marriage andsex possible

No marriage

House categories Haung phoengand huang suam

Huean yaai(sleeping room)

Huean naui(guest room)

Saan (platform) Compoundfence

Rules relating tohouse space

Sleeping rules separ-ating parents fromson-in-law andmarried daughter

Rights of entrybut not sleeping

Taboo to crossthreshold intohuean yaai

Visitors washfeet if in-vited in

Excludingoutsiders

Animal series Domestic animalsthat live insidethe house

Domestic animalsthat live underthe house (andhave beenreared there)

Domestic ani-mals belongingto otherhouseholds

Animals of theforest: coun-terparts,deer, etc.

1. Powerful ani-mals of theforest

2. Monkeys

Eating rules Inedible and taboo Cannot be eatenat ceremonials

Eminently edibleat ceremonials

Edible Inedible andtaboo

source: Tambiah (1985:table 5.2, Copyright � 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted by permission.)

of this important—and, for fauna, ubiquitous—culturalconcept.

As for indexical anchoring, this cultural concept of“edibility” is dependent upon a radial distance functionfrom a center point. This becomes apparent in the locallystructured conceptualization of zones of a village micro-cosm-to-macrocosm organized first around the internalstructure of the living quarters of the house of a head ofhousehold and then around the various correspondinglocations of the house’s undercroft. Then it includes thevillage of several houses, its surrounding land for floodedrice cultivation, its surround in the (uncleared) forest,and finally what may lie beyond. The stereotypic houseitself, as shown in figure 5, top, is in effect linearly zonedstarting from the point on the northeast corner of thesleeping room where the Buddha’s statue and ritual altarconnect the house—and its head of household—to thecosmic realm. The line moves next to the west of thatorigo or anchoring point, then to the south out to theentrance platform and down to the undercroft (fig. 5,bottom), duplicating the arrangement, then outside andinto the macrocosm of the village, and then beyond toother villages.

Privileges of access to these zones are isomorphic withan egocentric kinship structure centered on the stereo-typic male head of household (not on a marriageablechild). Marriage and thus legitimated nonincestuous sex-ual relations for a young woman of such a household andultimately a son-in-law’s access to the sleeping room(west side) are permissible, indeed stereotypically ex-pected, in the mid-range of the kinship classification inthe homologue of table 2.

The abstract structure of analogies anchoring ascrip-tive “edibility” to other kinds of experienced social re-lations follows in the realm of relations of humans to

animals. In fact, the implicit conceptual metaphor—“ed-ibility” (as ego’s comestible) is homologous to “(avail-able) sexuality” (as ego’s legitimate marriage object)—is,as we might expect, ritually literalized as “figuration”and thus made experiential in cases where expiation isnecessary for an incestuous (too close) marriage in thiscognatic system. Both parties to a relatively more in-cestuous union have to “eat” from the same “tortoiseshell” (a pun on the older lexeme for “vagina”) in public,a metaphor, it is thought, of the sexuality of “omnivo-rous” dogs. The spouses indexically-iconically performthis public act of self-mortification to overcome the ta-boo they have violated by marrying (Tambiah 1985[1969]:172–73, 175).

It is to be expected, of course, that an abstract conceptthat is culturally normative is thus anchored in the fig-uration of ritual, such practice authorizing its defaultinvocation as knowledge of the world in the everydayusage of the linguicultural community; whether any in-dividual who uses a faunal term “believes” is, of course,not to the point. The abstract structure authorizing thiscultural concept is made flesh, as it were, in this ritualsite, (re)authorizing its experienceable force in everydaylife—itself experienced in a space that is orderly and in-dexically anchored in the house altar.

“Edibility,” as a degree concept, moves across a spaceof animal types designated by the various faunal terms—a culturally stipulated serial structure, then—accordingto stereotypic habitat along the microcosm-to-macro-cosm-ordered path from the origo of cosmic anchoring.The animals of the innermost household realms (ac-cording to the distance function implied), such as cats,are taboo for eating—disgusting, in fact; buffalo, nor-mally kept in the space under the highly regulated sleep-ing quarters, can be eaten only with ritual circumspec-


Fig. 5. Plan of Thai villager’s elevated house (top) and of its ground-level undercroft (Tambiah 1985:figs. 5.1and 5.2, Copyright �1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted by permission).


tion; chickens and ducks are edible; bears, elephants, andtigers, at the opposite extreme, are “inedible,” as aremonkeys, who correspond iconically in the deep-forestmacrocosmic realm to humans in their microcosmic,house-centric realm, the empirically lived-in village.(There is, in fact, a whole iconic logic of correspondencesof edibility and nonedibility across major spatial realms,as Tambiah shows.)

So cultural concepts turn out to be just that, revealedin cultural practices—among them the always indexicalsocial action of using language—and in a nontrivial way.They are empirically investigable once we abandon theidea that they are analogues in “folk-science” to lexicallycoded concepts of one particular view of theory-basedWestern science. Thai villagers do not have an articu-lated “theory” as such of “edibility,” but they knowwhich fauna are relatively “edible” and which not, asthe organization of their social practices made clear toTambiah. And I have been concerned to show throughthis example that it is this presumptively shared knowl-edge that people rely on. They indexically access it andexperientially renew it each time words and expressionsare used in the emerging “poetic” structures of denota-tional and interactional textuality, especially as the formof interaction ritual figurates role identities of social ac-tion in relation to it.

This is what Messrs. A and B are relying upon in theirculturally fluent interaction: the mutual knowledge infact of two University of Chicago professional-schoolgraduate students from Catholic backgrounds with Jesuitcollege degrees and some understanding of the profes-sional worlds for the ultimate functioning in which bothare pursuing degrees. Hence, the shared, even teachable,schemes of social differentiation, of institutional differ-entiation, generate the specific stereotypes that are madeemblematic through the use of terms that come to bear/bare them. Such is the result of socialization and en-culturation, which we can see are themselves achieve-ments of discursive and other forms of interaction (Ochs1988, Schieffelin 1990). Thus do cultural concepts be-come useful to ritualized self- and other-positionings inthe interaction: stereotypes (truly cultural concepts)come to life and are renewed in and by interactionritual.

Dialectical Production of Cultural Conceptsof “Kinds” and of Inhabitable “Identities”

Having considered how specific occasions of discursiveinteraction invoke cultural concepts of the world andrenew them, we now move to our third issue in contem-porary linguistic anthropology, the more general consid-eration of how the macrosocial variability of concept-coding denotational language is at the same time asystem of identity formation. In a somewhat larger sense,that is, we should step back and ask ourselves, is thekind of interactional text generated in, for example,Messrs. A and B’s encounter specific in any way to these

“kinds” of people? What do we mean by a “kind of”person, in an apparent scheme of social differentiationof inhabitable identities?

Are Messrs. A and B, for example, exemplifying—in-stantiating—identities of proto-“lawyer” and proto–“social worker” as well as “bourgeoisness,” “maleness,”incipient “friendship” or “enmity,” or other fleeting orperduring aspects of ascriptive and achievable identity?The discursive interaction of the two men is fluent whenmeasured by their unproblematic coconstruction of aflow of segmentally coherent interactional texts. Thisachievement would seem to indicate that they implicitlyunderstand their own and the other’s more enduring po-sitionalities along many macrosociological dimensionsof identity and are operating in terms of normative ex-pectations for such identities. All evidence leads us tosee that these positionalities become relevant to theirrelational roles as interlocutory partners for StarkeyDuncan’s data-gathering occasion. A mapping from themacrosociologically positional to the indexically cen-tered microsociological clearly underlies what we termtheir recruitment to interlocutory role not merely as in-dividual intentionalities but as social “kinds.” And inthis way we reach what I think is the third major areain which language is now seen to lie “in” culture as wellas vice versa.

Discursive interaction (and the aspects of languagecentral to its accomplishment) is the very site of pro-duction/maintenance/contestation/transformation of so-cial identities and interests in society, notwithstandingthat such identities and interests lie in the plane of themacrosociological. The fact is that stereotypic mean-ings—cultural concepts—attached to words and expres-sions exist in a complex space between authorizing andauthorized discursive engagements of the people in apopulation, and such stereotypes are not uniformly dis-tributed across the population. Cultural knowledge is,in part, intuitive knowledge of such biases of distribu-tion, essentialized as “kinds of people”; such implicitly“meta-cultural” knowledge is itself biased in distribu-tion by the dynamics of the very processes of com-munication.

In discursive interaction, participants indexically pre-sume upon, project, and even contest these stereotypesof bias as the very stuff of “identities” in “contexts” inwhich their semiotic signaling is realized in a precipi-tated text. As receiver, one always has an “Aha!” of rec-ognition: “So-and-so talks like a———!” (fill in the cat-egory of identity). And one always endeavors to projecta self-identifying intersection of categorial alignmentsfor others to discover about oneself as sender. We canunderstand the cultural concepts of social identity thatinform specific interactional events only by studying theinterdiscursive structures of usage with the tools of theperspectives outlined above. From such a perspective,the “macro” level of sociality is always already imma-nent in the “micro.”

To investigate the contextualization of language, then,is additionally to follow out the politics, the interestedcontestation of identities, that may not at first be ap-


Fig. 6. Micro-/macrocontextual relations (Silverstein2003a:fig. 3).

parent in a particular interaction but becomes apparentin a more enveloping (contextualizing) order of phenom-ena for which any particular interaction must be seen asthe very site of manifestation. As diagrammed in figure6 (reproduced from Silverstein 2003a:201), the categoriesof identity we can inhabit in the microcontexts of in-teraction are licensed or authorized by conceptual par-titions of macrosocial space associable with values. Likeall schemata of value, these are made convincingly realto us from cultural essentializations (frequently natu-ralizations) that are manifest in and at functionally ritualsites of potent figuration. (Recall here how the structureof homologies underlying the Thai villagers’ concepts ofthe relational “edibility” of fauna was made ritually vis-ible in expiation of incest.) Such values percolate througha social formation along paths that connect interactionalexperiences of them as values at nodal points, that is,sites of manifestation in which they are invoked and somade relevant to achieving interactional textuality. Un-derstanding the macrosocial is essential to understand-ing the microcontextual.

Any microcontext of interaction draws on principlesof recruitment to role, where, indexically, one’s inhab-iting particular interactional positionalities points to andis mapped from such schemata of (macro-) social iden-tity: “Who”—what kind of person in a social partitionmade relevant in this genred mode of entextualization—can inhabit a particular kind of interlocutory role usingsuch-and-such expression forms? (As speaker? As ad-dressee? As audience? As overhearer?) The very inhab-iting of an interpretable interlocutory role at some givenphase of interaction using interpretable expression formsperforms or constitutes the recruitment, the making-rel-evant, of the cultural schema of social differentiation.This performative or constitutive process is, of course,all the more apparent in sites of relatively explicitly rit-ualized import in society. From these, the inhabitablecategories that emerge in the ritual poetics suffuse thesocial space, enveloping all discursive interactions au-thorized by the ritual center.

Messrs. A and B are, thus, socially locatable not onlyto each other but to others in their society (a societymany of us still share up to a certain point, of course,even after 25 years) and—after much further collateralstudy in the ethnographic mode—socially locatable byany outside linguistic anthropological analyst of that so-ciety. There have been accounts of “male”-“male”—notethe identities!—conversational or interactional style,seen as a genre of interactional text, which would makeplausible the fact that this conversation leads in the di-rection of one-upmanship. It is interesting here that Mr.A seems to be tending that way from the first, while Mr.B resists for a long time before launching into the game,too, ultimately seeming to hold the upper hand over Mr.A. In this way, too, we can understand the denotationalfocus on college affiliation as the semiotic site underconstruction in achieving mutually intersubjective bi-ographies in the conversation, for alma mater is also so-cially locatable as a kind of perduring emblem alwaysalready available as a focus for interactional work.

There is, then, a larger-scale macrosociological realityimplied here. Being a process caught in motion, of course,“society” as a macrosocial form might be reconceptual-ized from the semiotic point of view as a perduring vir-tual communicative economy.15 It is the reconceptuali-zation that Mikhail Bakhtin (1982) adumbrated with hisconcept of the discursively manifested social formationas a “heteroglossia” of identities. One enters this con-dition, always already in shadow (p virtual) conversa-tion with identities in it, on any occasion of use of one’slanguage. Any such occasion, for Bakhtin, becomes aswell a potential site for the “polyphony of ‘voicings’ ”of the self and other(s) (Silverstein 1999:103–8), the mul-tiple virtual heteroglossic conversations or dialogues in-dexically invoked and made relevant to the interactionat hand.

This processual and communicative reconceptualiza-tion of society puts cultural beliefs and values—whichshow themselves only as they are indexically invokedin and by use of language and derivative semiotics—atthe risk of language use, sometimes even use of languageon a single, powerfully ritual occasion of interaction.Institutional sites of culture are, thus, sites of struggle,contestation, domination, resistance, hegemony, etc.From this point of view, moreover, when we say “lan-guage” as a technical term we mean the conditions underwhich a heteroglossic population is dynamically orga-

15. Already in 1931, Sapir wrote of this virtuality in an extraordi-narily pregnant way in dealing with the most subtle kinds of com-munication, which he labeled “social suggestion”—“the sum totalof new acts and new meanings that are implicitly made possibleby these types of social behavior.” He went on to observe that “theimportance of the unformulated and unverbalized communicationsof society is so great that one who is not intuitively familiar withthem is likely to be baffled by the significance of certain kinds ofbehavior, even if he is thoroughly aware of their external forms andof the verbal symbols that accompany them. It is largely the func-tion of the artist to make articulate these more subtle intentionsof society” (1949[1931]:106).


Fig. 7. Anxieties of status-conscious oenophilia, illustrated (cartoon by William Hamilton, New Yorker car-toonbank.com cartoon image no. 42156, reprinted by permission).

nized around certain implied norms of communication(including rules of grammar in the strict sense).

In some sense, then, Mr. A does not have to call him-self explicitly “an old Jesuit boy” for us to know, asmembers of the society, that this is a male speaker ofAmerican English of a certain background and class out-look and to expect that matters such as undergraduateinstitution are, culturally, close to hand in encounteringand getting to know another like individual. Or does he?Even to investigate and answer such a question, we haveto examine the intercontextual, interinstitutional mu-tual animation of voicings in language use, a macrosocialorder of interdiscursivity immanent in microcontextualdiscursive interactions the study of which takes us intopolitical economies and even franker politics of signs noless than into their grammar.

Enregistering Identity

What I like to call oinoglossia, “wine talk,” reveals some-thing about how language, in contemporary Americansociety, works as such an interdiscursive vehicle for self-and other-fashioning (see also Silverstein 2003a:222–27).We can glimpse the complex interdiscursive space of oin-oglossia, where, perforce, a macrosociological regime ofcommodified identity is at issue that calls upon people

to voice an orientation of proclivities, desires, and abil-ities with respect to it.

In figure 7, a young, well-heeled dinner-party hostgathers up and gazes intently at the empty bottles fromwhich he has presumably served wine to his now-de-parted guests: have they “gotten” the wine, as one “gets”an artwork or the point of some other carefully fashionedaesthetic text? Perhaps the guests could not properly oradequately verbalize their own reactions to the wine,leaving the host wondering whether he and his consort—dutifully off in the kitchen doing the heavy clean-up—have wasted the wine by serving it to aesthetically un-derrefined and hence undeserving guests.

Like every other social institution, the yielding up ofthe identity (the “status”) of “wine connoisseur” (avo-cational or professional) is centered on tightly structuredritual, which includes a verbal component. The ritual iscalled the “tasting”; its verbal expression is a highly or-ganized text, the “tasting note.” This is the interactionalcontext that performatively authorizes identities—ofboth wine and taster, as it turns out, eucharistically—and to which a Bakhtinian voicing-laden literary renvoi(or interdiscursive indexical back-reference) is being im-plicitly made by degrees each time one knowingly usesa wine term in connected discourse.

The ritual discourse accompanies the experience thatis structured as an orderly aesthetic event the phased


Fig. 8. Phases of wine-tasting, with their dimensions of evaluative construal of the object of aesthetic percep-tion (Silverstein 2003:223).

structure of which I have laid out in figure 8. Exposingone’s aesthetic sensorium to the object is a ritually au-thorized construal of the object as well as a verbal con-struction of it, with two relational directionalities of ef-fectiveness or “illocutionary force.” The aestheticdimensionalities of the art object to be experienced aredefined (constructed) through the orderliness of one’s ed-ucated experiencing of those dimensionalities, just as theexperience tests and further refines one’s abilities at dis-cernment (construal) of them. It is akin to the inherentlytemporal mode of engaging with any complex sensuoustext, such as the totality of a painting or sculpture, notall of the compositional, thematic, and iconographic di-mensions of which can be analytically attended to si-multaneously. For wine, the actual aesthetic object isapproached in phases or stages, along an ordered struc-ture of dimensionalities of perceptual encounter, with a“peak” or seemingly closest stage toward which andaway from which all the other stages seem to proceed.The curvilinear intensity of the observer’s perceptual ex-perience is shown in the diagram.

As diagrammed, a (I) visual stage of looking for bril-liance, color, and cross-sectional gestalt of a glass’s con-tents gives way to (II) an olfactory stage in which one issmelling the wine for its scents, its grape-dependent“aroma,” and its vinification-dependent “bouquet.” Theaesthetic experience peaks in (III) the gustatory stage af-ter taking some wine in the mouth, in which its on-the-tongue characteristics of tactile weight or “body,” tan-nin-derived “harshness,” and “acidity” can be gauged.This is the perceptual closest point in terms of the con-structive semiosis of the aesthetic object; stage III di-mensionalities are generally commented upon even inthe most summary (telescoped) tasting note. For stageIII, moreover, the lexicon of the register has the greatestnumber of special descriptors. Moving away from this

close encounter of the third phase, by opening the mouthso as to take in some air over the mouthful one reacheswhat I have termed (IV) the internal olfactory stage, bywhich a wine’s volatility and aftertaste are judged. Andfinally, spitting out (or swallowing) the wine allows oneto judge its “finish” in (V) the vaporization phase of theencounter.

Figure 9 presents examples of three professional tast-ing notes by Michael Broadbent (1983:91, 189, 259),taken from among thousands reviewed for textual struc-ture in guides for consumers. I have reproduced the lan-guage of the tasting note in the occurring textual order,readable top-to-bottom and left-to-right, but I have sep-arated the descriptors that make up the text expressionsinto two columns, putting those that use the special oin-oglossic terminology for evaluation in the right columnand the more stylistic, colorful, nonterminologized de-scriptors and modifiers in the left column, insofar aspossible.

What we find is that the tasting note does, indeed, havea mimetic or iconic textual form, in which the descrip-tors in text-time in general move along as though pre-supposing the ritualized organization of the tasting en-counter. The operative units of such a text are not merelyelements of a (Saussurean-Bloomfieldian grammatical)lexicon, much as popular belief even among some lin-guists would so construe it; it is words and expressionsbearing Putnamian stereotypes a.k.a. cultural concepts,as they form part of denotational (and thence, interac-tional) text properly cohesive and thence coherent. I callspecific attention to the descriptors in the left column,which are not elements of the self-consciously used spe-cialist’s vocabulary but seem to be essential to the artfulconstruction of the text that one communicates in theregister of oinoglossia.

We immediately see two things in each of the dia-


Fig. 9. Analytic presentation of three wine-tasting notes of a professional connoisseur (Broadbent 1983:91, 189,259, quoted in Silverstein 2003a:225, reproduced with the permission of the author). Bracketed material anno-tates the significant segments of the texts according to the scheme of figure 8.


grammatic presentations of figure 9. First, the words onthe left are potentially anthropomorphizing metaphori-cal (figurative) usages of an evaluative characterologyand/or seem to be dealing with matters of “breeding.”Their use by the speaker (taster) bespeaks (indexes) anevaluative stance with respect to the qualities of theobject being described that is therefore indexicallygrounded—“voiced,” in Bakhtinian parlance—to the ex-tent that it presupposes the basis for evaluation in thespeaker’s intentionality and especially the speaker’sidentity. What kind of a person, coming from what kindof background, would be concerned with “character” and“breeding”? What are the target denotational realmsabout which such concepts are generally used, other thanwine?

Thus, second, read as interactional figurations of iden-tity, the left-side descriptors are similar to those used inprestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly hor-ticulture and especially animal husbandry of prestigecreatures such as dogs, racehorses, and other things that“ ‘show’ well.” Hence, the connoisseurship indexed inmicrocontext by the use of such evaluational terms isan identifiable and inhabitable one; it is macrosocio-logically locatable through its being indexed by a registerin a cultural schema of sociolinguistic differentiation.The terminology as applied to wine dates, in fact, fromthe marketing of county family identities in this way tothe upwardly mobile urban wealthy of London, who wereable from 1863 onward to buy wine in bottles from citymerchants (as opposed to importing barrels or casks toone’s country estate for domestic bottling).

But further: the basis for authoritatively using this ver-bal paraphernalia of such inhabitable figurations is thefact that, in essence, “it takes one to know one.” Thereis, in other words, a consubstantiality of inhabited/fi-gurated essence between the intentionality or subjectiv-ity (interested social persona) doing—and reporting—theevaluation and the object of the evaluation. It is, ideally,a “match,” as it were, of the fineness of an aesthete’sgentlemanly sensorium that emerges from whatever theculture allows. Like other forms of aesthetic sense, it isseen by some to depend on “breeding”—the elite, exclu-sive, and absolutist stance. Perhaps, as others assert, itcan be achieved by “training”—the stance of upward mo-bility in which the education of connoisseurs’ sensoriawill result in authoritative entextualization of the reg-ister’s terminologies of evaluation. This second stanceis useful to aggressive commercial interests who wantto “create a market” among the anxious haute bour-geoisie. Or, third—as in some accounts of the acquisitionof grammar—one might manifest naıve virtuosic “train-ability” that reveals “natural” breeding (after all!).

Interestingly, in macrosociological terms, the farthersomeone is from the institutional sites nodally close tothe (professional or avocational) ritual context, the morethe characterological words and expressions constitutepeople’s ideas of what “wine talk” is, conceptualized asan unordered lexical register of terms and evoking strong(positive and negative) stereotyping reactions of people’sbeyondness: “It is a naıve domestic burgundy without

any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its pre-sumption,” joked James Thurber some decades ago.16 Allthe humor comes from the concatenation of terms inwhat would be the lefthand column of our display ofentextualization structure. Why? What interesting an-thropological point is contained here about the politicaleconomy of oinoglossia and its mode of cultural exis-tence in various places in contemporary AnglophoneAmerican society?

We can see immediately that, given our observationsabove, wine tasting and its all-important entextualiza-tion in the tasting note (and all the usages penumbrallyderivative from it) is culturally eucharistic. Used in con-text, the lingo has the entailing effect or creative powerto index consubstantial traits in the speaker. As we con-sume the wine and properly (ritually) denote that con-sumption, we become the well-bred, characterologicallyinteresting (subtle, understated, balanced, intriguing,winning, etc.) person iconically corresponding to themetaphorical “fashion of speaking” of the perceived reg-ister’s figurations of the aesthetic object of connoisseur-ship, wine. The eucharistic exercise is a powerful mi-crocontext of indexical authorization and reauthor-ization laid into a complex interlocking set of macro-sociological institutional interests.

These bring about a recognizable social form, a marketof production-circulation-consumption of the by-degreesaesthetically constru(ct)ed objects, with all the com-plexity of “taste”—in short, a value process lying at theintersection of displayable comestibles and aestheticconnoisseurship. Producers, shippers, importers, distrib-utors, retailers, purchasers, consumers, all backed by an“applied science” of one or another sort, compete tofound the market on its bedrock of (pseudo-)science.There has been input recently from the applied scienceof oenology in the form of attempted systematic -onomicstandardization of wine “aroma” terminology (Noble etal. 1987), just as is done for standard measure terms de-fining units in physics and chemistry at places such asthe U.S. National Bureau of Standards or the Paris Bureauof Weights and Measures.17 The chart has since beenreprinted widely in the avocational and popular press andcalqued—perhaps humorously—for such things as sakeand beer. It is, of course, a semiotically ironic exampleof attempted empirical extensional fixing of denotationalterminologization run amok (compare older excesses of“cognitive anthropology”!). It is, however, important totake into account because of the attempt at scientificdenotational backing for what is, after all, the oinoglossiccurrency of ritually centered interests that attempts to

16. This Thurber cartoon caption has become a “classic”—thefounding text for a whole industry of indexical renvoi. For example,in the current television age, “Naive and yet . . . chubby. No, holdon: It’s a naughty little wine that should be taken around the cornerand spanked!” says Ellen Degeneres’s television character EllenMorgan at a wine tasting (quoted on Vinbonics 101 web site).17. This calls to mind Lehrer’s (1975,1983) studies of the oinoglossiclexicon as a collection of scientifically extensionalizable denotingterms with fixed sense in the image of applied aesthetic scienceand her discovery that the register fails to conform.


maintain what has been a priestly charisma of such aes-thetic connoisseurship by seeming to transform it on thebasis of “objective science.”

In effect, all such social institutional forms are broughttogether in the indexical value of oinoglossic words andexpressions, whether used in proper textual genre or not,whether used “straight” or with a superposed (evenhigher-indexical-order) wink—this last showing not onlyknowledge of and familiarity with the oinoglossic viti-cultural and oenological world but transcendence of it.

Thus we are subject to an inevitable self-placement inrelation to the social structure of the wine world when-ever we use a word or expression form that can be takento lie within the enregistered set. Depending on who isspeaking, this is true both of the lexicon that is profes-sionally terminologized and of the characterological fig-urations penumbrally entextualized for those at the cen-ter, yet indexically of somewhat greater or wider potencyamong the non-cognoscenti. Elites and would-be elitesin contemporary society seek to use these enregisteredforms, communicated positively (literally) or negatively(by a decipherable trope of avoidance/substitution); usingthem—or using them with a knowledge-indicatingwink—confers (indexically entails) an aspect of elitenessbefore prestige commodities.

Furthermore, the world of prestige commodities, es-pecially prestige comestibles, is more and more an au-thorizing one in the First World and its economicallyglobalizing beyond, with generative “fashions of speak-ing” all based on oinoglossia, on the Anglophone wine-tasting note itself, which structures these derivativeforms of discourse to varying degrees. The wine note hasin effect become an originary historical site of higher-order entailments for identity, now a merely competing/replacive presupposed indexical of identity at themacrosociological center of consumerist influence some-times called “Yuppiedom.” One need only go on a food-shopping expedition in any affluent urban neighborhood.In the specialty prestige-comestible shops one sees coffeeand tea tasting notes, cheese tasting notes, pate tastingnotes, etc., prominently displayed to orient (and reassure)the elite consumer that these are the paraphernalia ofthe correctly indexical “lifestyle” (identity). High-pricedchocolates, perfumes, microbrewery beers, and so forth,are all constru(ct)ed as prestige comestibles by use of this“fashion of speaking,” as each now comes with its tast-ing notes or equivalents.

The moral is that you are what you say about whatyou eat. Lifestyle commodities exist verbally in constantdialectic tension from above the plane of mere stan-dardization of language, and the trope of aboveness be-speaks the anxiety of “distinction,” as Bourdieu (1984)would have it, that is hegemonic for those most caughtup in their indexical values. Marketing in contemporaryAmerica oscillates between the—as the critic Paul Fus-sell (1983) would say—post-“prole” warm-and-fuzzy ad-vertising vocabulary of “fresh,” “light,” “clean,” etc. (cf.health food and the new green or eco-Puritanism of bour-geois whiteness in America), and the traditional terms

for comestibles, the latter mostly at relatively more ex-pensive levels of the retail market.

The professional or avocational connoisseur would notbe caught dead using terms except in constructionalphraseologies that bespeak experience in making wine-tasting notes and their equivalent. However, the fartherone goes sociologically away from these identities, themore one sees the extraction of certain terms, certainlexical forms—the ones from the left side of our struc-tural diagram of the poetics of discourse—as the index-ically communicated essences of wine as a cultural ex-perience to the “outsider” (see the hapless outsiderdiscourse in the late Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe cartoon re-produced in figure 10). These terms are evaluative termsof character and (social) pedigree which to the outsiderconstruct wine as an anxiously approachable reflectionof selfhood—rather like being suddenly called upon toexpress a critical opinion on cutting-edge contemporaryart. It is important to see that there is a whole inflectionof identities around the prestige-comestible commodityinsofar as discourse about it places one with respect toits complex institutional framework—from tasting noteto certain terms sprinkled in discourse that is otherwisecommunicated quite out of register. These usages are thesite of the identity work understandable in terms of ma-crosociological class formation—something local to Brit-ish and especially American English and dating onlyfrom the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

In this way studying language has become once morecentral to making real progress in understanding the na-ture of truly cultural concepts, those that are irreduciblyindexical and dialectic as the distinctive roots of humanconceptualization in the state of having languages suchas we do. This is the cultural in language, it seems tome—its mode of connection to language form alwayscaught between the two orders of contextualization wehave analyzed. We have begun by theorizing differentaspects of a Jakobsonian “poetics” of discourse in the“interaction order,” as Erving Goffman (1983) termed themicrosociological, seeing such cultural knowledge as thevery stuff “made flesh” in figurational forms of discoursecome-to-structure as text. In such analysis, the two in-dexical relationships come into view, the one that de-fines the structuredness of entextualization “within” atext, cotextualization, and the other constituted by themore obvious and widely appreciated indexicality of con-textualization. Understanding such immediate contextnecessitates, however, moving out to the wider “orderof interactionality,” as we might correspondingly termthe macrosociological, which is reconstructed or re-viewed as event-punctuated and ritually centered com-municational process.

We see that any schemata of cultural conceptualiza-tion are ultimately anchored and given felt or intuited“presence” for their users by the authorizing or regi-menting forces that emanate from ritual centers of in-


Fig. 10. Oinoglossic terms used by speakers remote from institutional sites of ritual warrants for their use(cartoon by Jeff MacNelly, Copyright 1992, Tribune Media Services, reprinted by permission).

stitutionality—whether in congruent, mutually rein-forcing ways or in noncongruent or even contradictoryways. Such sociohistorical forces, institutionally chan-neled, act as a kind of meta-interactional level or layerof meaning that permeates and is immanent in themicrocontexts where denotational words and expres-sions, bearing their cultural concepts, are used to makeinteractional text-in-context. And yet in the communi-cational view of society these forces, too, arise only inand by the situated use of language and other semioticson occasions of discursive interaction. Thus cultural se-miosis is seen to be a phenomenon forever in dialecticalprocess. And culture is, in this limited sense, perfor-matively enacted, always indexically (re)created in con-text by the simple fact that to understand as well as toparticipate in an interaction one must presuppose suchculture to be conceptualizations of the “what” and“who” in communicative context that are always al-ready both shared and in the instance precipitated.

Comments

jan blommaertAfrican Languages and Cultures, Ghent University,Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium ([email protected]). 6 vii 04

It is rare to read a paper in which every word counts.Silverstein’s paper is a dazzling attempt at (literally) re-conceptualizing a vast field of approaches in the domain

of language-in-society. The scope is perplexing: Silver-stein reformulates central concepts from interactionalsociolinguistics (contextualization), conversation anal-ysis (sequential interaction), ethnosemantics (folk tax-onomies), and finally sociolinguistics (the relation be-tween micro-instances of talk and macro-identities). Enroute he makes innovative use of two other crucial an-thropological concepts: poetics and ritual. Cultural con-cepts emerge as stereotyped meanings unevenly distrib-uted among people and primarily indexical in nature inthe sense that they organize the social field in which aparticular interaction takes place.

I find the recasting of sequential interaction and theGumperzian notion of contextualization particularly ap-pealing. Using indexicality as the focus of his analysis,Silverstein conceives of a stretch of talk as “a ritual po-etics” and a metric of indexical meanings-in-forms bymeans of which the participants produce several effectsat the same time: they “have a conversation,” developa “topic” in that conversation, and construct identitiesby means of valuated indexical elements which in turninvoke a stratified social world which lends impact towhat happens in the interaction. The analysis on whichthese insights are based is terribly dense and complexbut rewarding for those who delve into it. We see a wholeset of new or renewed notions and images of languageat work there: form, function, meaning, and social effectall combine into indexicalities, and the patterned, gen-red, and enregistered exchange of such indexicalities pro-duces a layered, heteroglossic poetic event which re-volves around the bartering of valuated (hence, sociallyanchored) terms—cultural concepts.


The critical impact of this redefining attempt is quiteconsiderable. Where contemporary conversation analysisstill strongly relies on analyses of the “mechanics” ofordered talk, Silverstein provides the ordered nature oftalk itself with an indexical backbone (orders of inter-discursivity). And to the extent that conversation anal-ysis still relies on explicitly articulated—denotational—elements in order to accept and ratify constructions ofidentity and so still sees identity as the outcome of in-teraction, identity work is here made part of the inter-action itself: as the cultural structure, so to speak, ofinteraction. We get a very rich account of contextuali-zation here, one that solves a number of questions re-garding form, interactional deployment, explicitness, co-textuality, and culture that have consistently come upin discussions of contextualization.

I am less fascinated by Silverstein’s comments on themacro-social order and its connection to interactionevents. Here I see an uneasy relationship between, onthe one hand, comments emphasizing the “real” econ-omy of behaviour and meanings and comments tendingto dematerialize such economic aspects and referring toa “virtual communicative economy.” The theoretical ac-count tips over to the latter, while the example he givestips over to the former.

In passages reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s Quia egonominor leo example, Silverstein argues—rightly—thataccess to certain forms of identity depends on unequalaccess to the rituals, texts, and emblems that index it.This is not just a virtual economy but a real one, and hedemonstrates it. In his “oinologia” case we see discursivepractices that derive a lot of what they mean from in-terdiscursive links sustained by linguistic-generic-reg-istered artefacts such as the tasting note, in turn an ar-tefact that is embedded in complex—real—economies ofcommodities which enable the interdiscursive rituals of“oinoglossia.” The bourgeoisie is indexed by small, pe-culiar rituals, and these rituals and the indexicalitiesthey invoke (or in which they are caught up) may bewhat Barthes meant by norme bourgeoise—somethingthat operates primarily through (implicit) indexicalitiesbut is sustained by unequal, privileged access to thekinds of indexable commodities and activities that thenprovide the “prestige” pharmacopoeia of social (indexi-cal) life. The orders of interdiscursivity are sustained by,and index, material orders. Reggae fans in the townshipsof urban South Africa can acquire only so much rastaslang from contacts with peers; if they want to adopt aspeech style that comes close(r) to Jamaican creole theyneed to get access to Bob Marley records or cassettes andenter a real economy of commodities.

Some more work is needed here. The analysis of “oin-oglossia” is accurate, illuminating, and amusing but re-mains a bit too microcosmic to demonstrate principlesand structures: the obviousness of its internal structur-ing (obvious, that is, as soon as Silverstein has demon-strated it) obscures the fact that it is in itself packed intolayer upon layer of “macro” factors. There is a wholeworld of fascinating topics to be empirically exploredregarding the connection between material and cultural

economies, between access to objects and activities andaccess to the indexable symbolic repertoires they offer.But the building blocks are in this paper.

steven c. catonDepartment of Anthropology, Harvard University,William James Hall 348, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge,MA 02138, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 6 vii 04

A canonical diagram in the Course in General Linguis-tics depicts two identical-looking individuals facing eachother, one labeled A, the other B, engaged in what Saus-sure (1915) describes as “an individual act” within the“circuit of speech.” They reappear in Silverstein’s paper,except that the allusion to Saussure—whether inten-tional or not—is now deeply ironical. For one thing, Mr.A and Mr. B are social individuals even if their biogra-phies are only minimally known to us, whereas in Saus-sure’s text they are generic of the roles of speaker andhearer and little else. For another, they are in a dialecticalrelationship with each other in the act of speaking andnot merely, as in Saussure, a “circuit” or “relay” of in-stantiation or execution. By “dialectical” is meant whatBakhtin (1982) developed in his writings on “dia-logicality.”

At stake is the demonstration of the fundamental the-oretical claim, which arguably goes as far back as Sapir,that culture does not exist as a disembodied and un-grounded “system of symbols and their meanings” andis not simply instantiated in action as Saussure claimedfor the system of linguistic signs but is always groundedin discourse—though the crux of the problem is under-standing what is meant by that term. Building upon hisintersubjective and interactive model of language (whichis far more so than the Jakobson [1960] event model, withits six communicative functions, that has long been thecornerstone of linguistic anthropology), Silverstein pro-ceeds to draw out three lessons from linguistic prag-matics by which he hopes to demonstrate his claim that“cultural concepts” emerge (often unconsciously) incommunicative interaction.

The first of these lessons has to do with the ways inwhich a text is constituted as an ontological entity (en-textualization) while simultaneously being grounded ina context of communicative interaction (contextualiza-tion). To demonstrate these joined discursive processes,Silverstein has developed a “poetics” of ritual action thatrepresents an original contribution to both the linguistictheory of the poetic function as elaborated by Jakobsonand the discursive theory of ritual in anthropology (forexample, Tambiah). Jakobson did not connect his in-sights into the indexicality of verbal categories to a nar-rated event (contextualization) with his insights into thebuilding up of a poetic text through parallelism (entex-tualization), but it is precisely this connection that Sil-verstein makes. For those working in the field of poetics(and Paul Friedrich must be counted among them) it isa brilliant demonstration of the poetic function and its


signal importance to the emergence of unconscious (andalso imagined) concepts of culture.

The second lesson from linguistic pragmatics concernsthe construction of subject positions (or emergent bi-ographies) through the indexical use of signs in contextsof social interaction. Though Silverstein does not say so,this lesson might be applied to the reflexive practices offieldworkers as much as to those of their informants inthe construction of a “positionality.” From a more lin-guistic theoretical standpoint, what is important is theinsight that denotation is always contingent upon the“social distribution of (cultural) conceptualization,” aDurkheimian point of utmost importance, and not theother way around.

The third lesson concerns wider social institutions andpolitico-economic processes in which semiotic interac-tive events are embedded. Here one might expect mostcultural anthropologists, concerned as they are withglobal processes, to consider whether linguistic prag-matics might relate to their own interests in culture. Yet,it is precisely this lesson that seems less fully or con-vincingly developed for that particular audience. Con-cerned as we have been with the micro-analysis of lin-guistic form and function, which dazzles the lin-guistically inclined as much as it dazes the uninitiated,we have fallen short theoretically. This may be becauseour method of analysis has been to start with the em-pirically concrete, interactive event and then work out-ward to ever wider contexts to develop our insights intothe connections between language and culture, ratherthan to start with a theory of that connection which ina sense delineates the object of study that can then bescrutinized empirically with the full semiotic apparatusat hand. For example, most of the terms in which thelesson is cast seem to echo an earlier functionalist so-ciology (institutions, norms, macro-micro contexts,roles), and the otherwise extraordinarily subtle analysisof wine tasting does not even pretend to come to gripswith questions that might immediately spring to mindfor anthropologists concerned with the commodificationof culture. An understanding of the processes of com-modification within a global wine industry that affectthe creation of labels and their denotation to begin with,not to mention qualitative categories of taste, and soforth, is a precondition for the analysis of discursive pro-cesses in which wine tasters are constituted as certainkinds of social beings. Would it not be more prudent atthis juncture in the continuing conversation with cul-tural anthropologists to admit that linguistic pragmaticshas some lessons to learn as well as to impart?

wataru koyamaRikkyo University, 3-34-1 Nishi Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 171-8501, Japan ([email protected]).30 vi 04

Silverstein’s work raises some fundamental, hence “ab-stract” and “philosophical,” issues of current anthro-pology that we must face squarely, especially if we find

our discipline still suffering from what Bateson, follow-ing Whitehead, called the “fallacy of misplaced con-creteness.”

Starting with a highly abstract observation, one maynote that, crosscutting epistemology, praxiology, and aes-thetics, “man” has been the subject in the “hot,” dy-namic culture of the critical age called modernity, con-stituted by constant dialectics between the pragmatic(empirical) and the conceptual (transcendental, ideolog-ical). This figure, “man,” is constructed around norm-setting ritual centers such as “autonomous,” that is, em-pirical and transcendental, post-Lockean sciences,governments, and even arts of, by, and for man, in which,for example, man transcendentally studies himself asempirical object, anthropologically. Historically, this re-flexive regime of culture, characterized by the anthro-pocentric constitution of man as empirical-transcenden-tal doublet, came into being when the transcendentalnorm of the theocentric cosmos began to move from thestatic and eternal “there and then” (e.g., heavenly,nether, or other sorts of mythico-symbolic “otherworld”)to the empirical universe of man, which was organizedaround the dynamic and ephemeral origo of discursiveinteractions taking place “here and now” and rituallypresenting themselves as replicas of otherworldly cosmicprototypes through indexical-iconic semiosis. Certainly,as Silverstein has shown in his explications of “oino-glossia” and linguistic nationalism, the tropic play ofindexical icons is still a major means in the semioticconstruction of our cosmos, but the basic trope of mo-dernity is, as he has also shown, Bakhtinean “free in-direct speech” and other devices that construct empiri-cal-transcendental subjects by making invisible thecosmic boundary between the symbolic, transcendental“narrated universe” of (once mythico-folkloric and oth-erworldly but now thisworldly and realistic) “charac-ters” and the empirical, indexical universe of “authors”/“readers.” Such tropes are found not only in the modernnovel and other aesthetic genres but also in the post-Kantian (empirical-transcendental) sciences of, by, andfor man and the modern practices of law, government,etc. (cf. Weberian-Foucauldian man’s internalization oftranscendental norms [“gaze”] in himself, who is amerely empirical being yet thus becomes an empirical-transcendental subject).

Indeed, since the 1960s, developing the works of Sapir,Peirce, and Jakobson, Silverstein has demonstrated thatthe Boasian, (neo)Kantian “universal grammar”—as un-derstood or used in the modern empirical-transcendentalorder—consists of the systematic interlocking of thesymbolic (formal-semantic, conceptual, transcendental)and the indexical (pragmatic, discursive, empirical; cf.the noun phrase referential hierarchy). In this endeavor,what has turned out to be crucial is “denotational-in-dexical duplexes” (shifters), for example, demonstrativedeictics, which diagrammatically show the constitutionof modern humans, including modern scientists, as em-pirical-transcendental doublets.

Moreover, exploring other “sciences of man,” espe-cially concerning “mind” and “culture,” Silverstein


again finds the crucial nexus between the conceptual andthe pragmatic in denotational-indexical duplexes andother metapragmatically-functioning signs (e.g., indexi-cal-icons such as quoting, Bakhtinean renvoi, speechgenres, frames, event/action-types), which serve to in-tegrate empirically, contingently happening indexicals(practices) and transcendental, more perduring concepts,as demonstrated in his semiotic explications of (1) Vy-gotskian social psychology (cf. metapragmatic, co-refer-ential textualization of “inner speech,” ontogeneticallylocated between pragmatic actions and metasemanticcodes; metapragmatics is the link that integrates [first-order] pragmatics and metasemantics [grammar and cul-tural semantics] and (2) the problem of “human culture,”which lies at the heart of the modern human sciences.This has resulted in a series of brilliant texts, includingthe one presented here, that reveal the essence of “cul-ture” in the modern sciences. Everything we wanted toknow about humans (language, mind, culture) is nowshown, if only as a diagrammatic outline with prototypicexemplars, to be completed by Silverstein and his fol-lowers. Thus, at least the epistemic telos of the centu-ries-long incomplete project of modernity has, at last,become apparent.

If so, the critical question, befitting our reflexive age,is, What does this “working-out” (perfection) of the neo-Kantian, anthropo-semiotic project mean: “the end ofman,” “the exhaustion of modernity,” and/or the com-ing-of-age of the Weberian “last man” (“a postmodern”age even beyond yuppiedom)? Does Silverstein’s univer-sal semiotic science of language, mind, and culture—which shows that metapragmatic signs such as empiri-cally occurring indexical icons re-present transcen-dental, cosmic symbols “here and now” (perhaps moretypically characterizing nonmodern societies) and thatindexicals and conceptual symbols are tropically inte-grated to create metapragmatic signs such as deictics,linguistic structure, and even reality and verity (perhapsmost typically characterizing modernity)—signal, likethe owl of Minerva, the (upcoming) end/perfection ofmodern anthropology and modernity and the arrival ofa new regime of “signs” or pseudo-signs in which thesemiotic order of symbols (virtual-systemic), indexicals(real), and icons (imaginary), or the figure of man, finallydisappears, as is suggested by his recent treatise on thespurious culture of pseudo-reality and pseudo-concept incontemporary America, Talking Politics (Silverstein2003)? This is a question one might raise (as) to the mas-ter figure of the modern semiotic craft.

lukas d. ts its ip i sDepartment of French, Aristotle University ofThessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54124, Greece ([email protected]). 30 vi 04

Silverstein’s handling of cultural concepts points in thedirection of a paradigm shift. This piece constitutes anintellectual culmination, meaning by that a synthesisand not an end point.

Peirce’s (1955) breakthrough consisted primarily in de-constructing the closed universe of Cartesian dualisticphilosophy, replacing it with a phenomenological mo-nism, and in allowing signs to be simultaneously preg-nant, by degrees, with all their modes of existence (sym-bols, indexes, icons). This shattered confidence in thedominance of symbols, since, to echo Hegel, “the symbolis the murder of the thing.” Indexes and icons thereforebring us back to the analogical firstness and secondnessof the heat of the actual communicative situation in thehere and now. But Peirce remains an equalizer of sorts.No evaluative priorities are set up as to the weight andthe role of the various sign modalities. Silverstein, onthe contrary, introduces a hierarchical semiosis in prag-matic-semiotic anthropology. This means that, the emer-gence of denotation out of our Saussurean-structuralistrealm notwithstanding, deep down we are all immersedin social indexicality. Furthermore, Silverstein is non-isolationist. His is a sociological-political pragmatic se-miosis by rigorous analysis whereas for Peirce, eventhough his pragmatism launches a concern with instru-mentalism and use, a division is still visible between thesemiotic and the social. For Silverstein a dynamic fig-uration linking, through indexical diagrammatic icons,a cosmic realm with the here and now brings to thecenter of analysis interaction order at the micro-level ina dense dialectic with the order of interactionality at themacro-level. By degrees, explicit metricalized poetics(classical ritual) comes into contact with the immanentpoeticality of everyday discourse. True, in any kind ofparallelistic structure in ritual, denotation is there (Fox1974), but ritual would not be effective without contex-tualization (for instance, divination has to go throughdialogicality to fulfill its goals [Kuipers 1990]. To echoVoloshinov (1973), no social semiosis is possible withmeaning alone; we also need the theme. As a conse-quence, “cultural concepts” are not cognitively prefab-ricated in the cryptic realms of the mind but becomesocially “domesticated” and appropriated by actors inthe give-and-take of discursive practice. We, as agents,reconstruct, reenact, and reinvent the inherited sche-mata through indexical figuration, exactly as our wineterms as used construct our negotiable positionalities ona ladder of social distinction or our dialogically builtbiographies make contact with social stereotypes. Thisis the spirit in which, I claim, this paper is the culmi-nation of a long-standing concern of the author with acritical view of structuralism-functionalism, positivism-formalism, and the neo-Kantian glorification of free-floating text artifactuality (Jameson 1981).

As a corollary and component of the hierarchicalitymentioned above, Silverstein deals with reference de-notation in a manner similar to the extensionalist Put-nam’s, who has recourse to social expertise as an arbi-trator of meaning rather than to its conceptualization asan asocial and agrammatical source expressing the Car-tesian-plus-Austinian intentional individual. Silversteininterrogates referential denotation as Putnam (1992) in-terrogates Fodor’s work on meaning-tokening by pro-posing a reintroduction of context-boundedness and in-


terest relevance, proving thus that theories of meaning(at least the most enlightened of them! [see Horkheimerand Adorno 1994]) suffer from an impermissible reduc-tionism.

Cultural concepts, as the first, longer part of the paperand its (indexical) linguistic backing (the excursus) haveit, are products and instigators of complex processes ofsemiosis emerging among interested agents. Denotation,divorced from its enabling indexicality, throws a (polit-ically) murky cloud (disguising as transparent) on praxisand frequently undoes what a range of practical and dis-cursive consciousnesses has achieved. For example (seeTsitsipis 2001), we all (semantically) sense a differenceand, at the same time, an identity between the followingsentences:

1. Colombia buys 500 helicopters from the U.S.A.2. The U.S.A. buys 5,000 tonnes of rice from Vietnam

[incidentally, notice the essentializing reductive stereo-type: Vietnam p rice].

Componential analysis would point to the followingfeature (among others; significata, as the behavioristMorris would have it) of the verb TO BUY [ � free�willtransactional activity]. You can be pushed to buy andstill be a buyer. But things are not so simple, since if thefree-will component is mitigated, expressions such aspushed to . . . forced to . . . are tagged to the lexical-semantic nucleus. This much of culture is enabled bydenotation. Commonsense practical-historical informa-tion is available, however, telling people that Colombia,the U.S.A., and Vietnam do not bargain on equal terms.Subtle speakers remind us of this inequality as they buildtheir discursive poetics. But referential readings of equi-structural constructions, from simple parsings to v-roles,erase a large part of this background knowledge by rees-tablishing at the heart of the semantics the equalizingfree-will (actually inoperative) blanket component.

Silverstein’s achievement is the replacement of “univ-ersalist” understandings of cultural concepts with inter-pretations of the historical contingencies of their emer-gence in praxis.

Reply

michael s ilversteinChicago, Ill., U.S.A. 4 viii 04

Each of these generous comments is a productive inter-vention as meta-text to the authorial text. Each col-league’s meta-text contextualizes the paper—and indeed,its author—in various relevant genealogies, intellectualand disciplinary, of which, as Tsitsipis characterizes it,the paper represents “an intellectual culmination.” Inthis respect, I am pleased that the readers of CA canglimpse the cumulative strands and collective state ofthe overall linguistic anthropological project in whichwe all participate, with its connections to issues in thewider anthropological, social scientific, and even philo-

sophical frames in which the understanding of languagehas played and must still play a central role.

Indeed, my aim is to show how contemporary lin-guistic anthropology illuminates several of the central,long-standing issues in each of these frames by showingtheir necessary interrelationships when focused uponlanguage in use. These are issues that have, cyclically,come to prominence and faded and come back again overrecognizable academic generations, perhaps because theyhave been addressed serially and separately rather thancumulatively and integratively. That is why I ask thereader to take yet another look at a venerable problemor two, such as the “cultural” nature of knowledge andhow words and expressions in use summon such knowl-edge to social significance. And as well I ask the readerto reexamine with me data long in the literature suchas various explicitly terminologized systems of classi-fication and the commodity-linked nature of contem-porary First World elite identity in the consumptive re-gimes of late capitalism. My hope is through the lens ofa theoretical perspective perhaps new to the reader toreveal relationships heretofore unnoticed and integrativeconclusions useful beyond the subject matter specificallytreated. And for these various problems or data my pointis to start from what, borrowing a medical analogy, wemight term a “presenting” conceptualization of them,using a particular descriptive vocabulary perhaps famil-iar to the reader. I hope to show that bringing semioticanalytic concepts and methods—nowadays, perhaps, in-creasingly, if not, as Caton wryly notes, soothingly fa-miliar—to bear on them reconceptualizes the phenom-ena themselves in productive ways.

So I start with the intuitive notion of two people hav-ing an “unscripted (or casual) conversation” and showin detail how, over the time-course of their discursiveinteraction, there emerges an at least locally normativeintersubjective reality giving structure to the social spacethey come to inhabit in this interactional event. Fromour own biographies of participation in unscripted dis-cursive interaction, we, too, have intuitions of degreesof coherence of interaction, of an almost elusive labilityof genre flowing across interactional time that still al-lows us actually to “do [paccomplish] things withwords,” moving in and out of phases of social relationalindeterminacy and determinateness. As we become out-side analysts of communicative experience, these intu-itions persist; our professional task is to convert theminto explicit analytic method, if we can, which I proposeto do by charting dynamically genred interactionalform—in short, readable interactional text—in the im-age of empirical “ritual.”

Now ritual, too, is one of the standard anthropologicalpresentational categories, much as is casual conversationto our everyday self-awareness. Like the 1964 U.S. Su-preme Court in respect of the concept of the prurientlyobscene, we recognize ritual when we are before it butare, if we stick only to the presentational, hard-pressedto “define” it—except, I argue, if we place presentational“ritual” and “casual conversation” along a cline of dif-ferentiation that comes into view under careful semiotic


analysis of the latter in terms of the former. This allowsus to recognize that “ritual” everywhere has the cultur-ally foundational semiotic property of being an indexi-cally iconic (or iconically indexical) interactional text.Ritual form semiotically strives for metapragmatic self-grounding and self-separation from mundane context,thus preaching its own autonomy as a text. Ritual itself“works” to the degree to which, participants’ intention-ality and consciousness (not to say “meaningfulness” toparticipants) notwithstanding, ritual action, as organizedinto segments, emerges as a figurative (tropic) diagramin the spacetime of performance of its outcome in theculturally real universe from which ritual signs derivetheir power/value and in which their power/valuecounts.

All we need to see this is the right conceptual meta-language—which we can develop, in fact, starting fromthe semiotic concepts of poetics of the long line of aes-thetic theorists culminating in my teacher, Roman Ja-kobson. To give a poetics of the Goffmanian “ritual” thatis everyday conversation, we additionally need a precisesemiotic-functional analysis of denotational language—one not generally offered by the contemporary linguisticsof the abstracted sentence form. In this way we get tosee how propositional content is organized for commu-nication by the plethora of deictic (indexical-denota-tional) grammatical and lexical forms that saturate everymeaningful utterance in every known language, deter-minately framing and mapping the strictly semanticfrom-and-to actual contexts of communication. (Such areorientation to how language presents its “form” incommunication is itself a culminative systematizing ofpost-Saussurean, indeed Peircean insights from Jakob-son, Jerzy Kuryłowicz, and Emile Benveniste, among ma-jor figures of twentieth-century linguistics. My 1976 ac-count spelling out the entailments of these com-monplaces of their teaching was, to my astonishment,at that time taken to be programmatic, retrospectivelyrevealing to us today just where disciplinary conscious-ness of language was at the time.)

But here, precisely, is the payoff that redeems our in-tuition that culture is a kind of or, rather, an aspect ofour knowledge but one which has heretofore lacked ad-equate methods of study—misguided by bad, linguisti-cally naıve philosophy left over from positivism, cog-nitive rationalism, self-styled “post-” movements, andthe like. Interactional “ritualization” emerges withinsuch a cultural universe of people’s knowledge, partlyexplicitly articulable but mostly implicit. I claim to haveshown how people externalize that knowledge via lan-guage, precisely in the sense of making it the crux ofinteraction. They indexically invoke such knowledge asthe here-and-now metrically and deictically structuredtertium quid mediating their ability, as interactants, tocoordinate one with another in social action. Interactionis the bricoleur of bits and pieces of knowledge derivedfrom precisely the many kinds of schematizations thatethnoscientists and cognitive anthropologists have longbeen interested in but have not really had the methodsfor studying as such (arranging decontextualized words

and expressions just won’t do). Knowledge is as integralto social action, then, as social action—with all its asym-metries and biases, its “division of labor” over a popu-lation organized by it—is a component of the kind ofknowledge involved in mutual coordination. This is, de-finitionally now, “cultural” knowledge, the “concepts”of which are inherently sociocentric in this sense, man-ifest by indexical invocation in and by social action thatcreates and sustains groups—whether fleeting or per-during—out of individuals.

And here, briefly, is another culminative payoff that Iam concerned to point out in response to Blommaert andCaton in particular, who take the interactional focus ofthe paper as a sample of the intellectual wares offeredby linguistic anthropology. These two colleagues appearto buy into them as nothing more than new semioticwine in old micro-sociological bottles—inadvertently re-ghettoizing linguistic anthropologists within sociocul-tural anthropology for treating the “discourse” of wine.Sociocultural anthropologists ought—certainly, want—to be studying the “global processes” (Caton) or “layerupon layer of ‘macro’ factors” (Blommaert) making upthe cultural, for example, in “complex—real—econo-mies of commodities” (Blommaert) “within a globalwine industry” (Caton).

But here again, my invocation of the presentationallymacro-sociological—“echo[ing] an earlier functionalistsociology” (Caton)—is precisely to locate these globalcultural processes in the real-time chains of semiotic(communicational, verbal) events where they intersect.The indexical relations among such events are preciselywhat relationally confers cultural, including “eco-nomic,” value on the communicators’ identities (as peo-ple in role relationships of multiple, institutionally per-during sorts), on the communicated-about (here, wine inrelation to all sorts of other comestibles and commodi-ties), on the communicated-to (clients, customers, an-thropologists), etc. A virtual communicative economy,then, is an emergent configuration of tiered, dynamicprocesses in real time, composed of events of semiosis.We treat the presentational micro/macro divide, then, todemonstrate its nonexistence except as a perspective onorders of abstraction by which we recognize semioticprocess. This approach categorically rejects any terms ofanalysis that would see discursive process in the first,micro, box and nondiscursive structure in the second,the macro, or that would consider economies as virtualin the first box and real in the second, functional syn-chrony in the first box and structural diachrony in thesecond, or any similarly nondialectical partitions that apresemiotic view of the matter would suggest.

How speakers of American English denote wine-as-comestible reveals an immanent macro-social formationof conceptual as well as lexical differences among them;the semiotic character of such differences is just a highlycomplex version of what we have seen in other examplesof cultural concepts, with mutually constitutive impli-cations for both “real” and other economies (they areone and the same). Talking about wine places someonein this order of interdiscursivity that is vivified in myriad


contributory verbal and other acts. We can discern theforces on any particular event in this order of interdis-cursivity, which is organized by the intersecting perfor-mative radiations from several institutionally potent rit-ual centers—privileged social sites of text-making-in-context that I enumerate in the paper. Depending on whois using the language where and when, then, thereemerges in any communicative act a particular weight-ing of these indexical warrants, sustaining (and maybetransforming) the social identifiability of those who arewithin the complex social field and who give verbal ex-pression to thinking about such stuff as wine and we aremade of.

Finally, I am particularly concerned that in my anal-ysis of oinoglossia I not be read—by Koyama or byothers—as giving an inherently disparaging critique, aspresuming that the fact of the “cultural” constructivityof our concepts is a “fault” of—or a joke on—modernity,going Baudrillard (and Derrida and Latour?) one better.My point is not to present an expose of our late-capitalist“pseudo-reality” lurking only projectively like a holo-gram behind commodity/signs-as-simulacra, ideologi-cally (culturally) backed now only by “pseudo-concepts”as well!

If there is a practical lesson in this analytic unravelingof one of our own orders of interdiscursivity in whichcultural concepts of wine—and the verbal register of oin-oglossia—live, it is this. It is the one that all varieties ofrealism have been urging with less or more explicitnessfor a long time: that we should learn to relax about the“cultural” condition of all human “conceptual” life, notto be shocked anew or dejected by each fraught revelationof unattained—unattainable!—Cartesian purity. Semi-otic realism, which is a positively constructive enter-prise, would have us, then, accept the inherently reflex-ive, sociocentric component of coming to conceptualgrips with the universe of even “objective things,” thosevalued in discourses of Science with a capital S. Thusmight we become comfortable with the fact that the“Science of Humanity,” anthropology, is itself endeav-oring to conceptualize an aspect of that universe verymuch from within.

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Documents

Whenever languages and other, perilinguistic semiotic ... · knowledge anchoring cultural concepts is always implicit and is even sometimes part of largely abstract cultural patterns