Discourse and The Nothingness of Culture

Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture
Author(s): Michael Silverstein

Source: Signs and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 327-366
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk
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Discourse and the
No-thing-ness of Culture
Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago
ABSTRACT
Where can we nd culture in relation to humans experience of it in by-degrees normatively
appropriate and socially effective semiotic interactions? By analyzing several examples of
such semiotic material, we can develop the idea that culture is a socio-historically contin-
gent wave phenomenon immanent in social practice dimensionalized by semiotic character-
istics I here term signicationcirculationemanation.
A
t my urging, a poster announcing this as a talk included a little
conceptual-art joke by using a background photograph of a kitchen
sink. The intent was interdiscursively to indexto point tothe
famous 1871 characterization by Sir Edward B. Tylor in his book Primitive
Culture, with which Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn begin their
critical review of concepts and denitions of culture in 1952. Tylors in-
troductory sentence is the very rst among those quoted in their section on
enumeratively descriptive denitions, as they cosmetically term the type:
Culture, or civilization, . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
A very early draft of these ideasThe Elementary Forms of Culture in a Post-culture-al World: Signica-
tionCirculationEmanationwas presented at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Central
European University, Budapest, March 26, 2007. Slightly revised versions were presented at the conference on
Mediatization and Identity, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, November 19, 2008; at the
Linguistic Anthropology Working Group, University of California, Berkeley, February 27, 2009; as invited plenary
address, American Association of Applied Linguistics annual meeting, Chicago, March 29, 2011; at the conference
Linguagenesis, Center for the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, May 19, 2011; at the Theory and
Media Colloquium, Yale University, Departments of English and Comparative Literature, September 15, 2011; and
at the Linguistic Anthropology Workshop, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, February 17,
2012. The prenal draft, under the title used here, was a lecture in the colloquium series of the Department of
Anthropology, Harvard University, September 27, 2012. I have incurred debts both to my numerous interlocutors
on those occasions who questioned and therefore contributed to clarifying my formulations and to those most
responsible for invitations to present these ideas: Daniel Monterescu, Miyako Inoue, Charles Briggs, Suresh
Canagarajah, Paja Faudree, Michael Warner, Bruce Mannheim, Judith Irvine, and Nicholas Harkness. Enthusiastic
positive readings by Greg Urban and by a reviewer of the paper for Signs and Society have, as well, emboldened me
nally to publish it with revisions attempting to respond to their comments.
Signs and Society, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013). 2013 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign
Studies. All rights reserved. 2326-4489/2013/0102-0006$10.00.
Since this article was published online on October 25, 2013, a correction has been made to figure 17. These
changes were made in both the online and print versions of the article. Corrected on November 25, 2013.
327
belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired
by man as a member of society 1871, 1.1. Talk about kitchen sinks! Even the
subtitle of Tylors book is enumerative: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom.
Indeed, in those heady days of social evolutionary explanation illuminated by
Darwinian light, it was the collectanea of travelers and missionaries reports, of
philologically worked-over texts, and especially of artifactsthingsdisplayable
in museum cases that constituted the evidence to be examined, classied along
relevant dimensions from simple to complex, allowing typology to be converted
to diachrony. Our living ancestors by then at the fringes of imperial enterprises,
no less than our civilizational ancestors as revealed by comparative philology,
could be seen to evidence culture in the general sense, just as the particulars
carefully segregated and labeled by provenance and provenience were the em-
pirical evidence for the existence of particular cultures in the plural see Stocking
1987; Silverstein 2005b.
We need not review Kroeber and Kluckhohns several hundred denitions
and characterizations of culture down to 1952, nor even those of the sixty years
since. What is important to note is that all of their writers and those since have
been trying to answer the question of what culture is. I would suggest that the
proper question is Where is culture? And, in the nature of matters cultural
note my substitution of the adjectivethe where question can only be an-
swered by exploring the semiotics of discourse, which, in the widest sense,
including language-in-use as well as other modes of semiosis, is the way culture
presents itself to humanity. Events of discourse, including both the verbal and
the otherwise e.g., Maussian 192425 1967 cycles of interagent prestation
counter-prestation . . ., manifest whatever is specic to the sociocultural
order of phenomena, whatever of other orders may also be involved, such as
human organismal psycho-biology. So I propose here to consider some exam-
ples of these phenomena as a semiotician of discourse to see what they reveal.
Using such examples, my aim is briey to outline the intersecting dimensions
of a semiotic space in which culture is to be found, such dimensions being a a
regime of evenemential signication immanent in the very experience of situated
social practice, b a regime of implied paths or networks of circulation of sig-
nifying value across such event-nodes in an intuited socio-spatio-temporal struc-
ture, and c a regime of multiple centers and peripheriespolar-coordinated
geometriesof circulatory emanation of signifying value always, inevitably, in
ux. Within this complexly dimensionalized semiotic, sites of interaction can be
recognized as nodes of signifying practice indexically revealing knowledge and
328 Signs and Society
values and therefore identities that people instantiate and contest in the se-
miotic production of genred cultural events. Patterns of interdiscursivity across
such semiotic nodes sometimes generate institutionally regular trajectories of
what is recognized as circulation, creating and maintaining thereby networks
of virtual interaction. Such circulations strengthen and cumulate in emergently
xed and tiered structures of emanation from certain centers of value produc-
tion that anchor particular trajectories of circulation, the values from several of
which can intersectsometimes conictuallyat ever new sites of experience
and interaction. All this seems highly abstract, so let us proceed to examples,
each one manifesting all of these dimensionalities, to be sure, but used here se-
rially to illustrate my points in order.
First, lets consider signication. You will note the closeness of the term to the
verb signify- and thus, suggestively, to that old bugaboo, meaning.
1
I avoid the
latter to emphasize, rst, that we are not doing what used to go by the label of
symbolic anthropology.
2
My usage of signication is, second, designed to
suggest signicance, as in consequentiality, as in effects and effectiveness of se-
miotic practice as social action.
3
As will become clear, semiosis as signicant be-
havior and the like does something in and to its social framing.
Look at a tiny but revelatory snippet of face-to-face signifying practice, shown
in gure 1. Ive published several analyses see Silverstein 1985, 1997, 2005a of
the longer two-participant conversation between these two graduate students
at the University of Chicago, but here I want to focus very specically on the
mechanism of culture here revealed. Seated in a small room on campus in Feb-
ruary 1974 and instructed by experimenters to have a conversation, Mr. A, a
1. Signs cited as forms-with-meanings are italicized, and those cited as forms (i.e., sign-vehicles) are
underlined.
2. What is generally denoted by this term is a movement or cluster of movements within the discipline of
anthropology peaking ca. 196575 that, seeking to counter the perceived arid sociologism of British-derived social
anthropology, talked endlessly about cultures being symbols and meanings. See such works as Turner 1967,
1969, Schneider 1968, Geertz 1973, and many of the contributions in Basso and Selby 1976. Often, such
work rested on the basis of what can only be termed uninformed ideas about semiosisfrequently confusing this
with Saussurean dyadic paradigmatic structures A : B, with actual lexical senses, with connotational associations,
etc.bespeaking as well philosophical views of language and mind uninformed by coeval pragmatist ferment
Putnam 1978; Rorty 1979 that resisted the ultimately dead-end foundationalism of earlier post-Enlightenment
trends see Losonsky 2006.
3. In anthropological terms, such concerns are similar to those professed by the self-styled practice
theoristsOrtner 1984 is a kind of manifestowho rebelled against their teachers, purveyors ofto them
seemingly inert, merely representational symbols and meanings signifying nothing. Eschewing, then, the
symbols-and-meanings concepts of culture, wishing to study matters of political and political economic
power, they resorted, in an almost knee-jerk fashion, to Marx-oid ideas of power as being somehow extra-
semiotic. Given their hostility to semioticsmisunderstood as symbols and meaningswe can perhaps
understand the popularity of the formulation, the poetics and politics of . . . so common in these scholars book
titles, as though these were really distinct.
Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture 329
Law School student whose words are transcribed on the left, has already been for
some time the persistent questioner of Mr. B, a graduate student in the School of
Social Service Administration, transcribed in the right column, in a conversa-
tional genre I like to term, after Rogers and Hammerstein, Getting to Know
You GTKY. He has been trying, it will emerge, to nd out Mr. Bs undergrad-
uate institution. After a lengthy digression about the state of Iowa, where Mr. B
said he had lived, Mr. A makes precise his request for information: An you
B
wnt to undergraduate school hre r in/at Iowa? Sitting, as they were, on
the premises of the University of Chicago Law School, within its campus, here
might be the very same university or any other outt in Chicago, or, in fact, in
the whole state of Illinois as opposed to Iowa, which has been the contrastive
reference, a distinct state bordering the state of Illinois to the west. Observe Mr.
Bs careful, if seemingly hesitant response: in Chicago t, uh, Loyola. By
the rules of American English grammar, note the in vs. at distinctionplace
vs. organizational afliationon which Mr. Bs response plays. Mr. B is using
the short form of the institutional name, Loyola University of Chicago, in 1974
principally a commuter and evening college without much of a campus before its
rebranding in the past decade or so.
Now why would Mr. A, then a second-year Law School student, be so
concerned with this particular bit of biographical information about Mr. B, then
a rst-year student in the University of Chicagos School of Social Service Ad-
ministration social work? Especially among the American bourgeoisie, in those
days, principally the male professional bourgeoisienote the demographic iden-
tiers already thick on the groundan important emblem of identity is the old-
school tie, as it were, punning on the item of sartorial display that indexically
links one to an institution of undergraduate tertiary education. Upper classes
had, additionally, private prep school at the level of secondary education. Mr.
As interest as a persistent questioner is hardly random, then; his questioners
part of the coparticipation in this event of GTKY does not, in fact, seek random
Figure 1. A moment of symmetrically revealed identities
biographical facts. His interest rests, to be sure, on a cultural affordance that thus
valorizesmore precisely, gives context-dening indexical salience toMr. Bs
response, thickening the intersubjective context by this differentiating revelation
that his old-school tie is not, in fact, the U of C, one of the possible heres up to
this point, but Loyola University in the same city.
But what does Mr. A make in the way of signicancein fact, of indexical
signicationof this piece of information? hhhhh! he exclaims in
recognition, I
A
m an ld Jesuit boy myself
A
, adding, with a wide, xed grin of
mock self-deprecation, a characteristic index of male-male in-group interactional
style, unfortunately. Observe what he has achieved interactionally, how he has
not only ratied a conceptuala denotationalunderstanding of Mr. Bs de-
scriptor, Loyola, but has framed its indexical signication for the identity-
work that is developing what we term the interactional text here, the genre of
consequential event in which he and Mr. B are engaged, getting to know one
another in some thickening of mutually relevant as well as mutually revealed
biographical detail. Mr. A has just placed himself as well as Mr. B within the
umbrella of Jesuit institutions of tertiary education, presumably those in North
America, both Mr. A and Mr. B enjoying the status of old boys, that is, former
students, now graduates, within that framework. Had the term of address ex-
isted at that time, its almost certain Mr. A would be saying, Hey, dude, Im an
old Jesuit boy myself ! with Mr. B responding Dude! instead ofas he does in
1974Oh re ya
A
?
But what does a cultural insider know about those Jesuit institutions of
tertiary education? Or even cultural outsiders like U.S. News and World Re-
port or Princeton Review? Observe that there is in fact a schema of cultural
knowledge that is being indexed, pointed to, and drawn upon, in this little
exchange see g. 2. Not only are there twenty-eight such institutions in
North America, which can be diagrammed as a multibranched taxonomy of
equivalent exemplications of the superordinate category, as shown; these
exemplars are as well differentially ranked or seriated indicated by the un-
equal sign as to a hierarchy of prestige of credential, perquisites of campus
and postcampus life, institutional comparabilities to institutions beyond the
Jesuit set, et cetera. Thus, when Mr. B, in a perfect mirror-image sequence
opener, asks Mr. A, Whered you
A
g to undergraduate school? Mr. A re-
sponds with his exquisitely chiasmatic expression, elaborating rst his Jesuit
institution followed by the gratuitous reference to its city, matching Mr. Bs
in Chicago. He responds, Georgetown, down in Washington, the gra-
tuitousness of the place-name conrmed by Mr. Bs back-channel response
that does not even wait for this information but overlaps it. Imagine a re-
sponse like Harvard College, a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A piece of interactional work has been done, to be sure, clarifying for each
other whothat is, socioculturally speaking, tokens of what social types
our interlocutors are or, more carefully put, have become. Messrs. A and B are
placed in the real time of interaction by virtue of their emblematic placement
with respect to the cultural conceptualizations that have been invoked and at-
tached to each in the course of their conversation. They have managed conver-
sationally to double their intra-Chicago status asymmetry, established at the very
outset by their having mutually revealed their relative places within the hierar-
chically status-conferring partonomy of the University of Chicago see g. 3,
now diagrammatically renewed by their emblematic old-school ties within the
seriation taxonomy of Jesuit institutions of higher education. Much that fol-
Figure 2. Conceptual space of undergraduate afliations of Messrs. A & B
Figure 3. Conceptual space of professional-school afliations of Messrs. A & B
lows in the rest of their videotaped interaction rests on this earlier structure
of interactional coparticipation, to which each has certainly contributed but
which neither has completely controlled. Note that insofar as performance of
social statuses is concerned, one generally does not at-footedly denote ones
status though children do this in pretend-play role-taking all the time with
explicit metapragmatic stipulations, such as You are the child and I am the
daddy, so Ill tell you what to do!; see Sawyer 1997. There is no Austinian ex-
plicit primary performative, no would-be behabitive construction Austin
1975, 16061 of the form I statusize myself relative to you thusly. But in-
tersubjectively understood relative statuses are invoked, ratied, or contested
as part of the ongoing co-construction of the role-relationality, the mutual coor-
dination, of participants in a social event.
All interaction is of this nature, whether face-to-face, as here, or mediated by
text-artifacts. As we indexically invoke the presupposed cultural knowledge
that gives interactional effect to what we say, by choice of expression we explic-
itly introduce such pieces of cultural knowledge into interactional space-time,
in effect we create context, such that this knowledge can be indexically called
upon later in the interaction as a now-given resource for self-other alignment.
Were Mr. A and Mr. B really engaging in a contest of status, an interactional
text of One Upmanship rather than just Getting to Know You at this point
Mr. A would denitely be up and Mr. B down. But that is not the point
here. It is important to see that there is a particular mechanism of signication
at work in the orderliness with which signshere, words and expressions
are introduced into the intersubjective space between participants getting to
know one another by alternating-turn question-and-answer, the development
of a social context that comes to frame them with ever more specicity. With
respect to such context, the words and expressions in their grammatical and co-
textual congurations do effective social work by drawing upon or presuming
uponindexically presupposing, we sayschemata of socially locatable knowl-
edge of the universehere, political geography, institutions of education, et
ceterarendering each participants interactionally relevant relative position a
consequence of location within and perspective on such knowledge. The knowl-
edge is, as it were, made esh in the interactional here and now as participants
co-construct an interactional text, a coparticipatory doing things with words.
All contextual and contextualizing signication is thus fundamentally in-
dexical in character, as signs invoke particular knowledge schemata identiable
with social positionality, attitudes, et cetera in social formations, and make such
social positionality, attitudes, et cetera real and consequential for themselves
and for others copresent or referred to in the here and now. We do not engage
in social interaction merely to convey information, to make propositions about
or representations of a distinct and separate world, notwithstanding our of-
cial ideology of language and of many other sign systems hides the real work
of semiosis behind this screen of representational inertness a screen some-
times itself interactionally useful; see Silverstein 1976, 47. Once we properly
understand what is cultural about interactional semiosispotent context-
dening and -transforming indexicalityand once, most importantly, we learn
how to lay it bare through analysis, we see that every event even of so-called
politicslet alone political economyis really composed of poetics all the
way down.
* * *
So far, then, we see how to read the cultural signication of what goes on
verbally and otherwise in an event of discursive interaction. Now lets turn to
circulation. Here we are concerned with the apparent movement or transfer
of signication across events of discursive and equivalent interaction in social
process. This happens through the mechanisms of interdiscursivitycommuni-
cative events creatively referencing other communicative events see Bauman
2004; Agha and Wortham 2005, whether prior or subsequent. In humanistic
cultural criticism, people have long thought about the circulation of intertexts
connecting textual forms. Ren Magrittes famous painting of 1929, captioned
Ceci nest pas une pipe, became his most important emblematic piece, one that
in later years he himself parodied intertextually with many paintings captioned
Ceci nest pas une . . .; the intertext has now become in effect a genre and the
original a source of the punch line of cartoons such as the one in gure 4, show-
ing characters, one of them Magritte, verbalizing a reciprocally ironic and even
cynical gift exchange.
But perhaps the most characteristic kind of cultural circulation is for an ac-
count of Event One to be woven into Event Two, for an account of Event Two
to be woven into Event Three, and so on Tom reported that Dick said that
Harry was thinking about . . .. In this socio-spatio-temporal sequence moving
across sites of communicative transmission, each prior event becomes the ob-
ject signaled about as well as a source for signication in the event that frames
it, as shown in the contrast of diagrams in gure 5: the temporal process over an
interval of time, delta t, is really a process of iteratively nested meta-meta- . . .
meta-pragmatic framing all the way back to some event-from-which the series
or sequence takes off. We sometimes can trace this process, and sometimes we
must merely assume that because a communicative event, such as that of Mr. A
chatting with Mr. B, presumes upon certain cultural knowledge normatively as-
sociable with someone who engages in or has engaged in certain kinds of com-
municative events at certain social loci, there must have been circulation of such
knowledge through characteristic chains of interdiscursive transmission.
Circulation of type-level semiotic material is then an inferred effect or
consequence of token-level interdiscursive links across interactional sites,
whether such links are those of true intertextuality replication by degrees;
Urban 1996, 2001 or of representation report or of indexical renvoi or prolep-
sis. The proper perceptual analogy is of the emergently patterned structure of
circulation of lighta trick effectunder a movie-theater marquee, which is
merely the effect of the individual or token lights being illuminated in rapid se-
rial order belowthe perceptual threshold of acuity. Note the metaphorical paral-
lel to the perceptual trick of moving pictures, too! For cultural semiosis, circu-
lation is a process predicable at the intensional level of a whole social formation;
Figure 4. Interdiscursivity of the longue dure for a Ren Magritte meme. BIZARRO 2004
Dan Piraro, Dist. by King Features. Used by permission.
it differs in this sense from the serially realizable spatio-temporal transmission
of objects, even of text-artifactual objects as such, for example as commodities.
4
The central sociological characteristic of circulation is that it is lumpy and
unstable, precisely because the interactional events mediated by what we can
term transmission of textual entextualized semiosis are nodes in chains of
4. The formulation here benets from comments of my longtime interlocutory partner Greg Urban, whose
work has particularly emphasized these type-level issues of circulation of culture, whether as intertexts
or emergent structures-of-knowledge or structures-of-value. See, in addition to the works cited, Urban 2010.
Figure 5. Semiotic logical and temporal relations of interdiscursivity
connectivity regimented by social structures of many different kinds. We never
communicate with others purely as disembodied and a-social cognitions: our
relative positionalities as social selves are essentially involvedstatuses in sys-
tems of categories in sociological parlanceas are our group interestsin the
politico-economic and more frankly political senseand as are our individual
and group projects toward the accomplishment of which in particular sites of
communicative contact and coordination among individuals is the sine qua non.
Everyone in a social formation does not communicate directly with everyone else
about everything that is on his or her mind, notwithstanding fantasies about
happy rational communicators in otherwise unstructured mass public spheres.
5
Even my adult Australian Aboriginal friends in a society of fteen hundred re-
vealed extraordinarily well-kept lines of demarcation about who could com-
municate with whom, based on classicatory kinship, initiation status, and, of
course, gender. And even if someone normatively unauthorized to have heard
and therefore to knowsomething actually knew it, that person would never
think of ever communicating it in any publicly acknowledgeable wayonly,
fortunately, to the friendly visiting anthropologist, quietly and under wraps.
Universal communicative circulation is not even true in really small-scale social
formations like domestic groups such as nuclear families, as Simmel 1906 long
ago discussed; why would one not understand how socially complex are the
routes of circulation in mass society?
Consider news reportage in our mass media as an institutionalized route by
which this process, the circulation of cultural signication, happens. In fact, in
modern mass societies, organizations bureaus, rms of extraordinary size and
tiered complexity attempt to manage such circulation of narrative, in the form of
news reports transmitted at clock and calendar intervals, like radio news-on-
the-hour or evening news on a television channel, or what Walter Benjamin
citedinAnderson1983, 39 calledthe 24-hour best-seller, the newspaperthat
we will now revise to the 24-second best-seller on Twitter. In contemporary
mass cultural times, these kinds of organizationally produced and transmitted
narratives of doings and happenings play a central role in the coordination of
knowledge, values, and opinions that allows various kinds of interest groups
to form and even to act in group termsor for various interests within a so-
cial formation to work to prevent this. One thinks of the Hosni Mubarak
5. I allude here to the large literature that has emerged in response to ideas of Jrgen Habermas 1989
about the rise of and threats to a bourgeois public sphere as the legitimate matrix of rational public opinion
in a polity. The nature of such publics and of their encompassed heterogeneity has been much debated in
the years since. Among key and inuential discussions see, e.g., Fraser 1990, Warner 1990, 2002, Gal and
Woolard 2001, and much ethnographic literature.
government in its last days in Egypt in 2011 pulling the plug on the Internet;
or of the Peoples Republic government in China blocking access to Google,
in particular; or of American parents desperately installing V-chips to pro-
tect the children within the domestic group from X-rated material on the web.
Heres an interesting example of the complexity of the socio-spatio-temporal
spaces of circulation even in small-scale society. I take my example from the
continuing work of Don Brenneis on the Hindi-speaking community of Fijians
in Bhatgaon. In his dissertation Brenneis 1974 and in a series of illuminating
articles e.g., 1978, 1984a, 1984b, 1987, 1988, 1990 on what he terms an oc-
casionally egalitarian society, Brenneis provides us with rich material useful for
conceptualizing the nature of interdiscursivity in the realm of community-level
politics. The village of Bhatgaon is populated by descendants of people recruited
to overseas indentured labor in the formerly British colony. People in this oc-
casionally egalitarian community will report a generalized mutual respect for
independence coupled with few mechanisms for direct, coercive political con-
trol. In such an environment, it is interesting that conicts of interests do, in
fact, get resolved by a kind of oscillating or dialectical mechanism of what we
might call a negative and a positive ritual form of political action. I diagram this
in gure 6.
The positive and public ritual site is easy to discern: it is the pancayat, or
council of ve, discursively unfolding as the formal presentation of grievances
for one or another side of disputes, of clashing interests, of construals of issues
where those pleading their cases nd themselves in radical conict. The pancayat
is a formally organized oratorical occasion convened by those called bada admi,
the big men, at which formal speeches are invited by the big men, delivered
Figure 6. Pancayat and talanoa as positive and negative moments of social circulation
by carefully chosen spokespersons on behalf of interests at loggerheads in a rhe-
torically fashioned register of Fijian Hindi, termed shudh Hindi sweet Hindi,
which is, as Brenneis reports, the language of religion, oratory and public
events. Everything here leads us to understand the pancayat as an orderly po-
etic of community politics, at which oratorical eloquence is supposed to work
its effective magic.
6
Poetic eloquence is locally expected to be appropriate to this
usesoothing and restorative of what people can live with as a sufcient-enough
resolution of conicts that have been brewing.
But how do political conicts ripen, as it were, to the point where they must
be savored through oratorical eloquence in the positive, highly valued ritual site
of the pancayat? There is another kind of event, negatively valuedin fact, a
kind of anti- or counter-ritual form in which and through which issues are de-
ned in a way by gaining adherents to a side. This is the talanoa, or adult mens
gossip session.
Small groups of generally related non-big men gather in early evening in
someones belo, a thatch-roofed sitting house on someones property, and have a
few, as we would say in Anglo-American culture. They drink yaqona, locally
termed grog, the mildly narcotic drink that Polynesians term kava in their
ceremonial life. Pleasantly relaxed, though not drunk in any sense as the drink-
ing proceeds, such a mens group addresses local issuesnews of the day or
week, as it werein a generally multiparty conversation. Talking politics in a
neighborhood bar should come to mind as the nearest urban equivalent in con-
temporary America.
Now none of this would be remarkable beyond the sociality of the occasion,
except that the formthe poetics, if you willof the conversational activity
and the medium in which it occurs draw our interest by virtue of their potent
indexical iconicity via interdiscursivethat is, circulatoryentanglements. Ta-
lanoa, male gossip, is rendered in the extreme negative opposite register of Fijian
Hindi from the one used in the pancayat, the ritual occasion of resolution of
issues. It is called jangli bat jungle talk, in essence, and it is specically nega-
tively viewed in the community, a kind of embarrassment of vernacular mascu-
linity, perhaps to be compared with highly masculinizing local vernacular Amer-
ican English, sprinkled with off-color phrases, as talking tough. As opposed to
the ofcially prized shudh Hindi of the pancayat speech maker, a register
6. Among numerous ethnographic examples of the ritual ecacy of oratorical poetics Bloch 1975, note in
particular Havilands 1996 exposition of Tzotzil marital squabbles, their adjudication, and at least resolution
for the time being under the power of ociants parallelistic, couplet- and formula-laden ritual oratory,
reinstating a poetic orderliness with which marital unions themselves are celebrated.
valued for displaying a good knowledge of standard Fiji Hindi, a large San-
skritic vocabulary, and a knack for apposite parables, jangli bat and its use in
talanoa have a clear negative cachet: men who excel in it are much appreciated
even thoughor should we say because?it focuses on stigmatized subjects,
using an ofcially low prestige variety of Hindiat the same time a source of
shame and of rural pride Brenneis 1984a, 49293. Real men get down!
In the course of their conversation over grog, men move in and out of epi-
sodes of talanoa. It is scandal, potentially embarrassing and to the detriment of
someone or some interests not present at the moment of delivery, that forms
the content of such talk. Who wants to have been responsible for telling such
tales? Indeed, in an at least surface egalitarian community, pointed and explicit
accusation against particular others would be very unwise, even in an intimate
group of friends and relatives.
So what we nd in the transcripts of talanoa sessions that Brenneis has
provided is this: rst, there is a low degree of explicit, orderly, and complete de-
scriptive information, the kind, say, we claim that we value in expository com-
munication and inculcate in institutions of learning. Half propositions, sugges-
tive allusions, et cetera, abound: claims made about doings and sayings, but not
attributed to anyone as agent or actor, are the dominant content. We would call
this property of fragmented communication the depleted referentiality and prop-
ositionality of gossip discourse. Note, on the one hand, how this depletion g-
urates plausible deniability for whoever is uttering itdishing the dirt, as it
were. Note more importantly, on the other hand, that this means the various
moment-to-moment coparticipating addressees of such discourse must already
be considerably in the know about the scandalous doings and happenings to
ll in missing referents and descriptive details.
See the adjacency pairs 2.42.5 on Brenneiss 1984a, 501 transcript, repro-
duced here as gure 7, as well as 2.82.9. The speakers, HN and DD, are matri-
lateral parallel cousins and close friends, reviewing scandalous events of the
night before causing Fijian police to be called to the community. Note how in
line 2.4 DD gives the time as nine oclock, immediately conrmed by HN, and
then DD says that the two persons they are talking about were totally drunk,
again conrmed and elaborated by HN, fully drunk . . . so that they fought.
In 2.8 DD reports a crowd of thirty people, conrmed and with precision in-
cremented by HN as thirty-two in 2.9. DD and HN are contributing detail upon
detail about the incident, but from all their talk an outsider could not reconstruct
a complete narrative. For example, whom are they talking about as the drunken
instigators of all the hullabaloo?
Figure 7. Transcript of a talanoa fragment Don Brenneis: collaborating on attenuated
denotational detail. Reprinted fromAmerican Ethnologist 11, no. 3 1984: 501. Used by
permission of American Anthropological Association 1984.
There is thus a threshold of knowledge that is presupposed as an oppor-
tunity cost of participation: a good talanoa ritual player, even as addressee, is
someone who dominates the news, gathers it, and is ready to relay detail. As
Brenneis observes, The most striking feature of these talanoa transcripts is
how difcult it would be to reconstruct the underlying events on the basis of the
talanoa texts themselves. . . . Generally participants in talanoa sessions must
come to them with some understanding of what is being discussed Brenneis
1984a, 494.
So if these sessions are not really informative, what are they? Here, a second
aspect of the form of conversation emerges. Talanoa is marked by rhythmic
and rapid delivery, the discourse divided . . . into syntactic and rhythmic
chunks of stress units giving a pulsing feel to the talanoa as a whole. . . . As-
sonance and alliteration are quite marked, and exaggerated intonation contours
and volume variation frequently occur. As well, repetition and near repetition
of words and phrases are common, as are plays with word order and lots of
reduplicative forms e.g., polis-ulis 5police, exaggerating a tendency of jangli
Hindi. The language is, in short, a poetry like our American English rap or hip-
hop, in which, even across speaking turns, people have to jump into the rhythm
of the talk, exercising a facility for artistically shaping their own contribution
to it.
As seen in gure 8, the time marker of the verbal beat of this rhythmic de-
livery is the form bole, structurally grammatically the third-person singular pres-
ent of the verb to say: thus, he/she says. In talanoa this form occurs so often
it no longer actually means he/she says; it has become what from the perspec-
tive of textual organization we call a discourse marker Schiffrin 1987, punctu-
ating breath-group and other discursively functional segments of utterance as
do like, ya know, I mean, ain it, and so forth in vernacular American English.
Frequently stressed and lengthened vis--vis the rest of the textwhich is rap-
idly delivered in oral performanceit is a kind of phrasal measuring device
that occurs not only in the middle of turns at talk but especially at the begin-
nings of turns and at the ends of turns when its utterance shows that the oor
has now become available for another speaker to jump in. This is shown very
well in 2.12, 2.182.19, 2.202.21 in the transcript reproduced from Brenneis
1984a, 502 in gure 8.
From the perspective of its denotative meaning, bole is what we term a
quotative particle; we might translate it they sy, pause that . . . extra stress
and perhaps rising-falling intonation on say, with generalized they that has
no actual denotational antecedent, or one hrs pause that . . ., putting the
Figure 8. Transcript of talanoa fragment Don Brenneis: bole as metricalizing device.
Reprinted fromAmerican Ethnologist 11, no. 3 1984: 502. Used by permission of American
Anthropological Association 1984.
onus for the stench being uttered about someone on the generalized community,
as though indeed Kants cf. Habermas 1989, 89140 public opinion has
informed the current utterer of the bad tidings. I like to think of this rap or
word-jazz game in the image of a jump-rope round, where children have to jump
out of and into the rhythm of the turning rope without getting fouled up by
stepping on it or by getting hit by it. It requires some skill.
So it is rhythmically co-constructed stylized gab or talk that is occurring in
talanoa, not a good, complete, orderly co-constructed story but a co-construction
of what is not said, a co-construction of what is mutually presupposable and
hence not in need of actual elaboration. That is the discourse form, whatever
the empirical actuality of some participants knowing or not knowing. To par-
ticipate you must be able to indicate by your own co-construction that you al-
ready know; to participate is to register a mutual alignment with the voicing,
as Bakhtin 1981, 275366 would term it, of the guy who has already spoken,
taking up the story at hand from the perspective emerging in the intersubjec-
tive space of co-construction. To hear the story in what is being said, you must
know the story, and you should be able to throw in your own little contribution
to the emerging skeleton of a story line to ratify your right to hear more. One
is never actually the Goffmanian 1979, 17 author of the details, moreover;
one is merely the animator of them in the instance, relaying what, by silent
assent in the gossip group, must clearly have been on everyones lips in prior
conversation that is at least formally indexed by the quotative particle: Im not
telling you this, but . . . !
The poetics of participation is, in short, a guration, a trope, a metaphora
diagrammatic iconof the participants likeness-of-alignment to the way some
scandal is being narratively formulated with an intersubjective voice of neg-
ative evaluation. In short, ones collusionto use the negative word for col-
laborationin fashioning as the denotational text an emergently group-based
account with negative evaluational stance indexically counts as creative co-
participation in the very coming into being of a potential political faction in re-
spect of some issue or situation that will likely face the community as a whole or
some signicant interests in it. Talanoa is the negative ritual among small groups
of men where political interests about particular issues come into being, ne-
cessitating, as they may in some cases persist and ripenor fester, to use a dis-
ease imagethe eventual constitution of a pancayat, the ritual event for airing
the social wound and cleansing it in its own poetic order of elegant sweetness.
Small-scale egalitarian politicseven occasionally egalitarian politicsis
factional politics, the spectral coming-into-being of which causes ofcial anxiety
and the search for remedies. Talanoa analyzed as an event of social action with
its own characteristic poetic form of participation gives us the key to how faction
comes discursively into being about particular issues. It may be ofcially nega-
tively valued and hence denied as part of the political processnote the wide-
spread notion in Western societies that men dont gossip, for examplebut it
is the very rst engine stroke in the reciprocating system that is the mechanism in
place for the politics of Bhatgaon and other such communities. Talanoa as an
event is a ritual microcosm and metaphor of the macro-social form of political
factionalism, which can come into being as men are drawn into co-constructing
a far-from-disinterested account of something with strong community involve-
ment and potentially multiple interests.
Brenneiss material is fascinating because lurking right beneath the surface
of this acephalous no-head person in the government apparatus egalitarian
presumptively non-status-differentiated household-based extended families
dwelling in compounds village community are processes that both depend on
social differentiation and constantly reorder such social differentitions. Men, and
especially heads of households, are recognized as the prime political actors, with
their very visible and deferred-to statuses always nervously at stake notwith-
standing the ideology of equality. Young men afliate with the older men as kinds
of political clients, especially via kinship relations as in supporting ones nuclear
and extended family. Ofcial political acts, such as pancayat, the dispute resolu-
tion council of ve, reveal these status asymmetries, of course, because the whole
procedure is an attempt to soothe rufed and damaged status claims, not to probe
truth and falsity. But as we see, unofcial but pervasive talanoa always has the
potential to be directed to rufing and damaging those claims. The talanoa form,
in a chain of interlocking such performances, is a locus of what we might term
the cumulation of detail into a factional charter myth about potentially rival or
counterposed others, sometimes denoted only by association with a big man,
who may be named, all in the voice of mere ratication of thoughts and views
of those anonymous others whom one alludes to and cites in the course of mak-
ing up the narrative. As Brenneis quoted in Silverstein 2005c, 2122 n. 4
noted for me about Bhatgaon, egalitarian politics in Bhatgaon at least is shaped
in large part by the anticipatory fear of factional politics or parti-walla kam, as
it is locally known. My consultants saw factions partis as ongoing and prob-
lematic in those villages where they had ourished and at a few times in the
Bhatgaon past. It was, I think, one of the reasons that a goal in conict was not
so much to recruit adherents as to nd third-party audiences who could provide
the events in which a conict would not so much be resolved as the
commensurate social worth and reputation of its parties in our sense publicly
displayed and vindicated. In any case, in local commentary, parti-walla kam
was very much something to be avoided. . . . Factionalism was always a
possibility but, during my own eldwork at least, not an ongoing feature of local
social organization it rather, I would say, haunted the social scene through the
fact of its possibility. I trust we can now see vividly the communicational
infrastructure thereof in one of its circulatory manifestations.
* * *
Finally, let us turn to the emanation of semiotic, of cultural value through the
socio-spatio-temporal structures that are dened in and by trajectories of com-
munication. My example starts fromit emanates fromwine and its culture in
contemporary American society. My theme here is not enological and viticul-
tural as such; it is cultural in a more general sense, using wine and its contem-
porary framing as exemplication of how culture operates in our institutionally
complex communicational environment.
I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the fol-
lowing swatch or sample of what for us, people with a certain wide experience of
English prose, is an unmistakable textual genre:
First tasted in 1963. Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the
mid-1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb, developing its charac-
teristic hot, earthy/pebbly bouquet only latterly. Ripe, soft, lovely texture,
but not as demonstrably or obtrusively a 61 as the other rst growths. Fine,
gentlemanly, understated.
It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting notein fact, one of the
thousands published in 1980 by Sir Michael Broadbent 1980, 81, whose eval-
uations set prices for Christies auction house for many years. English speakers
outside of the social elds where such discourse is the norm can recognize the
special quality, the ne, gentlemanly, understated quality of this kind of lan-
guage, but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers, only a
much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that
would make sense to the insiders. As a kind of text, the well-formed wine-tasting
note is highly structured. Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand
to be the dimensions of aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or tem-
porally structure ones perceptual encounter with the obscure object of enologi-
cal desire, as shown in gure 9. In fact, analysis of hundreds of such tasting notes
allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael had to say about
Chteau Haut-Brion 1961, a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux, on tasting
in November 1979. As in gure 10, we can diagram the way the very orderliness
of this spontaneous bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural
pattern.
What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases
composed of the technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions
along which they evaluate the substance. For example, under Stage II, nose,
Broadbent was surprised to nd the smell waxy and initially difcult to discern
Figure 9. Phases of the aesthetic encounter with wine. Reproduced from Current Anthropol-
ogy 45, no. 5 2004: 641, g. 8.
Figure 10. Textual structure of a wine-tasting note Broadbent 1980, 91. Adapted from
Current Anthropology 45, no. 5 2004: 642, g. 9a.
dumb but later was reassured to experience the hot, earthy/pebbly-ness of
the bouquet component of scent, the one presumed to come from the tech-
niques of vinication of its particular grape merlot and cabernet sauvignon.
There are what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension, among
the members of which a taster distinguishes. A maximal note records values
along all ve dimensions, in their proper order; a more telescoped or minimal
one generally concentrates on Stage III, for which there are the most taxonomic
differentiators, and perhaps as well Stage II.
Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evalu-
ative connoisseurship, there are other bits of prose, as I have separated to the left
of the textual diagram. These tend to be characterological, almost anthropomor-
phic, and bespeak, by their use, a kind of assumed social position on the part of
the user we nowadays associate with the rareed precincts of male clubby culture
in the city and, on weekends, with great estates and country clubs of tony sub-
urbia and exurbia. My research reveals, however, that it is these vocabulary and
phrases that those who live socially distant from enological pursuits actually
identify as the verbal register of wine talk and about which there is the usual
kind of class-associated anxiety peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisieas is
the case for many realms of connoisseurship. Perhaps you have seen the famous
1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a caption quoting a dinner
party host as he tastes the wine he has served, noting for his disconcerted guests,
Its a nave domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you will be
amused by its presumption. All of this talk is characterological phraseology, all
stuff from the left-side of the diagram, but richly communicative of the predic-
ament of the anxious readership of would-be wine acionados for whom Thur-
bers joke still resonates. There are still takeoffs on television sitcoms these
days; recall the fate of Magrittes non-pipe.
Now, as an anthropologist I am concerned with how, in modern life, people
approach commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such nor-
mative cultural schemes that direct their perception of the qualities culture makes
salient, qualities by which they classify, categorize, and come to judge the good
from the badnot only the things they ingest but as well those they wear, drive,
or make use of in other ways in their daily lives.
As a linguist, I am further concerned with the meanings of words and ex-
pressions by which people communicate with one another. In such communi-
cation, even the same word-form can be associated with many different concep-
tual schemes depending on socially recognized expertise; think of what we term
the technical meanings of otherwise ordinary words, like lattice, or bouquet,
and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain techni-
cal knowledge, such as muon or climat.
In effect, then, using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of
communication frequently does double classicatory work. A word used in a
certain descriptive way categorizes or classies both things-in-the-denotable-
world whether real or ctive/imagined, to be sure; it indexes a schema of
qualia see now Chumley and Harkness 2013. But additionally, the particular
differential application of the word at the same time revealsit points to, or
indexesthe social identity, the category of person, who would stereotypically
invoke such a use of the word. This is an example of what we term the register
effect of such linguistic variety which is, by the way, universal in all known
language communities. In what follows I will return several times to this biva-
lent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics that
mediate classications of things and persons; for the strength and institutional
entrenchment of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal
signs turns out to be key to understanding the observable spread or emanation
of wine-talk, or oinoglossia, as I have dubbed it.
My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed reg-
ister effect not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign sys-
tems that frame the production, circulation, consumption, and memorialization
of this substance and peoples relation to it. And, this register effect is spreading,
or has been spreading, from the domainthe domaine, if you will!of the
enological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction, that is, that as-
pires at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer. In terms of the
framing of myriad other comestibles undergoing stimulated stratication by pres-
tige, a kind of semiotic vinicationturning them into metaphorical wine
has been taking place both in the language surrounding them and in the other
sign systems by which we make their virtues known, for example in the visual
codes of advertising.
In other words, the institutional world of wine has become a center point of
emanation of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of con-
struable comestibles, edible and potable commodities that are brought into the
stratied precincts in which wine has long had a social life. So today, just as one
can be admired/reviled, imitated/shunned for being a wine snob a folk term
of opprobriousness from outside the fold, so also can one nd a parallel place
in the universe of experiencers of coffee, beer, cheese, ice cream, olive oil, vodka,
et ceteraexamples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor
represent nature turned into culture. Let me illustrate this process of value-
emanation, which transfers the register effect of bidirectional, thing-human co-
categorization to any such commodity now claiming the possibility of stratied
prestige. We will see that we aresociologically speakingwhat we communi-
cate about what we eat or drink.
Wine is, as it were, an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered
into potable art and thus is stratied as a commodity from the low or vulgar
registersthink of Thunderbirdto upper reaches perceivable aesthetically
only through knowledgeable connoisseurship, articulated through a whole crit-
ical apparatus of expertise and experience, like any art form, such as among
those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and westerly vine-
yards of a particular years La Tche or Cte Rtie. Setting the growing and
vinication of grapes aside, the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic
appreciation of wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating
talkingabout the consumption experience. Hence we can understand what
lies behindthe splendidcartoonby the NewYorker magazines satirist of the WASP
Upper East Side of Manhattan, William Hamilton, reproduced here as gure 11.
One drinks mere beverages; one gets great art.
Getting great art, and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art,
requires the practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur, the more subtle the aes-
thetic faculties, the more exquisitely near sublimity the experience; the more re-
Figure 11. Wine: consumption vs. connoisseurship William Hamilton. New Yorker
cartoonbank.com, cartoon image no. 42156, reprinted by permission.
warding the investment, as it were, of the aesthetic inclination and training. A
perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine drinker, an interaction with
the art object, is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that intersect
a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge; using
the discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great
macro-institutions of our society, the interaction of which shapes the communi-
cational networks determining how we think and talk about wine.
One such institutional force is that of applied science, in particular enological
and viticultural sciences such as soil science, botany, organic chemistry, and hu-
man psychophysiology. A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of
collecting, auctions, capital appreciation, as it were, ranging from the profes-
sional through the serious avocational to the rank amateur or even happen-
stance wine drinker. A third is retail marketing of commodity circulation of so-
called life-style commodities, that is, personal-value-conferring commodities of
domestic consumption, in which brand, for example, has become so impor-
tant as an index of distinction. Each of these institutional sources endows the
wine consumers reective engagement with a distinctive register effect that, my
materials show, has been spreading from wine to other comestibles.
First, from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we
respond psychophysically to the raw data of empirical reality in ways that can
be isolated, dimensionalized, numerically measured, and then terminologically
standardized by laboratory methods, dening an orderly perceptual space within
which the sensorium operates. This would do for the phases of wine perception
outlined in gure 9 much the same as has been achieved in other areas of sensory
perception; note pitch, loudness, and harmonic overtone structure for sound
related to the physical wave frequency, amplitude, and dispersion of acoustic
energy in a signal, or the perceptual space of huesaturationbrightness for
color characteristics of light in the visible spectrum. A particularly interesting
and inuential example of the analogical transfer is the standard system of wine
aroma terminology, from the University of California, Davis, School of Viticul-
ture and Enology, as shown in gure 12. It is, of course, just a three-node tax-
onomy of kinds of aromas; each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the
center point, essentially undifferentiated aroma, to more and more specic kinds.
Particularly in an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and cre-
dentialed for their very livelihoods, used to thinking in terms of a psychophys-
ics of the reactive self, the idea that one can achieve degrees of dimensionalized
precision like this in ones wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied science is,
of course, very natural and appealing.
And being so appealing, seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in lab-
oratory chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship, the aroma taxonomy
has spawned many repetitions and imitations, rst via admiring circulation
by wine critics in newspapers, in magazines, and on websites. Figure 13 shows
Noble and colleagues aroma wheel reproduced by Patrick Fegan in his syn-
dicated wine column. Figure 14, by Ronn Wiegand in the acionado magazine
Wine and Spirits, spreads to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a dif-
ferential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in wheel form. At a slightly later
period, as micro-breweries were coming denitively into the con-
sumer consciousness, note an imitation wheelcombining aroma and avor
Figure 12. Standardized terminology of the wine aroma wheel A. C. Noble et al..
American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 38, no. 2 1987: 143, g. 1. Ann C. Noble.
Used by permission.
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Figure 14. Unveiling of the sake aroma wheel Ronn Wiegand, in Wine & Spirits,
February 1994, 39. 1993 by Ronn Wiegand. Used by permission.
taxonomies in a single circular displayeven for beer in gure 15, bringing this
drink and its consuming public formerly culturally opposed to wine into the
aesthetic fold.
For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in enophily
is, to be sure, aesthetic connoisseurship and the communities of practice it en-
gages around any particular focus of attention organizing, at least in part,
ones style of life. The analogue is, of course, art connoisseurship as made clear
in William Hamiltons cartoon in g. 11. There are professional connoisseurs
Figure 15. The beer avor wheel. American Society of Brewing Chemists. Used by
permission.
who set price in the art market, and these people are valued for the subtlety
of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to
collectors and other avocational enthusiasts who are, at the same time, inves-
tors in a commodity that accrues monetary value in the market. Just as there
are published the Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate and, according to the
Google search engine as of July 2013, 14,800,000 sites accessible through the
expression wine appreciation and 1,130,000,000 through the expression wine
terms,
7
so also do we now have the Beer Advocate, the Malt Advocate i.e.,
scotch whiskey, the Cheese Advocate, and so forth, both in print and online.
The imitative parallelismhow these forms of avocational fandom mimic that
of wineis extraordinary.
The third macro-institution is life-style retailing, which relies on the existence
of the rst two. What you are in consumption class is what you eat, drink, wear,
et ceteraand what you consciously discover you have to think or say about
the experience. In such retailing, a product that can be a performative emblem
of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an artisanal experi-
ence and the repetition of brand dependability, of course. Total individuation in
wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle; the best enological connois-
seurs facing the most rareed of wines operate at this level. Note how this cul-
tural concept of distinctiveness informs the practice, at serving, of never lling
a glass with bottle number two if there is still present in the glass some of wine
of bottle number one, for example. Even where it is ridiculous not to do so, it
is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-
center of viticultural distinction. At the other extreme, it is brand, brand, brand
that is the principle of marketing, like the mass-produced couturier lines that
self-advertise on the products themselves.
8
At the middle ranges of the wine
market in the United Sates, brandedness is the key to marketing; the consumer
must be made to feel the equivalentfor wine, certainly anchored in France and
Frenchof prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body,
or a Miele dishwasher in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen. In this light, look
at the clever Clos du Bois ad in gure 16 which, summoning to consciousness
what we might term the wine brands Frenchness, of which a host serving it
7. An earlier Google search, done almost four years earlier on October 1, 2009, yielded 422,000 sites keyed
by wine appreciation and 25,300,000 by wine terms, giving some sense of either the phenomenal growth of
online information, as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to the trendy newer media, or of the
eciency of the search engine, or some combination of both.
8. For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of brand, see Moore 2003, Manning 2010, and Nakassis
2012, the latter in particular worrying the citational Nakassis 2013 nature of branded commodities.
to guests can be proud, notwithstanding emphasizes itssurprise!Califor-
nian provenance.
The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly
high register effects to other prestige comestibles and their connoisseurs is, in
fact coming to dene what a prestige comestible is. Early on in the Starbucks
coffee phenomenon, for example, the company circulated a take one newslet-
ter educating its consumer-customers about the rareed purchasing experience
they were having at Starbucks. As can be seen in gure 17, the prose of these
informativeindeed, educationalmaterials takes the genred form of wine-
tasting notes: seductive Ethiopian Sidamo has owery bouquet with a hint
of eucalyptus, light and elegant body, and a honeyed natural sweetness; Har-
rars Chiantiesque, slightly gamy aroma gives it a certain rustic charrn as a
Figure 16. The Frenchness of wine illustrated. 1996 Clos Du Bois Winery
coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of subtlety. And speaking of
subtlety, what could be less subtle in analogical form, as revealed in gure 18,
than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffeea cof-
fee varietal that is, we should surely appreciate, akin to wine itself in its most
characteristically French denomination, an AOC, appellation dorigine contrle.
Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia, wine talk, some
literally. Here, in gure 19, is the wrapper of one of Lindts chocolate bars. It
teaches the consumer that chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like
Figure 17. Kevin Knoxs tasting notes on African varietal coffees Inside Scoop, JuneJuly
1991, 2. Starbucks Coffee Co.. 1991 Starbucks Coffee Company. Quoted by permission.
wine, through stages of apperceptive evaluationsight, break-feel, aroma, taste,
aftertastein which, of course, this brand will be seen to be the best.
As we can see, from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the
prestige economy of aesthetic comestibles, people and things linked therein, in
which all the signs from language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects
that construct both the comestible and at the same time the consumer in a system
of cultural values that is still growinglike good vines. And even beyond hu-
mans: gure 20 is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough imag-
ined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts.
Finally, it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping
semioticization have a temporality such that what is happening at the institu-
tional center of emanation may be already shifting just as its inuence is being
Figure 18. Colombian coffee in the image of French wine. 1997 Federacin Nacional de
Cafeteros de Colombia.
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felt elsewhere in social space-time. Thus, on September 9, 2009, the New York
Timess wine critic, Eric Asimov, wrote about the populist proletarianization of
wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk, pro-
prietor of The Wine Library formerly Shoppers Discount Liquor in Spring-
eld, New Jersey, a couple of miles west of Newark Airport. As revealed in
gure 21, Everymanto use the medieval generic nameis here revealed
to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative photo shoot: open-shirted, tieless,
expressive-faced, perhaps visibly ethnic, tasting wine in the upstairs storeroom.
You, Everyman, can borrow taste from The Wine Library! And on the very same
day, Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about tea sommeliers,
tea-tasting ritual, stylistically vinied tea merchants elegantly dressed and ele-
gant of ritual, and the emergence of regimes of certication of expertise par-
allel to that of wine experts by the American Tea Masters Association, a self-
proclaimed certifying board. Observe the dress, the comportment, the demeanor
exemplied in gure 22: is that emanation, or what? The waves in the pond
of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular undulations
created where the stone is rst dropped inperhaps, to mix the metaphor, leav-
ing us with an ironic aftertaste.
Figure 20. A tasting note by the noblest of beasts Paul Wood. New Yorker cartoonbank.
com, cartoon image no. 8544718, reprinted by permission.
Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations, emanations
proceed simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation; in-
deed, they must operate in a socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and
more scale-encompassing than mere interdiscursivity as such, mere circulation,
which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of emanation.
Figure 21. Gary Vaynerchuk of The Wine Library videotaping his wine blog. Richard Perry/
New York Times/Redux. Used by permission.
So there you have it: whatever one might want to call cultural manifests in
this trimodal semiotic. As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them
but always nd that we must take account of the other two in order really to
locate, to nd, culture. Phenomenally and epistemologically semiotic signica-
tion emerges in the rst instance in events of discursive interaction, though as
weve seen, to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least under-
standing the interdiscursivities of circulation. Circulation as such encompasses a
social organization of communication, frequently and especially as institutional-
ized across structural sites that are implicitly referencedin renvoi and in pro-
lepsisin some particular site we seek to understand and interpret. And nally,
emanation denes an overall structure of tiered nodes in a network of sites of
practice, generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries. In or
through such emergent structures, semiotic value via genres of textuality, ever
of the moment, ows and intersects that coming from other generative centers,
such that complex cultural forms as experienced are inevitably multiply deter-
mined from several such centers of emanation. Wine and its oinoglossic regis-
ters of verbal, visual, et cetera, semiosis seem socio-historically to have crystal-
lized at such an intersection, as we have seen, and we have caught it as it, in turn,
Figure 22. Rod Markus, a tea sommelier, examines a brewing pot of tea. Keith Hale/
Chicago Sun-Times/Redux. Used by permission.
has seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation, semioti-
cally informing the more general stratication of consumption.
We have moved away fromthe essentializing and enumerating concept of cul-
tures as distinctive stuff to the contemporary semiotic world of cultural pro-
cesses. Yet even in this semiotic world the ontological claim to unique cultures
see Silverstein 2005b has itself become a genred discursive form asserting
locality Appadurai 1996, 17899 that emanates from numerous interested
centers and spreads accordingly as it licenses such claims. But one hopes that
contemporary sociocultural anthropology and any of its allied meta-semiotics
escape these emanations at an analytic plane all the while recognizing them as
a force in the circulation and signication of culture.
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