Concept
Semiotic anthropology
Overview
Semiotic anthropology is the process of using the cognitive tools of semiotics (theory of signs) to understand social structures from the anthropological perspective.
The phrase was first used by Milton Singer (1978), whose work brought together the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and Roman Jakobson with theoretical streams that had long been flowing in and around the University of Chicago, where Singer taught. In the late 1970s, Michael Silverstein, a young student of Jakobson's at Harvard University, joined Singer in Chicago's Department of Anthropology. Since that time, anthropological work inspired by Peirce's semiotic have proliferated, in part as students of Singer and Silverstein have spread out across the country, developing semiotic-anthropological agendas of their own.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Every reflective attitude and function, whether of naïve life, deliberate invention, or controlled scientific research, has risen through the medium of some such total objective situation. The abstract logician may tell us that sensations or impressions, or associated ideas, or bare physical things, or conventional symbols, are antecedent conditions.
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Close in meaning to Semiotic anthropology; the term itself is not named.
These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Semiotic anthropology is.
Yet, how difficult it is to avoid substituting the sign for the thing; how difficult to keep the essential quality still living before us, and not to kill it with the word. With all this, we are exposed in modern times to a still greater danger by adopting expressions and terminologies from all branches of knowledge and science to embody our views of simple nature. Astronomy, cosmology, geology, natural history, nay…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's Theory of Colours
States what Semiotic anthropology is.
Related ideas
- Contextualism
- Harvard University
- Bronisław Malinowski
- Roman Jakobson
- Semiotics
- University of Chicago
- Anthropology
- General semantics
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Winfried Nöth
- John Rupert Firth
Place in the tradition
Part of Contextualism.