CFP (AAA): "Is this the good life, is this just fantasy?": Semiotics and Ethics in Ethnographic Perspective

[Erika Alpert]

Hello! 

My colleague Jonathan DeVore and I are putting together a panel for the AAAs this November and we'd love for you to join us in discussing semiotics and ethics. The full abstract is below. If you think you have a project that fits, get in touch with either me (ealpert at umich.edu) or Jonathan (devorejd at umich.edu). We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

All best,
Erika Alpert

"Is this the good life, is this just fantasy?": Semiotics and Ethics in Ethnographic Perspective

Semiotics, as a field, attempts to analyze and describe “sign relations,” or the interrelationships between representations, objects, and interpretants.  In anthropology, we frequently employ its insights to explore how sign systems intersubjectively mediate our discovery and creation of meaning in the world. Ethics, conceived broadly, examines the forms of goodness in human activity and relationships.  Traditionally, ethics has been thought to both build on and inform other domains of normative inquiry, such as aesthetics (What is beauty?) and logic (What is truth?).  If these different kinds of goodness are things that become intelligible through social learning processes, it would seem to follow that what we understand as beautiful, good, or true must be at least recognizable through signs and marks of beauty, goodness and truth. Yet, the relationship between semiotics and ethics has not often been well articulated. In one sense, semiotics might be viewed as a mere lens or instrument for “viewing” or “picking out” what is good in the world.  However, this view may be overly simplistic because it reduces signs to transparent mirrors of meaning rather than seeing them as part of a system for creating, sharing, and transforming meanings. In our view, while semiotics is most notably concerned with sign relations and activity (or semiosis), semiotics is itself a theoretical practice and activity that aims at a kind of good (i.e. a clearer metalanguage for describing the world). Consequently, semiotic inquiry itself could be viewed as a kind of ethical action, a viewpoint taken by Charles S. Peirce in his writings on what he called the “normative sciences” (i.e., ethics, logic, and aesthetics) and what contemporary philosophers such as Hilary Putnam call “the moral sciences.”

In this panel, we attempt to explore the relationship between semiotics and ethics through ethnographic inquiries that treat signs both as bearers or markers of ethical goodness, and sign processes themselves as ethically meaningful social activities that are directly implicated in “goodness” itself.  We will examine different imaginaries of what it means to live a “good life” and to be a “good person” through addressing the different semiotic processes that are attendant to, or constitutive of, those achievements. We will examine different ways that people learn the sign relations that allow them to identify “good” things and relationships, as well as the constitutive role of sign relations themselves in the social construction of “goodness.” The papers also explore how individuals learn to perform goodness, as well as navigate failures in performance that might raise questions about whether or not the goods we recognize in objects and relationships are “mere performance” or “appearance,” and perhaps therefore unreliable and untrustworthy. Thus, in addition to asking how we recognize and signify the good, we also ask how people reconstitute meaning in moments of heterodoxy—when former notions and signs of “goodness” break down, fail, or come to be rejected as false. Through these inquiries, we aim to contribute to a fuller understanding of sign processes as intertwined with ethical processes.  

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Erika Alpert
Doctoral Candidate, Linguistic Anthropology
University of Michigan
メール：ealpert at umich.edu
携帯：080−3604−6722