[Linganth] AAA/CASCA panel CFP: Semiotic Approaches to Value and Commensuration

Wed Mar 15 13:01:46 UTC 2023

Greetings colleagues,

Steve Black and I are looking for one or two more papers for an in-person panel on semiotic approaches to value and commensuration. Below is a draft abstract of the session, to be revised depending on the final slate of papers (and I will trim the bibliography when I’ve had less coffee).

AAA/CASCA panel: Semiotic Approaches to Value and Commensuration

Anthropologists have long approached value as fundamentally a question of semiosis, from early Saussurean-structuralist theories of linguistic value to Nancy Munn’s thoroughgoing Peircean analysis in The Fame of Gawa (1986). Recently, semiotic approaches to value have been extended as part of “new materialism” (Manning 2012), a reexamination of work by Munn and by David Graeber (2001), and a resurgence of interest in the work of C. S. Peirce (1998; see especially Chumley & Harkness 2013). Linguistic anthropologists in particular have focused on evaluation as a kind of semiotic-discursive project, examining the talk used in the course of evaluating a good or a practice (e.g., Cavanaugh 2007, 2019; Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012; Silverstein 2006; Thurlow 2020a, 2020b; Thurlow & Jaworski 2017) or focusing on how semiotic mediation shapes circulation, such as by promoting and selecting for some qualities, tangible or intangible, over others (e.g., Calvão 2013; Cavanaugh & Shankar 2014; Faudree 2015; Gal 2017).

In honor of this year’s focus on transitions, this session interrogates what happens to value in transition. What happens when the “same” stuff—a material good, an image, a practice, or a stretch of discourse—is subjected to different criteria and different regimes of value? How do people reconcile slippages and change criteria to suit new purposes? When one mode or system of evaluation “wins out,” what are its political dimensions and its implications for power (Elyachar 2005)?

Papers in this session consider cases in which “value” is contested and the ways that people grapple with that apparent incommensurability, or force things to be commensurable. At the intersection of linguistic anthropology and economic anthropology, we consider the different conceptions of value that might be at play in a given ethnographic context, including use value, exchange value, moral value, and others. Rather than aiming for a unified theory of value (as Graeber [2001] lamented does not exist), this session asks what is at stake in forcing unlike things and unlike systems of evaluation into a commensurable system, or not, as an ethnographic question. Papers examine, for example, the different forms of value (ethical, scientific, financial) invoked by global health professionals in storytelling—some of which appear incommensurable to the people who invoke them; the different ways U.S. political actors are evaluated as “reasonable” or not, via surface markers like their suits, race, and hair; and a global cashmere commodity chain in which the value regimes people are acting on are often at odds, but still they have to meet a threshold of commensurability across the chain to agree that it’s more or less the same thing—“cashmere.”

WORKS CITED:

Calvão, Filipe. 2013. The Transporter, the Agitator, and the Kamanguista: Qualia and the In/Visible Materiality of Diamonds. Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):119–136.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2007. Making Salami, Producing Bergamo: The Transformation of Value. Ethnos 72(2):149–72.

__. 2019. Labelling Authenticity, or, How I Almost Got Arrested in an Italian Supermarket. Semiotic Review 5. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/47.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R., and Shalini Shankar. 2014. Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value. American Anthropologist 116(1):51–64.

Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013. Introduction: QUALIA. Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):1–11.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005.Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press.

Faudree, Paja. 2015. Tales from the Land of Magic Plants: Textual Ideologies and Fetishes of Indigeneity in Mexico’s Sierra Mazateca. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(3):838–69.

Gal, Susan. 2017. Qualia as Value and Knowledge: Histories of European Porcelain. Signs and Society 5(S1):S128–53.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Springer.

Manning, Paul. 2012. The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London and New York: Continuum.

Munn, Nancy. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (Papua New Guinea). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (2 vols.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism. 2012. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–69.

Silverstein, Michael. 2006. Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:481–96.

Thurlow, Crispin. 2020a. Expanding Our Sociolinguistic Horizons? Geographical Thinking and the Articulatory Potential of Commodity Chain Analysis. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(3):350–68.

__. 2020b. Touching Taste: The Classist Intersections of Materiality, Textuality and Tactility. Multimodal Communication 9(2):1–16.

Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. 2017. The Discursive Production and Maintenance of Class Privilege: Permeable Geographies, Slippery Rhetorics. Discourse & Society 28(5):535–58.

***
If you’re working on something that might fit, please send a draft abstract of about 250 words to Kate Graber at graberk at indiana.edu by EOD Sunday, March 19. Your abstract can be very drafty at this point; we will reply ASAP about paper selection, with finalized abstracts due a few days later.

Best wishes,
Kate, for Steve & Kate

<https://ssrc.indiana.edu/facilities/quallab/index.html>

Kathryn E. Graber

2022-23: NEH Fellow | on sabbatical | visiting at University of Edinburgh

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology<https://anthropology.indiana.edu/about/faculty/graber-kathryn.html> and Department of Central Eurasian Studies<https://ceus.indiana.edu/people/current-faculty/graber-kathryn.html>

Director, Qualitative Data Analysis Lab<https://ssrc.indiana.edu/facilities/quallab/index.html>

Indiana University

publications: Mixed Messages<https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750519/mixed-messages/> | Storytelling as Narrative Practice<https://brill.com/display/title/38668?language=en> | downloadable things<https://indiana.academia.edu/KathrynGraber>

<https://indiana.academia.edu/KathrynGraber>
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