A major voice in contemporary semiotic theory offers a new perspective on potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology.In Signs and Society, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier demonstrates how an appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational work of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research.Parmentier's concepts of "transactional value," "metapragmatic interpretant," and "circle of semiosis," for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar's Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity.Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology's future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

AcknowledgmentsPart I: Foundations of Peircean Semiotics1. Semiotic Anthropology2. Charles S. Peirce3. Representation, Symbol, and Semiosis: Signs of a Scholarly Collaboration4. Peirce and Saussure on Signs and Ideas in Language5. Troubles with Trichotomies: Reflections on the Utility of Peirce's Sign Trichotomies for Social Analysis6. Semiotic Degeneracy of Social Life: Prolegomenon to a Human Science of SemiosisPart II: Critical Commentaries and Reviews7. Representing Semiotics in the New Millennium8. The World Has Changed Forever: Semiotic Reflections on the Experience of Sudden Change9. Description and Comparison of Religion10. It's About Time: On the Semiotics of Temporality11. Anthropological Encounters of a Semiotic Kind12. Two Marxes: Evolutionary and Critical Dimensions of Marxian Social TheoryPart III: Comparative Perspectives on Semiosis13. Money Walks, People Talk: Systemic and Transactions Dimensions of Palauan Exchange14. Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence / With Massimo Leone15. The 'Savvy Interpreter': Performance and Interpretation in Pindar's Victory Odes / With Nancy FelsonList of ReferencesIndex