Dialogues between Continental Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology

This thematic issue of Semiotic Review aims to create a space for dialogue across continental semiotics and linguistic anthropology, that is, the semiotic traditions that emerged in post-war Europe in the wake of structuralism and, in North America, the branch of anthropology that emerged from the Boasian tradition of situating language in culture. These distinct approaches to theorizing and analyzing meaning-making share common roots (e.g., in linguistic structuralism, in the work between Jakobson, Benveniste, and Levi-Strauss, and in European engagements with Peirce, among other connections) and yet have largely diverged over the last half century and have been in little to no contact since. Semiotics on both sides of the proverbial pond are themselves internally diverse and heterogeneous, characterized by different schools, internal debates, as well as their own dialogues across adjacent approaches and disciplines, from linguistics and philosophy, to cognitive science and psychology, sociology and anthropology, literary studies and art history, among others. This issue provides a space to further explore the points of contact between these lively networks of semiotic thought and to open a channel of communication between these diverse traditions, a space for conversation and cross-fertilization.