Language socialization across borders

Recent scholarship on language use has developed a resurgent interest in the complex interrelationship of language and materiality; given its longstanding investigation of both non-verbal communication and political economy, language socialization research is well-positioned to make important contributions to this investigation of language materiality. This paper advances such a project by demonstrating how the discursive processes of language socialization make the material affectively meaningful. Through an exploration of prompting interactions in cross-border conversations within transnational Salvadoran families, the paper elucidates how processes of material-affective semiosis produce subject positions that are made normative for some individuals, in this case, differentiating between migrant and non-migrant kin. Drawing out the role of materiality in such processes thus reveals how language socialization functions as a scale-making resource that turns the inequalities of transnational migration into constitutive features of family life.

The cultures of grief: The practice of post-mortem photography and iconic internalized voices

I develop an exploratory analysis of “post-mortem photography”, a social practice existing in different cultures. The study, part of a larger project in Denmark, “The culture of grief”, combines Dialogical Self Theory, mainly concerning verbal and textual objects, with the iconic framework of affective semiosis to discuss the function of taking and keeping pictures of dead persons as if they were still alive or just sleeping. How can this practice and artifact culturally mediate the experience of death and the elaboration of grief? What kind of inner dialogue is developed through the internalization of this specific kind of presence/absence? These are some of the preliminary questions I will try to answer by discussing some examples of post-mortem photography from the 19th and 20th centuries in different countries.

Imagination in Vico and Hobbes: From affective sensemaking to culture

Giambattista Vico and Thomas Hobbes both are known for the particular emphasis they put on the workings of imagination in human understanding. Their respective concepts of imagination are compared in this article, with attention to the sensory basis and cultural products related to this capability. The connections and contrasts established in the analysis are contextualized by the notion of affective semiosis. An affective component can be traced at the basis of the process of image creation in both authors. The primary level of human semiotic activity where the most basic differentiation and identification processes take place must describe not only in terms of sensation but also affect, imagination, and memory. The expression of these processes on the level of culture is however understood and valued differently by Vico and Hobbes. Vico sees in myth and metaphor the necessary elements of imaginative sensemaking, for Hobbes they take the role of by-products in mind’s struggle toward rationality.