Approx.394 pages

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.

The acquisition of intersubjectivity, as the result of semiotic mediation and social mediation, is the critical issue in moral education. As Vygotsky lamented, morality is beginning to acquire an increasingly temporal character, therefore, the essence of moral education can not be found in unnecessary debate on moral stages or instruments. Rather, it should be concerned with how individuals improve their ability to think about one moral issue from multiple perspectives, and how young adults can learn to respect the different perspectives, with the assistance of semiotic and social mediation. This project returns to the basics of human development, which are semiotic mediation and social mediation, and uses open text and group activity to facilitate moral semiosis. The results suggest that, if reality is open to multiple perspectives, instructional texts and activities for moral competency should also be open for learners. This study provides alternative perspectives of semiotics and sociocultural development theory applied to moral educators as well as instructional designers and learning scientists.

This volume discusses semiotics in mathematics education as an activity with a formal sign system, in which each sign represents something else. Theories presented by Saussure, Peirce, Vygotsky and other writers on semiotics are summarized in their relevance to the teaching and learning of mathematics. The significance of signs for mathematics education lies in their ubiquitous use in every branch of mathematics. Such use involves seeing the general in the particular, a process that is not always clear to learners. Therefore, in several traditional frameworks, semiotics has the potential to serve as a powerful conceptual lens in investigating diverse topics in mathematics education research. Topics that are implicated include (but are not limited to): the birth of signs; embodiment, gestures and artifacts; segmentation and communicative fields; cultural mediation; social semiotics; linguistic theories; chains of signification; semiotic bundles; relationships among various sign systems; intersubjectivity; diagrammatic and inferential reasoning; and semiotics as the focus of innovative learning and teaching materials.

Building on earlier publications by Harry Daniels, Vygotsky and Sociology provides readers with an overview of the implications for research of the theoretical work which acknowledges a debt to the writings of L.S. Vygotsky and sociologists whose work echoes his sociogenetic commitments, particularly Basil Bernstein. It provides a variety of views on the ways in which these two, conceptually linked, bodies of work can be brought together in theoretical frameworks which give new possibilities for empirical work. This book has two aims. First, to expand and enrich the Vygotskian theoretical framework; second, to illustrate the utility of such enhanced sociological imaginations and how they may be of value in researching learning in institutions and classrooms. It includes contributions from long-established writers in education, psychology and sociology, as well as relatively recent contributors to the theoretical debates and the body of research to which it has given rise, presenting their own arguments and justifications for forging links between particular theoretical traditions and, in some cases, applying new insights to obdurate empirical questions. Chapters include: Curriculum and pedagogy in the sociology of education; some lessons from comparing Durkheim and Vygotsky Dialectics, politics and contemporary cultural-historical research, exemplified through Marx and Vygotsky Sixth sense, second nature and other cultural ways of making sense of our surroundings: Vygotsky, Bernstein, and the languaged body Negotiating pedagogic dilemmas in non-traditional educational contexts Boys, skills and class: educational failure or community survival? Insights from Vygotsky and Bernstein. Vygotsky and Sociology is an essential text for students and academics in the social sciences (particularly sociology and psychology), student teachers, teacher educators and researchers as well as educational professionals.

Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation, which is necessarily conducted through channels of communication and exchange, such as prayers or sacrifices. An understanding of such modes of semiosis is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the 'ineffability" of the deity or of mystical experience. This volume models and promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent semioticians, historians of religion and of art, linguists, sociologists of religion, and philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and immediacy in religious traditions.

Drawing on philosophical, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives, Bogdan analyzes how primates create the resources for "metamentation"—the ability of the mind to think about its own thoughts. Mental reflexivity, or metamentation—a mind thinking about its own thoughts—underpins reflexive consciousness, deliberation, self-evaluation, moral judgment, the ability to think ahead, and much more. Yet relatively little in philosophy or psychology has been written about what metamentation actually is, or about why and how it came about. In this book, Radu Bogdan proposes that humans think reflexively because they interpret each other's minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so forth. As naive psychology, interpretation was naturally selected among primates as a battery of practical skills that preceded language and advanced thinking. Metamentation began as interpretation mentally rehearsed: through mental sharing of attitudes and information about items of common interest, interpretation conspired with mental rehearsal to develop metamentation. Drawing on philosophical, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives, Bogdan analyzes the main phylogenetic and ontogenetic stages through which primates' abilities to interpret other minds evolve and gradually create the opportunities and resources for metamentation. Contrary to prevailing views, he concludes that metamentation benefits from, but is not a predetermined outcome of, logical abilities, language, and consciousness.