Youth and Status in Tamil Nadu, India

This sociocultural anthropological study looks at youth culture in Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on college-age youth in Madurai and Chennai. The dissertation first shows how youth experience their position in the larger Tamil society as “being outside of.” This exteriority is manifest in youth concepts of status and gender, the signs and activities which express such status and gender, and the social spaces in which such signs and activities are played out. In particular, the dissertation focuses on how the youth peer group is dually shaped as an exterior space of youth status negotiation—as exterior to adult norms of authority (and thus a space of status-raising qua transgression) and as exterior to norms of hierarchical ranking (and thus an egalitarian space of status-leveling, intimacy, and reciprocity). It is this tension between status-raising and -lowering which the dissertation shows to be crucially at play in how youth engage with and deploy various status-ful signs. In particular, the dissertation focuses on youth’s engagement with English and Tamil-English hybridized slang, commercial hero-centered Tamil films and their heroes, and (counterfeit) Western brands and fashion. In addition to focusing on youth engagement with such forms, the dissertation also looks at the production and circulation of youth-oriented Tamil film and (counterfeit) branded garments. The dissertation argues that we can only make sense of such cultural forms and their production and circulation by situating them with respect to youth concepts of status and their negotiation in the peer group. Based on this discussion the dissertation offers critical commentary on academic literatures of globalization, film reception, and the semiotics of the brand

Images: An Introduction

One persistent ideological ambivalence in Western academic thought is the differentiation and slippage between language and image. As historians of philosophy have pointed out, Western philosophy has often construed language as a species of vision and imaging. In this line of thought, the meaning of linguistic discourse is (or is like) an image, imprinted in the mind. Just as frequently, however, it is asserted that there is a radical caesura between language and image (and between representation and our sensory modalities), the latter being a space of non-representability and thus before or beyond the enclosure of language. Here, images exceed language, which is unable to capture their affect, materiality, or sensoriality. This special issue confronts these two persistent problematics by critically asking, how can we productively (re)think the relationship between language and image, text and the sensorial, representation and presence through a holistic semiotic framework? And how can we do so without reducing one side of these seeming antinomies to the other or instating their radical difference? As with all issues of Semiotic Review, “Images” remains open to new submissions (essays, reviews, interviews, etc.)

Vision, Voice, and Cinematic Presence

Anxieties around the appearance and audition of the female body and voice in Tamil cinema reveal a semiotic ideology of the image that does not fit neatly within the idea of cinema as representation. Instead, this ideology takes filmic images to be acts that performatively presence the actresses and singers who animate them, in other words morally charged acts for which such animators are held accountable. Drawing on linguistic anthropology and film theory, this article explores vision-image and sound-image as distinct modes of performative presence, noting the division of semiotic labor between them as well as their interaction and interdependence. The theoretical project, relevant to cinema and related media more generally, argues for the need to attend to those processes and factors that enable the performativity of images to be either elaborated and institutionalized or played down and attacked in any particular historical, cultural, or political context

Opening Up the Indexicality of the Image, Again: A Virtual Roundtable

This virtual roundtable was conducted from May 10 to June 2, 2020 over e-mail, across four rounds of statements and responses. The participants were Christopher Ball, Meghanne Barker, Elizabeth Edwards, Tomáš Kolich, W. J. T. Mitchell, Daniel Morgan, and Constantine V. Nakassis, who also functioned as the moderator of the discussion. Oriented by the question of the indexicality of the image, the roundtable covered a wide range of topics—from COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. protests against racial injustice to indexical desire and anxiety, animation, realism, ideology and ontology, Peircean semiotics versus Saussurean semiology, the concept and use of indexicality in art history, linguistic anthropology, film studies, photography studies, among other topics

Materiality, materialization

Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press

Scaling Red and the Horror of Trademark

No abstrac

Fare stile: Culture giovanili e mass media nell’India del Sud

In Fare stile Constantine V. Nakassis prende in esame il mondo dei giovani e dei mass media nell’India del Sud, dove la vita quotidiana e i mass media trovano ancoraggio in un fenomeno che i giovani Tamil chiamano stile. Penetrando nell’intimità dei soggetti, le descrizioni etnografiche della vita universitaria nel Tamil Nadu consentono a Nakassis di decifrare il funzionamento complesso degli atti e degli oggetti di stile (abiti di marca, slang anglicizzante, rappresentazioni cinematografiche) nei quali trovano espressione le aspirazioni e le inquietudini molteplici di una generazione che vive all’ombra di una promessa di modernità globale. L’autore ne ricava una notevole quanto opportuna ricostruzione del modo in cui forze immense come la cultura dei giovani, la globalizzazione e i mass media interagiscono nel quadro vivace e ricco di energie di un’India in corso di rapida trasformazione. “Fare stile articola in modo estremamente persuasivo una teoria della cultura giovanile ispirata ai concetti di performatività e interdiscorsività. Ricchissimo di acute considerazioni teoriche e argomentazioni creative, è destinato ad affermarsi come un punto di riferimento negli studi sulle culture giovanili, l’India del Sud, il cinema, l’alternanza linguistica e la moda, in uno spettro disciplinare che va dalle scienze sociali agli studi umanistici. Complimenti all’autore.” (Alexander S. Dent, George Washington University) “L’ambizioso volume di Nakassis mostra bene fino a che punto uno studio attento delle socialità quotidiana possa gettare luce sulle realtà politiche ed economiche di un paese. Un tour de force di analisi semiotica accompagnato da una coinvolgente descrizione di vite immerse nel mondo dei mass media e del consumismo.” (Webb Keane, Università del Michigan) “In questo volume, creativo e originale, Nakassis illustra un approccio radicalmente nuovo a temi come il cinema, la mercificazione e lo stile nella cultura dei giovani Tamil, analizzando in forma ravvicinata il lavoro performativo della citazione per mostrare come i giovani Tamil desumano di continuo nuovi spunti da una cultura cinematografica nella quale il film stesso si fa pastiche di altri film o della vita quotidiana. Innovativo sul fronte teorico e ricco di materiale etnografico, il lavoro illustra con ragioni cogenti il carattere cinematografico della vita quotidiana e l’incessante gioco con le identità che la citazione rende possibile.” (Brian Larkin, Columbia University) Constantine V. Nakassis è professore associato di antropologia e direttore del Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) all’Università di Chicag