Semiosis, interaction and ethnicity in urban Java

Abstract

This paper teases out the interdiscursive relations between local and perduring signs of personhood and their recontextualization in situated talk. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence of the utility of incorporating ethnography, linguistic anthropological work on semiotics and work on face-to-face interaction. My empirical focus is on two consecutive men's meetings that occurred in an urban Indonesian milieu. In particular, I draw upon work on semiotic register formation and processes of social identification to flesh out how signs from different temporal-spatial scales figure in the social identification of a non-present neighbor as deviant and Chinese. By taking an interactional view I also attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship on such inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto primarily been historical in nature.