Constantine V Nakassis
Biographic Data
| ID | 149773 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Constantine V Nakassis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Constantine V |
| FAMILY NAME | Nakassis |
| SIGNATURE | NAKASSIS C V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6672-3792 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 360 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Introduction: Indexing Persons
This article introduces the special issue, “Indexing Persons.” In this introduction, we distinguish persona- and person-indexing registers . While the former refers to speech registers that enact social types of personhood, the latter denotes registers whose indexical value enacts and points to individuated entities (social “tokens”), such as biographical persons. In so doing, we engage with the anthropological literature on the person as a cultu…
Person-Indexing Registers, Idiolect, Subjectivity
This article explores person-indexing registers : registers where the non-referential indexical value of the register’s metasemiotic model of semiosis is an individuated entity, prototypically a person. Differentiating such cases from persona-indexing registers (e.g., speech registers like legalese, dialects, slangs, etc.)—which invoke metapragmatic stereotypes of various sorts, prototypically figures of personhood—and so-called idiolects, I turn…
Introduction: Towards a linguistic anthropology of AI
This essay introduces the themed cluster of articles, ‘Towards a linguistic anthropology of AI’. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in large language models capable of producing coherent discourse mimicking conversational interaction, is exerting unprecedented pressure on prevailing concepts of language, personhood, and the human. This provides a challenge and opportunity for reflection, particularly for linguistic anthropolog…
Person-Indexing Registers, Stardom, Auteurism
This article explores the semiotics of person-indexing registers—registers where one of the indexical targets of the register’s metasemiotic model of semiosis is an individuated, singular entity (vs. a social type). Differentiating such cases from persona-indexing registers (e.g., speech registers like legalese, regional dialects, etc.) and so-called idiolects, the article then turns to cases of person-indexing enregisterment in the cinema, where…
Voicing, Looking, Perspective
What, semiotically speaking, is a perspective? Synthesizing the notions of voicing in linguistic anthropology and looking in film and visual studies with Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized perception, this article situates perspective as a constitutive feature of semiosis and, vice versa, sign activity as constitutive of how perspectives evenementially and historically emerge in and circulate across events. To exemplify this process, I analyze s…
Seeing, being seen, and the semiotics of perspective
Building upon work in visual studies and art history on symbolic perspective, film studies on structures of looking, and linguistic anthropology on entextualization and ideology, this article explores the semiotics of vision/visibility and perspective. In particular, I focus on ethnographic data from the cinema of Tamil Nadu, India, wherein (being seen) seeing a film image and being seen in a film image emerge as pragmatically problematic for tho…
Accenting Tamil
A Linguistic Anthropology of Images
This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists’ research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review schola…
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia
Some definitive
Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, Reconsidered
In this entry, we reconsider the topic of Linguistic Diversity in South Asia – the title of the landmark 1960 volume edited by Charles Ferguson and John Gumperz – from the perspective of contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Reviewing a number of case studies, we argue that empirical and theoretical accounts of language, diversity, and South Asia cannot be disassociated from the ideologies and political projects that construe…
Poetics of Praise and Image-Texts of Cinematic Encompassment
Developing the concept ofimage-textout of Roman Jakobson's notion of aesthetic function and linguistic anthropology's discussion of entextualization,this paper shows how the tropology explored by the late Bernard Bate in twentieth-century Dravidianist oratory is taken up and recontextualized in the late twentieth-century Tamil films of the "mass hero" Rajinikanth. I trace a particular image-text across the two major media of modern Tamil politics…
Indexicality’s Ambivalent Ground
Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality’s implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, lang…
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 f…
Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence
This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the “Superstar” Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini’s onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke refl…
Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India
Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language
The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, "language" functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as…
Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India
This paper examines so-called fictive, or tropic, uses of cross-kin terms by college-going youth in Tamil Nadu, India. The paper shows how youth usages of cross-kin terms are motivated out of normative kinship practices, even as they decenter and suspend the semantic and pragmatic norms of such terms. Through such suspensions, forms of youth sociality and identity are performed. Such sociality and identity turn on the ability of tropes on cross-k…
Citation and Citationality
This essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, significat…
Youth masculinity, 'style' and the peer group in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines young men's concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of 'style'. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability,…
Introduction: Social value projects in post-liberalisation India
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Brands and Their Surfeits: Brands and Their Surfeits
This article approaches the brand from its surfeits, those material forms and immaterial social meanings that exceed its authority and intelligibility. By thinking through "counterfeits" and other unauthorized brand forms, on the one hand, and the novel and often unpredictable social meanings that emerge through moments of brand consumption, on the other hand, I argue that at the heart of the brand is an instability, a tendency toward an excess o…
Materiality, materialization
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Social Dimensions of Modern Tamil by E.Annamalai. Chennai, India: Cre‐A:, 2011. 196 pp
Counterfeiting What: Aesthetics of Brandedness and BRAND in Tamil Nadu, India
This article investigates the circulation and production of branded apparel consumed by lower and lower-middle class young men in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on garments which exceed the authorized brand: export surplus, duplicates, hybridized branded forms, and fictive branded forms. I argue that the circulation and production of such brand surfeits is governed by the (dis)articulation of global brand logics and local aesthetics of branded…
Brand, Citationality, Performativity
This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand …
Brand, Citationality, Performativity
This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand …
Brands and Their Surfeits: Brands and Their Surfeits
This article approaches the brand from its surfeits, those material forms and immaterial social meanings that exceed its authority and intelligibility. By thinking through "counterfeits" and other unauthorized brand forms, on the one hand, and the novel and often unpredictable social meanings that emerge through moments of brand consumption, on the other hand, I argue that at the heart of the brand is an instability, a tendency toward an excess o…
Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language
The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, "language" functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as…
Citation and Citationality
This essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, significat…
Poetics of Praise and Image-Texts of Cinematic Encompassment
Developing the concept ofimage-textout of Roman Jakobson's notion of aesthetic function and linguistic anthropology's discussion of entextualization,this paper shows how the tropology explored by the late Bernard Bate in twentieth-century Dravidianist oratory is taken up and recontextualized in the late twentieth-century Tamil films of the "mass hero" Rajinikanth. I trace a particular image-text across the two major media of modern Tamil politics…
Materiality, materialization
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Counterfeiting What: Aesthetics of Brandedness and BRAND in Tamil Nadu, India
This article investigates the circulation and production of branded apparel consumed by lower and lower-middle class young men in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on garments which exceed the authorized brand: export surplus, duplicates, hybridized branded forms, and fictive branded forms. I argue that the circulation and production of such brand surfeits is governed by the (dis)articulation of global brand logics and local aesthetics of branded…
Youth masculinity, 'style' and the peer group in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines young men's concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of 'style'. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability,…
Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India
This paper examines so-called fictive, or tropic, uses of cross-kin terms by college-going youth in Tamil Nadu, India. The paper shows how youth usages of cross-kin terms are motivated out of normative kinship practices, even as they decenter and suspend the semantic and pragmatic norms of such terms. Through such suspensions, forms of youth sociality and identity are performed. Such sociality and identity turn on the ability of tropes on cross-k…
Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema
This article first examines representations of women's desire in Tamil cinema, from highly implicit and non-transgressive representations of desire in an older movie to linguistically explicit and transgressive representations of desire in a recent hit movie. We then examine how such contemporary filmic representations are related to what we call a mode of realist spectatorship, and how this mode of spectatorship is linked to a particular social …
Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence
This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the “Superstar” Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini’s onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke refl…
Seeing, being seen, and the semiotics of perspective
Building upon work in visual studies and art history on symbolic perspective, film studies on structures of looking, and linguistic anthropology on entextualization and ideology, this article explores the semiotics of vision/visibility and perspective. In particular, I focus on ethnographic data from the cinema of Tamil Nadu, India, wherein (being seen) seeing a film image and being seen in a film image emerge as pragmatically problematic for tho…
Introduction: Social value projects in post-liberalisation India
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia
Some definitive
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 f…
Formalizing Context
Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema
This article first examines representations of women's desire in Tamil cinema, from highly implicit and non-transgressive representations of desire in an older movie to linguistically explicit and transgressive representations of desire in a recent hit movie. We then examine how such contemporary filmic representations are related to what we call a mode of realist spectatorship, and how this mode of spectatorship is linked to a particular social …
Social Dimensions of Modern Tamil by E.Annamalai. Chennai, India: Cre‐A:, 2011. 196 pp
Counterfeiting What: Aesthetics of Brandedness and BRAND in Tamil Nadu, India
This article investigates the circulation and production of branded apparel consumed by lower and lower-middle class young men in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on garments which exceed the authorized brand: export surplus, duplicates, hybridized branded forms, and fictive branded forms. I argue that the circulation and production of such brand surfeits is governed by the (dis)articulation of global brand logics and local aesthetics of branded…
Brand, Citationality, Performativity
This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand …
Citation and Citationality
This essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, significat…
Youth masculinity, 'style' and the peer group in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines young men's concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of 'style'. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability,…
Introduction: Social value projects in post-liberalisation India
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Brands and Their Surfeits: Brands and Their Surfeits
This article approaches the brand from its surfeits, those material forms and immaterial social meanings that exceed its authority and intelligibility. By thinking through "counterfeits" and other unauthorized brand forms, on the one hand, and the novel and often unpredictable social meanings that emerge through moments of brand consumption, on the other hand, I argue that at the heart of the brand is an instability, a tendency toward an excess o…
Materiality, materialization
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India
This paper examines so-called fictive, or tropic, uses of cross-kin terms by college-going youth in Tamil Nadu, India. The paper shows how youth usages of cross-kin terms are motivated out of normative kinship practices, even as they decenter and suspend the semantic and pragmatic norms of such terms. Through such suspensions, forms of youth sociality and identity are performed. Such sociality and identity turn on the ability of tropes on cross-k…
Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India
Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language
The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, "language" functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as…
Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence
This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the “Superstar” Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception, and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini’s onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke refl…
Indexicality’s Ambivalent Ground
Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality’s implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, lang…
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 f…
Poetics of Praise and Image-Texts of Cinematic Encompassment
Developing the concept ofimage-textout of Roman Jakobson's notion of aesthetic function and linguistic anthropology's discussion of entextualization,this paper shows how the tropology explored by the late Bernard Bate in twentieth-century Dravidianist oratory is taken up and recontextualized in the late twentieth-century Tamil films of the "mass hero" Rajinikanth. I trace a particular image-text across the two major media of modern Tamil politics…
Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, Reconsidered
In this entry, we reconsider the topic of Linguistic Diversity in South Asia – the title of the landmark 1960 volume edited by Charles Ferguson and John Gumperz – from the perspective of contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Reviewing a number of case studies, we argue that empirical and theoretical accounts of language, diversity, and South Asia cannot be disassociated from the ideologies and political projects that construe…
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia
Some definitive
A Linguistic Anthropology of Images
This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists’ research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review schola…
Accenting Tamil
Person-Indexing Registers, Stardom, Auteurism
This article explores the semiotics of person-indexing registers—registers where one of the indexical targets of the register’s metasemiotic model of semiosis is an individuated, singular entity (vs. a social type). Differentiating such cases from persona-indexing registers (e.g., speech registers like legalese, regional dialects, etc.) and so-called idiolects, the article then turns to cases of person-indexing enregisterment in the cinema, where…
Voicing, Looking, Perspective
What, semiotically speaking, is a perspective? Synthesizing the notions of voicing in linguistic anthropology and looking in film and visual studies with Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized perception, this article situates perspective as a constitutive feature of semiosis and, vice versa, sign activity as constitutive of how perspectives evenementially and historically emerge in and circulate across events. To exemplify this process, I analyze s…
Seeing, being seen, and the semiotics of perspective
Building upon work in visual studies and art history on symbolic perspective, film studies on structures of looking, and linguistic anthropology on entextualization and ideology, this article explores the semiotics of vision/visibility and perspective. In particular, I focus on ethnographic data from the cinema of Tamil Nadu, India, wherein (being seen) seeing a film image and being seen in a film image emerge as pragmatically problematic for tho…
Introduction: Indexing Persons
This article introduces the special issue, “Indexing Persons.” In this introduction, we distinguish persona- and person-indexing registers . While the former refers to speech registers that enact social types of personhood, the latter denotes registers whose indexical value enacts and points to individuated entities (social “tokens”), such as biographical persons. In so doing, we engage with the anthropological literature on the person as a cultu…
Sociology (17 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Semiotics (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Tamil (8 works) · Art (7 works)