Material habits, identity, semeiotic

Abstract

Complementing recent archaeological work on identities, in this article I describe the semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce - his general ‘theory of signs’ - and discuss its uses for interpreting human identity through material culture and the artefactual record. Often classified as ‘symbolic anthropology/archaeology’, previous researches have presented a more restricted sense of semeiotic, while fewer scholars have been working through Peirce’s theories directly. Here, I articulate some aspects of Peirce’s semeiotic realism and his pragmatism with his theories regarding semeiosic matter and semeiosic identity. Specifically, Peirce regarded matter as ‘mind hidebound with habits’, and his semeiotic is particularly well-suited for analyzing the obdurate or habitual character of material culture. Based primarily on my ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in an Irish-speaking region in western Ireland, I explore and apply some of Peirce’s theories to an interpretation of human social identities manifest through such things as prayer beads and field-walls.

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