Identified: Rigid Signs, Speech Chain Networks, and Indexical Personhood

Abstract Person-specific indexicality is both socially ordering and semiotically ordered. To illustrate the former, I highlight linguistic, gestural, and even epistolary signs that index and symbolically elaborate interpersonal connections, using as a case study rites of phatic recognition in Victorian England that mediated elite social networks by establishing and sanctifying personal ties. To illustrate the latter, I examine person-pointing as a distinct mode of indexing universally anchored to the linguistic category of names, but also found in other “rigid signs” of personhood—signs like the human face and voice that invariantly index particular persons. Drawing on Peter Brosius’s ethnography of Western Penan mourning practices, I show how the invocation or the avoidance of signs-linked-to-persons becomes a privileged site for the figuration of relational personhood. In both kinds of cases, interpersonal networks (rather than speech communities) constitute the basic unit for the sociolinguistic study of indexical personhood.