Official URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-semiotics...

The story of how semiotics, broadly defined, has emerged and evolved along multiple trajectories within the sub-disciplines of anthropology can be and has been told in many different ways (Mertz 2007; Singer 1984; Sebeok 1969, 1986; Sebeok, Hayes, and Bateson 1964; Sicoli and Wolfgram 2018).1 The present narrative will proceed along a somewhat unusual path in its attempt to tell one portion, the cultural anthropological portion, of this complicated story. It will track the history of what has been explicitly recognized as “semiotic anthropology” (as opposed to “symbolic” or “semiological” or “structural” or “semiotics in” anthropology), and it will do so specifically with regard to research in the sub-discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.2 In so doing, it will briefly take into account the emergence of biosemiotics within anthropology as it has influenced ongoing research in socio-cultural anthropology.