Sacred Foe: About the Face of Exemplary Evil.

This essay aims to summarize and explore two issues that, in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text, have triggered a myriad of semiotic intelligences. First, the nature of Cain's face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, a face variously interpreted as angry, sad, dejected, depressed, dark. Second, the nature of the sign imposed by God on Cain following Abel's fratricide. After exploring Jewish and Christian exegesis, ancient and modern, with some reference to contemporary narrative versions (and especially to Saramago's Cain), the reflection will turn to the question of whether this kind of exegetical questioning can be part of the objects of a discipline like semiotics, the modern science of signs.

A oferta do café de rua nas capitais São Paulo e Vitória / The offer of coffee on the streets of the state capitals São Paulo and Vitória / La oferta de café en las calles de las capitales estatales São Paulo y Vitória

A pandemia gerou impactos sociais e econômicos, como o trabalho informal dos que se ocupam do serviço de café de rua, ampliado na retomada pós-isolamento. O artigo analisa as significações construídas pelas instalações do serviço nas ruas de São Paulo (SP) e Vitória (ES), enquanto manifestações do empreendedo-rismo por necessidade. O corpus foi coletado em dias úteis, no início das manhãs, em diversos pontos das capitais. A semiótica discursiva sustentou a análise, e o seu método permitiu traçar isotopias conectoras de figuras e temas. Os resultados apontam para comunicação dos sentidos da informalidade, casualidade e familiaridade, marcados pela presença feminina, pela autonomia imposta aos sujeitos produtor/vendedor e consumidor e pela conexão entre a energia proporcionada pela bebida e o trabalho. Esses significadosvêm embebidos no risco vivido por esses sujeitos, aconchegados entre si e alijados da proteção de políticas públicas de trabalho, condições sanitárias, serviços de transporte e saúde.

The pandemic has generated social and economic impacts, such as the informal work of those who sell coffee on the streets, expanded in the post-isolation resumption. The article analyzes the meanings constructed by the service facilities in São Paulo (SP) and Vitória (ES), as demonstrations of the entrepreneurship by necessity. The corpus was collected on weekdays, in places of the state capitals. Discursive semiotics underpins the analysis, suggesting connective isotopies of figures and themes. The results point to the communication of the senses of informality, casualness and familiarity, marked by the female presence, by the autonomy imposed on the subjects producer/seller and consumer and by the connection between the energy given by the drink and the work. These meanings are embedded in the risk experienced by these subjects, snuggled among themselves and excluded from the protection of public policies of work, sanitary conditions, transportation and health services.

La pandemia generó impactos sociales y económicos, como el trabajo informal de quienes se ocupan del servicio de café en las calles, ampliado en la reanudación post-aislamiento. El artículo analiza los signifi-cados construidos por las instalaciones de servicios en las calles de São Paulo (SP) y Vitória (ES), como manifestaciones de emprendimiento por necesidad. El corpus fue recolectado entresemana, en puntos de las capitales. La semiótica discursiva sustenta el análisis y permitió trazar isotopías conectoras de figuras y temas. Los resultados apuntan para la comunicación de los significados de informalidad, marcados por la presencia femenina, por la autonomía impuesta a los sujetos productor/vendedor y consumidor, y por la conexión entre la energía dada por la bebida y el trabajo. Estos significados están incrustados en el riesgo vivido por estos sujetos, y excluidos de la protección de las políticas públicas laborales, las condiciones sanitarias, los servicios de transporte y salud.

Visualization as irritation: producing knowledge about medieval courts through uncertainty.

Visualizations are ubiquitous in data-driven research, serving as both tools for knowledge production and genuine means of knowledge communication. Despite criticisms targeting the alleged objectivity of visualizations in the digital humanities (DH) and reflections on how they may serve as representations of both scholarly perspective and uncertainty within the data analysis pipeline, there remains a notable scarcity of in-depth theoretical grounding for these assumptions in DH discussions. It is our understanding that only through theoretical foundations such as basic semiotic principles and perspectives on media modality one can fully assess the use and potential of visualizations for innovation in scholarly interpretation. We argue that visualizations have the capacity to "productively irritate" existing scholarly knowledge in a given research field. This does not just mean that visualizations depict patterns in datasets that seem not in line with prior research and thus stimulate deeper examination. Complementarily, "irritation" here consists of visualizations producing uncertainty about their own meaning-yet it is precisely this uncertainty in which the potential for greater insight lies. It stimulates questions about what is depicted and what is not. This turns out to be a valuable resource for scholarly interpretation, and one could argue that visualizing big data is particularly prolific in this sense, because due to their complexity researchers cannot interpret the data without visual representations. However, we argue that "productive irritation" can also happen below the level of big data. We see this potential rooted in the genuinely semiotic and semantic properties of visual media, which studies in multimodality and specifically in the field of Bildlinguistik have carved out: a visualization's holistic overview of data patterns is juxtaposed to its semantic vagueness, which gives way to deep interpretations and multiple perspectives on that data. We elucidate this potential using examples from medieval English legal history. Visualizations of data relating to legal functions and social constellations of various people in court offer surprising insights that can lead to new knowledge through "productive irritation."

The Transition from Alchemical to Modern Chemical Symbolism: from Bergman and Guiton de Morveau to Hassenfratz and Adet, Higgins, Richter, Dalton, and Berzelius.

The alchemical concepts of chemical symbolism, nomenclature, and affinity underwent fundamental changes between the 1770s and the 1820s, roughly simultaneously with the Chemical Revolution (ca. 1772-89), i. e. the replacement of the phlogiston theory with Lavoisier's New Chemistry. Using the old, alchemical symbols, Bergman devised a system of formulas to describe virtually all known inorganic chemistry, and he influenced Guiton de Morveau's Mémoire sur les Dénominations Chimiques, and the subsequent Méthode de nomenclature. Hassenfratz and Adet devised a new artificial sign language which, however, was too complicated and unintuitive to gain widespread acceptance. Bergman refined the concept of affinity, but his belief in phlogiston rapidly made the system obsolete. Wenzel realized that the dissolution of metals in acids is not just a question of affinity but rather of concentration, and he and Berthollet separately formulated early versions of the Law of Mass Action thereby making attempts to quantify affinity redundant. Richter formulated a principle that became known as the Law of Equivalent Proportions, describing acid-base reactions and double decompositions of salts, but continuing to use Bergman-style alchemical formulas. Only John Dalton's atomic theory with little globules denoting atoms and their combination into molecules made a definite break with the alchemical symbols.

Spatializing HIV: Putting Queer (men) in its place via social marketing.

The current study is concerned with how HIV is spatialized, or emplaced in everyday life, and therefore how prevention, Queer identity, and the virus itself are given meaning. Employing a transdisciplinary methodology based in Critical Discourse Studies and critical human geography, this study provides a geosemiotic analysis of an HIV prevention social marketing effort called the Little Prick campaign. Findings showed that space was constructed through multiple competing dynamics across professionals and citizens, as well as amidst contested notions of risk and branding in the epidemic. The analysis illuminates the discursive relationship amongst Queer, HIV, and prevention. Equally, this study counters the biased notion that "prevention fatigue" in high-risk populations hampers professional labor by, instead, exposing a semiotic fatigue in the HIV epidemic and prevention efforts.

Expanding Medical Semiotics.

This special issue explores the evolving landscape of medical semiotics of conventional biomedicine. With expansion we refer to the range of phenomena considered signs or symptoms of underlying disease, but also the growing anthropological attention to the medical sign system in ways which reach beyond classic semiotic analysis. The articles testify to the expansion in terms of empirical foci and theoretical contributions. As part of the introduction, we discuss three modes of reading symptoms within medical anthropology: the hermeneutic, material, and critical readings, all highlighting the crucial role of medical anthropology in understanding the biosocial and cultural dimensions of medical semiotics.

Tackling the Unknown: Medical Semiotics of Inflammation and their Legal-Epistemological Boundaries in Brazil.

Do different medico-scientific understandings of autoimmune inflammation, whose carriers disobediently promote the therapeutic use of immunostimulants, have the potential to destabilize the hegemony of the standard palliative treatment based on immunosuppression? Here I explore whether and how medical paradigms in Brazil develop and expand around immunopathologies through practices of exclusion and inclusion in the context of global circulation of knowledges, therapies, and regulatory frameworks. While focusing on concurrent immunotherapeutic models within biomedicine, I discuss aspects of legal-epistemological frictions that animate controversies in which distinct ways of co-producing medical evidence affect and are affected by the biomedical establishment.

Decoding semiotic minimal genome: a non-genocentric approach.

The search for the minimum information required for an organism to sustain a cellular system network has rendered both the identification of a fixed number of known genes and those genes whose function remains to be identified. The approaches used in such search generally focus their analysis on coding genomic regions, based on the genome to proteic-product perspective. Such approaches leave other fundamental processes aside, mainly those that include higher-level information management. To cope with this limitation, a non-genocentric approach based on genomic sequence analysis using language processing tools and gene ontology may prove an effective strategy for the identification of those fundamental genomic elements for life autonomy. Additionally, this approach will provide us with an integrative analysis of the information value present in all genomic elements, regardless of their coding status.

Towards a forensic semiotics.

For years, forensic science has been criticized for its lack of scientific foundations, explaining its methodological drawbacks. Notwithstanding recommendations to upgrade quality management and counter cognitive biases, the ontology of the trace and the very nature of forensic science amplified by its decision context is rarely invoked as sources of inescapable errors. Understanding what (forensic) science is could even reconcile the prescriptive approach and the descriptive cognitive reality, through an unexplored pathway, Peirce's semiotics. The implementation of a semiotic line of arguments could concur to the transparency of scientific opinions for security and justice purposes, with rich potentialities in sight.

Enacting biosocial complexity: Stress, epigenetic biomarkers and the tools of postgenomics.

This article analyses attempts to enact complexity in postgenomic experimentations using the case of epigenetic research on biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Enacting complexity in this research means dissecting multiple so-called biosocial processes of health differentiation in the face of stressful experiences. To characterize enactments of biosocial complexity, the article develops the concepts of complexity work and complexification. The former emphasizes the social, technical, and material work that goes into the production of mixed biological and social representations of stress in epigenetics. The latter underlines how complexity can be assembled differently across distinct configurations of experimental work. Specifically, complexification can be defined as producing, stabilizing, and normalizing novel experimental systems that are supposed to improve techno-scientific enactments of complexity. In the case of epigenetics, complexification entails a reconfiguration of postgenomic experimental systems in ways that some actors deem 'better' at enacting health as a biosocial process. This study of complexity work and complexification shows that biosocial complexity is hardly a univocal enterprise in epigenetics. Consequently, the article calls for abandoning analysis of these research practices using clear-cut dichotomies of reductionism vs. holism, as well as simplicity vs. complexity. More broadly, the article suggests the relevance of a sociology of complexification for STS approaches to complexity in scientific practices. Complementing the existing focus on complexity as instrumental rhetoric in contemporary sciences, complexification directs analytical attention to the pragmatic opportunities that alternative (biosocial) complexities offer to collective, societal, and political thinking about science in society.

Turning Towards the Affective: Medical Semiotics of Child Maltreatment in Denmark.

Signs of child maltreatment may be physical and detectable by clinical examination but may also arise as a feeling of strangeness that sparks uncertainty. Based on fieldwork in Danish general practice, and thinking along recent discussions around semiotics and affect, the article explores how feelings of "strangeness" arise in child consultations. It focuses on how subjective, embodied, and interpersonal reactions arise, how signs, however tactile and arbitrary, are felt and experienced, and how engaging with affective aspects when doing diagnosis, could expand the medical semiotics of child maltreatment.

Signs of Nothing: Negotiations Over Semiotic Indeterminacy in Danish Lung Cancer Diagnostics.

In Denmark, injunctions of "early" cancer diagnosis increasingly imply surveillance of small tissue changes, which may or may not develop into cancer. Based on fieldwork at diagnostic lung cancer clinics and with people in CT surveillance for tissue changes, I explore how detected tissue changes are ascribed meaning as signs of "nothing" or "something." Inspired by Peircean semiotics, I suggest that the semiotic indeterminacy of tissue changes points to how diagnostic socialities both expand medical semiotics and enable this expansion. The article, thereby, contributes to understandings of signs as diagnostic infrastructures.

Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in joint-attention naming game: experimental semiotics study.

We explore the emergence of symbols during interactions between individuals through an experimental semiotic study. Previous studies have investigated how humans organize symbol systems through communication using artificially designed subjective experiments. In this study, we focused on a joint-attention-naming game (JA-NG) in which participants independently categorized objects and assigned names while assuming their joint attention. In the Metropolis-Hastings naming game (MHNG) theory, listeners accept provided names according to the acceptance probability computed using the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm. The MHNG theory suggests that symbols emerge as an approximate decentralized Bayesian inference of signs, which is represented as a shared prior variable if the conditions of the MHNG are satisfied. This study examines whether human participants exhibit behavior consistent with the MHNG theory when playing the JA-NG. By comparing human acceptance decisions of a partner's naming with acceptance probabilities computed in the MHNG, we tested whether human behavior is consistent with the MHNG theory. The main contributions of this study are twofold. First, we reject the null hypothesis that humans make acceptance judgments with a constant probability, regardless of the acceptance probability calculated by the MH algorithm. The results of this study show that the model with acceptance probability computed by the MH algorithm predicts human behavior significantly better than the model with a constant probability of acceptance. Second, the MH-based model predicted human acceptance/rejection behavior more accurately than four other models (i.e., Constant, Numerator, Subtraction, Binary). Among the models compared, the model using the MH algorithm, which is the only model with the mathematical support of decentralized Bayesian inference, predicted human behavior most accurately, suggesting that symbol emergence in the JA-NG can be explained by the MHNG.

The Musical Semiotics of Voice in Distance: Some Reflections on the Question of Teleanalysis.

Within the context of the debate over teleanalysis, I wish to reintroduce the discussion of voice as the primary link between analyst and patient, a link present in analysis on the phone. Far from questioning the importance of the in-person analysis, I aim to emphasize the voice, the musical semiotics of emotions, as a critical, if not the most vital, aspect of psychoanalysis as a "talking cure" and an art of listening. Insofar as the speaking is instituted in the body, the body is present through voice, even in the virtual analytic room in teleanalysis. I argue that the need for the presence of the material bodies in the session is one aspect of the analytic rituals that, along with the room, the couch, and other power objects, set the stage for the continuous projection of the role identities of the analytic couple. In teleanalysis, the seductive nature of the analytic situation and the status differential are more salient in the analyst's office turf than in the patient's room.

Doing and undoing transgender health care: The ordering of 'gender dysphoria' in clinical practice.

A formal Gender Dysphoria classification- as outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders- is a prerequisite for the reimbursement of both gender-affirming medical care and transgender mental health care in the Netherlands. Gender Dysphoria and its conceptual precursors have always been moving targets: moving due to research, policy, care practices and activism both within and outside of medicine. This raises the question of what Gender Dysphoria is exactly. To elucidate this question, we turn to the people who use the concept in clinical practice to come to a diagnosis and treatment indication: mental health professionals working in gender-affirming medical care and transgender mental health care. Using a material semiotics approach, we reflect upon how Gender Dysphoria is done in clinical practice. Based on an analysis of seventeen practice-based interviews with clinicians as well as an examination of clinical guidelines and texts, we describe four modes in which Gender Dysphoria is ordered. These modes of ordering illustrate that Gender Dysphoria is not one, but multiple. We illustrate how in the mode of isolating, Gender Dysphoria is something which is carefully isolated from mental disorders, while in the modes doing the future and narrating, Gender Dysphoria is done as a continuous and predictable object of care. Such orderings of Gender Dysphoria potentially conflict with a fourth mode of ordering: the doing of diversity in transgender health care. The study's findings provide empirical insights into how transgender health care is currently done in The Netherlands and provide a foundation on which ethical debates on what good transgender health care should entail.

Code biology and aesthetics.

This paper lays the foundations for an investigation of aesthetics in the light of the theories proposed in the field of Code Biology. Starting from the research objectives that aesthetics has set since its origins, a comparison is made with those aesthetic theories that have been most concerned with the sensory approach to the environment, with the attempt to unite human sciences and the main biological discoveries. Thanks to the scientifically grounded insights offered by Code Biology, we will first outline the field of interest of aesthetics and its foundations, and then delineate certain boundaries - such as those between sensations and perceptions, the aesthetic process and the work of art - that characterise such a field of research. Particular attention will be paid to locating the aesthetic process within the more general cognitive processes, i.e. the three cognitive macrosystems that enable the modelling of the world.

Association neurons in the crow telencephalon link visual signs to numerical values.

Many animals can associate signs with numerical values and use these signs in a goal-directed way during task performance. However, the neuronal basis of this semantic association has only rarely been investigated, and so far only in primates. How mechanisms of number associations are implemented in the distinctly evolved brains of other animal taxa such as birds is currently unknown. Here, we explored this semantic number-sign mapping by recording single-neuron activity in the crows' nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), a brain structure critically involved in avian numerical cognition. Crows were trained to associate visual shapes with varying numbers of items in a number production task. The responses of many NCL neurons during stimulus presentation reflected the numerical values associated with visual shapes in a behaviorally relevant way. Consistent with the crow's better behavioral performance with signs, neuronal representations of numerical values extracted from shapes were more selective compared to those from dot arrays. The existence of number association neurons in crows points to a phylogenetic preadaptation of the brains of cognitively advanced vertebrates to link visual shapes with numerical meaning.

Myth of objectivity and the origin of symbols.

An age-old challenge in epistemology and moral philosophy is whether objectivity exists independent of subjective perspective. Alfred North Whitehead labeled it a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness"; after all, knowledge is represented elusively in symbols. I employ the free energy principle (FEP) to argue that the belief in moral objectivity, although perhaps fallacious, amounts to an ancient and universal human myth that is essential for our symbolic capacity. To perceive any object in a world of non-diminishing (perhaps irreducible) uncertainty, according to the FEP, its constituent parts must display common probabilistic tendencies, known as statistical beliefs, prior to its interpretation, or active inference, as a stable entity. Behavioral bias, subjective emotions, and social norms scale the scope of identity by coalescing agents with otherwise disparate goals and aligning their perspectives into a coherent structure. I argue that by declaring belief in norms as objective, e.g., expressing that a particular theft or infidelity was generally wrong, our ancestors psychologically constructed a type of identity bound only by shared faith in a perspective that technically transcended individual subjectivity. Signaling explicit belief in what were previously non-symbolic norms, as seen in many non-human animals, simulates a top-down point of view of our social interactions and thereby constructs our cultural niche and symbolic capacity. I demonstrate that, largely by contrasting with overly reductive analytical models that assume individual rational pursuit of extrinsic rewards, shared belief in moral conceptions, i.e., what amounts to a religious faith, remains a motivational cornerstone of our language, economic and civic institutions, stories, and psychology. Finally, I hypothesize that our bias for familiar accents (shibboleth), plausibly represents the phylogenetic and ontogenetic contextual origins of our impulse to minimize social surprise by declaring belief in the myth of objectivity.

The beautification of men within skincare advertisements: A multimodal critical discourse analysis.

This study draws on the theory of Social Semiotics and the methodology of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to examine the textual and visual design of skincare advertisements targeted towards men. The current proliferation of the market for male-oriented facial products represents an important shift towards the increased attention to the beautification of male bodies in Western societies. Such beautification encourages men to work on and improve the self (and face) through intensifying practices of "aesthetic labour." Aesthetic labour places emphasis on an entrepreneurial self-care and self-control regime that promotes an active late lifestyle fostered through ideas about "successful ageing." As expected, the analysis of the corpus consisting of advertisements from L'Oréal Men, Nivea Men and Clarins Men shows that the male face is generally constructed as a "problem" that can be cured through the consumption of skincare products. The consumption of these products increases men's visual literacies of the face and hence normalises male beauty practices that seemingly encourage men to care for and work on their skin, which can be construed of as a feminising practice. Nonetheless, the advertisements employ masculine traits and strategies that link cosmetic products to traditional values of masculinity. The beautification of the male body, thus, turns the consumption of skincare products into a performance through which men can maintain their already privileged status in society, rearticulating the double standard of ageing (Sontag, 1972).

Relato de la conquista y discurso del descubrimiento. Reflexiones sobre el problema del otro tal como lo plantea T. Todorov / Account of the Conquest and Discourse of Discovery Reflections on the problem of the other as stated by T. Todorov

Este texto pertenece al sociólogo suizo Jean Widmer y fue publicado originalmente en francés en 1992, al cumplirse los 500 años del primer viaje de Cristóbal Colón. Constituye el estudio más importante de la obra de S. Todorov sobre la otredad y fue incluido en una antología junto a otros trabajos de Widmer, en una compilación indispensable para comprender la nueva sociología estructural. Se lo publica ahora por primera vez en español, al cumplirse quince años del fallecimiento de su autor, como homenaje a su labor académica en la Universidad de Fribourg y en la plena vigencia de sus idea

This text belongs to the Swiss sociologist Jean Widmer and was originally published in French in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage. It constitutes the most important study of S. Todorov's work on otherness and was included in an anthology together with other works by Widmer, in an indispensable compilation for understanding the new structural sociology. It is now published for the first time in Spanish, fifteen years after the death of its author, as a tribute to his academic work at the University of Fribourg and in full force of his ideas