What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Gainesville, Florida…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

BRIAN KHUMALO

I grew up in South Africa, a multicultural nation, and I suppose somewhere subconsciously I understood that there were different ways of interpreting and living in the world that manifested as ‘cultures’ and ‘cultural patterns’. However, none of that was ever explicitly conscious. I remember always having a fascination with the arts, particularly film which was my first love, and the idea of conveying human stories symbolically to a diverse audience. I enjoyed reading ethnography of the ‘thick description’ variety because it sought to express everyday life in a literary form. I suppose that was what initially drew me to cultural anthropology which remained my home discipline for years before I branched out. I’ve been obsessed with conveying the human story and finding what is common (and resonates with all of us) since I was 21.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

BRIAN KHUMALO

While I was completing my BA in Anthropology I was exposed to structuralism (on which Saussurean semiology was a key influence, though I didn’t realize it at the time) and poststructuralism. I wasn’t interested in semiotics, then, so much as I was disenchanted with poststructuralism — which has become the dominant (though tacit) paradigm in much of the humanities and segments of social science.

Poststructuralism is an anti-realist philosophy; it sees no concordance between the truth value of a statement and that statement’s correspondence with external reality. Practically, this manifests itself as an extreme subjectivism… which erodes what I love most about anthropology: the quest for bridges between different peoples. Finding what it is that we share, what it is that makes us human. And going back to my love of the arts, the poststructuralist worldview undermines our capacity for cross-cultural dialogue, broadly construed.

In reaction to poststructuralism, I started training as a human behavioral ecologist. However, while I still love HBE, I soon discovered issues with some of its assessments as well as a tendency towards extreme reductionism. As [the American neuroanthropologist] Terrence Deacon has pointed out, we are a symbolic species; HBE does not always properly take this into account.

While frustrated and seeking solace, I happened upon a paper by Søren Brier — a Danish biosemiotician — that would serve as my first introduction to Peircean semiotics. The paper argued that we can maintain the generalist aspirations of structuralism and HBE while acknowledging the localism/relativity of specific cultural manifestations of specific human behaviors — therefore skirting extreme subjectivism and extreme reductionism. The rest is history.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

BRIAN KHUMALO

I started off as a social scientist, which is still my area of expertise. I am quite early in my career, and for numerous reasons I have recently started branching outward from academia.

Before this move, however, I was already applying semiotics to my research. For example, my PhD work, which is currently underway, relies partly on the commutation test — a byproduct of Saussurean semiology, one which is used to analyze a signifying system by identifying signifiers as well as their signified value and significance — to explore food perceptions among the peoples of the Western Solomon Islands, in hopes to better understand modern dietary transitions. These transitions are having very noticeable effects, many negative, socio-ecologically and on public health.

In addition, I am now applying semiotic theory within some novel commercial forays in marketing and in science communication. I am quite blessed to have a relatively stable job doing what I love in academia — that is, research. While the commercial work began as a kind of as a hobby, it is starting to pay dividends. Slowly.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

BRIAN KHUMALO

Curiosity and discipline are good attributes for any profession.

The best semioticians I know live and breathe semiotics, it is not a 9 to 5 job for them. They also tend to be good at pattern recognition, often working in very diverse areas that are superficially unconnected — however if your scratch the surface, the connections become clear.

Broadly, semioticians are open people who are willing at least to entertain pretty much any idea, no matter how outlandish.

Given the relative obscurity of semiotics as a profession, it’s helpful for a semiotician to be self-motivated, with a keen sense for opportunities, and no fear of failure.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

BRIAN KHUMALO

• [American neuroanthropologist] Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species. Deacon argues that humans think in terms of symbol conventions, and overlay that schema on the external environment, in a way that no other animal does. He relies on Peircean semiotics to make his argument, eventually arguing that there are aspects of human nature that are neither nature nor nature but rather products of semiotic constraints. Deacon’s book helped dissolve the sciences vs. humanities barrier in my own thinking.
• [French film theorist] Christian Metz’s Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. This book has helped me think more consciously about science communication from a visual and narrative perspective. Also, I mentioned the commutation test earlier — and screen writing and film making are fields where this semiotic methodology is particularly useful.
• [American anthropologist] Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. Kohn’s book is an ethnography that deploys Peircean semiotics to explore how forests communicate. Kohn’s definition of ‘thinking’ has been criticized, but the book serves as an excellent intro to semiotics in cybernetic systems.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

BRIAN KHUMALO

I usually fall back on my academic credentials and years of experience working with different stakeholders — some public, others private — on a range of anthropological projects. Semiotics still isn’t widely known, which makes it hard to present the methodology to the untrained ear. Instead, I use terminology with which they are already familiar, like ‘cultural researcher’.

Ultimately, I think results speak for themselves — and having an approachable but confident demeanor doesn’t hurt. Use your existing dossier to demonstrate your competence. Your work will show that you are a semiotician. That approach has worked out pretty well for me.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

BRIAN KHUMALO

I work primarily in cognitive anthropology and human ecology. The two are interlinked because external conditions and internal representations/understandings inform one another. So I tend to be interested in projects that have to do with perceptions, particularly how perceptions influence behavior. 

In my research life, I have worked on everything from resource management as formally (government policy) and informally (local customs and norms) construed to primate cognition and communication through both gestural and facial modalities (a new area of interest for me). I’ve also started a new project with a team of researchers based in the United States and Europe hoping to help in tracking disease progression among patients with Parkinson’s.

These and other projects are heavily informed by semiotic theory, even though this may not be obvious from first glance. But that’s the beauty of semiotics: It is applicable everywhere.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

BRIAN KHUMALO

Semiotics is too often perceived as an obscure ‘theory’ (this term is used to suggest gobbledygook) from the humanities, one that therefore has no applicability practically, nor rigor scientifically. In fact, the situation is the exact opposite. Semiotics is one of the few methodologies serving as a bridge between the arts and the sciences. Its practical significance is a still mostly untapped resource for those with the vision to put the method to use. For example, some of my colleagues and I are thinking about a relatively novel way to apply it to everything from marketing to gene therapy and animal welfare.

As more semioticians find success, and become more prominent wherever they are situated, perceptions of the discipline will shift. Until then, we get to be explorers seeking to popularize this way of thinking. Very exciting!

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

BRIAN KHUMALO

Peirce’s emphasis on the object brings a coherence to semiotic theory, preventing it from floating too far into the abstract. Reading Peirce himself is quite challenging, though. He himself acknowledged that he was an awkward writer. And the constant introduction of novel jargon and the ever-changing meaning of words like ‘sign’ doesn’t help. However, Peirce’s richness and depth is almost unparalleled. There is a reason he is often called the greatest philosopher the United States ever produced.

I have tremendous admiration for Saussure, and I often prefer Saussurean terminology where it dovetails with Peirce. Reading him in the original French (which I can to a certain degree) is also quite enjoyable as I enjoy his writing style. However, his poststructuralist descendants haven’t done his work any favors.  

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

BRIAN KHUMALO

You have to chart your own path, no matter how scary it may seem. Learn from the greats, whether it be through books and or mentorship — but ultimately you need to find your own ‘spin.’

Connect with as many people as you can, through as many avenues as you can. Where knowledge fails, a solid social network always saves the day.

Everyone practices semiotics differently — from the questions that interest you to the methods you gravitate towards. Semiotics is such a diverse field that there is virtually no risk of you not being able to find a niche within which you fit just right. Or you can create your own niche. But the bottom line is: Get in as much practice as you can.

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