Semiotic anthropology is the process of using the cognitive tools ofsemiotics (theory of signs) to understand social structures from the anthropological perspective.
The phrase was first used by Milton Singer (1978), whose work brought together thesemiotics ofCharles Sanders Peirce andRoman Jakobson with theoretical streams that had long been flowing in and around theUniversity of Chicago, where Singer taught.[further explanation needed] In the late 1970s,Michael Silverstein, a young student of Jakobson's atHarvard University, joined Singer in Chicago's Department of Anthropology. Since that time, anthropological work inspired by Peirce's semiotic have proliferated, in part as students of Singer and Silverstein have spread out across the country, developing semiotic-anthropological agendas of their own.
Semioticanthropology has its precursor inMalinowski'scontextualism (which may be calledanthropological semantics), which was later resumed byJohn Rupert Firth.[1] Anthropological approaches to semantics are alternative to the three major types of semantics approaches:linguistic semantics,logical semantics, andgeneral semantics.[1] Other independent approaches to semantics arephilosophical semantics andpsychological semantics.[1]