Selected Publications
Books:
[Overview]
This ethnography focuses on the two poetic "texts" in contemporary Fiji: 1) the official colonial-time documents which have stipulated the ownership relationship between land (vanua) and social groups since the colonial period, 2) the chiefly installation ritual which was held in the Dawasamu district of Tailevu province in 2010 for the first time in 30 years, and it reveals the semiotic connection, or meta-pragmatics, of the two texts through analyzing colonial documents, ritual utterances, mythical narratives, and digital archives from a linguistic anthropological perspective.
[Overview]
Is “translation” simply a matter of paraphrasing what is said in one language in another? By rethinking modern concepts and practices of “translation” and identifying ideologies behind them, such as nationalism, linguistic purism, and standard variety-centered understandings of language, On Translation presents a comprehensive, linguistic-anthropological framework for analyzing “translation” (i.e., interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translations, in Roman Jakobson’s terms) as historical, sociocultural processes, crucially involving linguistic varieties (dialects and sociolects), language use, and semiotic interactions.
Examining myriad examples from American Evangelicalism and Dispensationalism, Eugene Nida’s Bible translation and SIL/WBT, Descriptive Translation Studies and the Tel Aviv-Leuven Axis, Goethe’s theory of translation and Benjamin’s concept of pure language, language reforms in the Carolingian Renaissance and King Alfred’s nation-building enterprise, pseudo-translations involving Buddhist texts in Chinese and Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian, to textless-translations as found in documents of the Tohono O’odham nation and the British East India Company, On Translation elucidates the historical, sociocultural emergences and contextualized/contextualizing (presupposing/entailing) semiotic functions of modern concepts and practices of “translation” and Translation Studies, by semiotically grounding them in pragmatic processes, deictically anchored onto communicative events, dynamically generating intra- or inter-(co(n))textual indexical or iconic linkages and thus unfolding in and creating ontico-epistemic spaces, or “worlds,” in which we, humans and non-humans, all live.
Article:
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How Forests of Qualia Emerge. Signs and Society. Vol.11, No. 2. (2023)
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Tracing Ancestral Vestige/Figure: Figure-Ground Reversal, Semiosis, or Realism in the South Pacific. Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 84, No. 4. (2020) (Extended Summary)
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Discourse on the Last Descendant: The Chief as a Constellation of Signs in Contemporary Fiji. People and Culture in Oceania. No 34. (2018)
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Environmentalism and its Ritualized Fakeness: A Semiotic Analysis of Onomatopoeic Discourse on Nature. RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, No. 42 (2015)
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At the Nexus of Environment, Communication, and Socio-culture in Fiji. Intergenerational Learning and Transformative Leadership for Sustainable Futures (2014)
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On Language Ideology: Semiotic Introduction. In On Modern Language Ideology: Geopolitics of Signs and Social History of Metacommunicaiton (2011)
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Intercultural Communication Studies, or the Culture-Nature Poetics: A Critical Commentary on Kigou no Keifu (Genealogy of Signs and Semiotic Anthropology). Intercultural Communication Review, No. 7 (2009)
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Nature Interpretation as Ritual or Interactional Poetry: A Linguistic Anthropological Analysis of Environmental Discourse. The Japanese Journal of Language in Society. Vol. 11 No. 2 (2009)
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“Environmental Communication” as the Culture-Nature Nexus: Chicago’s Socio-Environmental History as the Poetic Structure of “Here and Now” and “There and Then.” Intercultural Communication Review. No. 6 (2008)