Complementing recent archaeological work on identities, in this article I describe
the semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce - his general ‘theory of
signs’ - and discuss its uses for interpreting human identity through
material culture and the artefactual record. Often classified as ‘symbolic
anthropology/archaeology’, previous researches have presented a more
restricted sense of semeiotic, while fewer scholars have been working through
Peirce’s theories directly. Here, I articulate some aspects of
Peirce’s semeiotic realism and his pragmatism with his theories regarding
semeiosic matter and semeiosic identity. Specifically, Peirce regarded matter as
‘mind hidebound with habits’, and his semeiotic is particularly
well-suited for analyzing the obdurate or habitual character of material culture.
Based primarily on my ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in an Irish-speaking
region in western Ireland, I explore and apply some of Peirce’s theories
to an interpretation of human social identities manifest through such things as
prayer beads and field-walls.
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