A remote sociosemiotic ethnographic study of ethnicity in a multi-ethnic region in China

This thesis explores what semiotic resources and signs are available and how they are designed, resemiotized, and assembled to represent the Dai culture by people at a Dai culture themed restaurant in Yunnan, China. It also traces the impact of sociopolitical agendas and ideologies on social actors’ multi-semiotic practices and perceptions. It aims to examine two themes attached to ethnicity, taking the Dai as an example, in the Chinese context: the diversity of ethnic cultural representations and the complicated entanglement of social structure and agency in the (re)construction of ethnicity. To these ends, I adopt a sociosemiotic ethnographic approach, which combines social semiotics (e.g. Kress, 2010; van Leeuwen, 2005) with ethnography of multiscale contexts (e.g. Hawkins, 2018; Holstein & Gubrium, 2008a, 2008b; LeCompte & Schensul, 2010), within the social constructionist paradigm. I draw on observations of collected photos and video clips, interviews, a corpus of political and public discourses, and my reflections. The thesis integrates two analytical methods — a critical analysis of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs (CASs) based on Peirce’s theory of signs and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) (e.g. Fairclough, 2001; van Dijk, 1993). CASs is adopted to interpret semiotic resources and signs as ethnic markers and their (re)semiotization and (re)assemblages. Through it, I have unpacked how multi-semiotic practices and semiotic (re)assemblages mobilize accessible cultural and natural resources and signs and involve the interplay between social forces and actors. CDA is used to examine how discourses and ideologies are entangled in (re)constructing ethnic culture and identity and how structure-agency dynamics play out in this entanglement. From this critical lens, I have unveiled how semiotic and developmentalist ideologies have impacted individuals’ perceptions, design, and use of ethnic cultural resources and signs; and how the (re)construction of provincial and individuals’ identities is intertwined and achieved through a structure-agency interplay. The research findings that ethnic culture and identity are socially (re)constructed through multi-semiotic and context-dependent resources and practices shed light on future studies of ethnicity. The sociosemiotic ethnography adopted in this study has wider implications for future context-specific and critical-analytical research, especially to be conducted in a world where multimodal semiosis becomes the norm of social (inter)actions.