and the visual arts, see Hirsch (1995: 1–30) and Dorrian and Rose (2003: 13–19).
8. The writings of Peirce will be cited in this volume using abbreviations standard in Peirce scholarship. EP1 and EP2 refer to The Essential Peirce, Volume 1 (1867–1893) and The Essential Peirce, Volume 2 (1893–1913) (Peirce Edition Project 1992 and 1998 respectively). CP refers to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1–8 (1931–1958). CN refers to Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, Part Three: 1901–1908. The term “pragmaticist” refers specifically to the philosophical approach Peirce developed and which he contrasted with other philosophical work, particularly that of William James, that has also been identified under the more well-known rubric of “Pragmatism.” “Semeiotic” is used to refer specifically to Peirce’s sign theory, as he did himself (CP 8.343; cited in Colapietro 2007: 18), and to distinguish it from other sign theories that go by the more well-known labels “semiotic” or “semiological.” See James Hoopes (1991), James Liszka (1996), and Cornelis de Waal (2001) for summary overviews of Peirce’s semeiotic that are beyond the scope of this introduction. Daniel (1987) also provides an excellent introductory overview adopting a cultural anthropological perspective.
9. The concept of articulation as it is here employed is drawn from Mark Franko’s use of the term in an address given at the conference Weaving Politics, in Stockholm, Sweden, 2012.
10. “Semiosis,” it should be noted, is typically defined in Peirce scholarship in terms that do not explicitly employ the concept of performance. Definitions approaching the concept from logical and grammatical perspectives more often characterize semiosis as the “action,” “activity,” and/or “information processing” of signs (Colapietro 1989: 19; De Tienne 2006; Fuhrman 2010; Stjernfelt 2014: 40, 118). While Colapietro does not include the term “performance” in his etymologically focused definition, I employ it here as the concept that most accurately characterizes the way in which the transformative movements of semiosis are foregrounded in Peirce’s rhetorically oriented arguments. The concept of performance is here posited as the conceptual parallel, from a rhetorical approach, to those of “exformation,” “transformation,” and “metaformation” that André De Tienne has identified in relation to the logic of “information” explicated in Peirce’s writings, both early and late (De Tienne 2006: 3). “Performance,” in sum, is the concept that best characterizes the most basic and general identity of semiosis as it appears from the rhetorical standpoint here adopted.
11. All technical terms taken from Peirce will be capitalized initially to indicate their belonging to Peirce’s semeiotic. After their introduction, the terms will no longer be capitalized unless it would create confusion not to capitalize them, but they will be employed as technically defined unless otherwise noted.
12. Despite the similarity in terms, Colapietro makes no reference here to Geertz’s renowned conceptualization of “thick description” (1973). The phrase is used simply to refer to the kind of observational analysis that is typical of semeiotic inquiry.
13. “Actant” is a term used by Bruno Latour (2005) to identify agentive participants in an assembled network that may or may not be human subjects.
14. “Semio-genesis” is defined by Jerry Chandler as simply “the process of creating signs” (2012). Chandler distinguishes between “intentional” and “natural” forms of semio-genesis, which are seen to produce “cultural” (or “human”) and “natural” forms of semiosis, respectively. It is one main contention of this study that landscape performances may constitute hybrid processes of intentional-natural semio-genesis as well. In focusing on such creative processes of sign initiation, it should be emphasized that the signs “born” are not absolutely or entirely new in every conceivable respect, as no sign, semeiotically conceptualized, could be (EP2: 328). Nonetheless, it is in the respects in which they are creative and in which they manifest the performance of initiative that they are considered semio-genetic. On the political significance inherent in this capacity to initiate significant movement, see Lepecki (2012c: 34).
15. See, for example, Stanley J. Tambiah (1979); Roy A. Rappaport (1979); E.V. Daniel (1987, 1996), Webb Keane (1997, 2007), Richard Parmentier (1987); Sally Ann Ness (1992), J. Lowell Lewis (1992), Diane Mines (2005), Carol Hendrickson (2008), and Eduardo Kohn (2013). All focus on thick descriptions of actual practices, looking at processes of sign transformation as they provide insight into actual cultural and historical contexts. None self-identify as specifically “rhetorical” (or logical or grammatical), but rather claim simply to employ Peirce’s theory of signs without indicating any specific branch of it. This claim is discussed in more breadth in Ness (2012).
16. The entire area of Yosemite National Park is much larger than Yosemite Valley. In its entirety the park is 1,169 square miles, or roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. However, 94 percent of the park’s land is designated wilderness area that can only be reached on foot along some 800 miles of trails (Swedo 2011: 1; Medley 2002: 8). It is estimated that 95 percent of Yosemite’s visitors go only to Yosemite Valley (Wells 1998: 1).
17. The oral historical dimension of this research, the Yosemite Visitors Project, took place between 2005 and 2012. More than sixty interviewees have participated in the project, which seeks to document the diversity of visitor experience among individuals who have family histories of visiting the park for three generations or more.
18. In stressing the “non-metaphorical” character of this choreographic identification, I adopt the general perspective of Lepecki and the cultural theorist Andrew Hewitt, who have recognized that such a non-metaphorical identification has substantial political consequences for the study of performance. The perspective leads to the recognition that, in Lepecki’s words, “choreography is, in itself, the very matter, indeed, the very matrix, of politics’ ‘function’” (Lepecki 2013: 155). This function, as Hewitt has phrased it, is politics’ “disposition and manipulation of bodies in relation to each other” (Hewitt 2005: 11). See Lepecki (2012a, 2012b, and 2012c) for further discussion of this perspective.
19. The most obvious and critical “other” in this regard would be the semiotic sign theory of Ferdinand de Saussure as it can be seen to undergird (post-)structuralist and critical theories of sign production. The second most critical comparison would be to the theory of Ernst Cassirer, whose work was of fundamental importance to the interpretive ethnography of cultural performance as developed by Clifford Geertz. The discussion in this section orients itself primarily in relation to Saussurian semiotic theory, although the positions taken could be opposed to Cassirerian theory as well. A full explication of these contrasts must await future publication.
20. Peirce’s view here on the development of signs is particularly closely aligned with Henri Bergson’s view on the location of images as they relate to human consciousness (2007).
21. Eduardo Kohn has advanced a somewhat similar pragmaticist definition of form that also identifies it as fundamentally processual. Kohn asserts, “By ‘form’
