About

Myrdene Anderson is a professor at Purdue University in the College of Liberal Arts, with a background in anthropology, linguistics, and semiotics. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has been a faculty member at Purdue since 1977. Her specialization includes ethnological theory, linguistics, semiotics, cognitive science, ecology, systems theory, nonequilibrium dynamics, and the philosophy of science. Anderson has conducted ethnographic research in diverse settings, notably among Saami reindeer-breeders in Norwegian Lapland, a fieldwork that began in 1971 and continues to this day. Her research interests extend to Fennoscandia, circumpolar cultures, regions of pastoralism and nomadism, and areas of high latitudes and altitudes. She has published extensively, with over 200 articles and chapters, and has edited numerous volumes on topics such as human-alloanimal ethology, ethnicity and identity, semiotic modeling, and the cultural construction of trash. Anderson has organized more than 100 international and transdisciplinary symposia since 1983 and has served on editorial boards and professional society leadership, including presidencies of the Semiotic Society of America and the Central States Anthropological Society. Her work also includes engagement in ethnographic research related to artificial life, violence, and Peircean notions of habit, and she has been active in teaching courses in anthropology, linguistics, and semiotics at Purdue.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Economic geography
• Epistemology
• Communication
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Nonverbal Communication

  Elsevier eBooks · 2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Storying Humans Brimming Over: To Emote, to Show, to Tell, to Write, or ChatGPT

  Numanities - arts and humanities in progress · 2025-01-01

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• Metalogue Meets Interview: It Takes Three to Tango

  Proceedings of the 14th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS) · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  le nebbie dei fenomeni sociali, prodigo di riflessioni lucide e calzanti.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The end of Sebeok’s century meets twenty-first century pandemic: modeling through and beyond Sebeok’s systems, semiotics, science

  Chinese Semiotic Studies · 2021-11-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in which language would constitute a primary modeling system, and cultural phenomena a secondary modeling system. We inspect how Sebeok amended Lotman’s system, inserting another primary modeling system before language. This brings biological precursors to human language as a syntactic and learned faculty that builds on many nonsyntactic and sometimes nonconscious senses, including emotion, affect, and memory. We note how, in Sebeok’s final book in 2000 on modeling systems theory, co-authored with Marcel Danesi, there is a suggestion that the three layers of modeling systems may be colored by Peircean notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; we clarify how these layers are analogue. Finally, the fundamentals of the primary modeling system leak into languaging, as better understood through post-Sebeok cognitive and neurological sciences, and rendering less mysterious some of the strange effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s proxemics crisis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Meaning of Play as a Human Experience

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Psychology
  • Epistemology

  Culture, society, language, and biology conspire to render play significant in human experience. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” sums up adults’ idealistic image of childhood play. Adults consider play, even that silent and solitary musing at any age, to be open-ended and dynamic. The most clearly innovative play is evolutionary in that it is open-ended, exploratory, unpredictable, unique, and “comedic” or imbued with “surprise”. The English-language notion of play conventionally spars with work. Culture and society shape children’s play enactment as much as language shapes its conceptualization. In contemporary US society, scholars have described children as being as adultlike as adults are childlike. In Western culture, there have been several watersheds for children’s play. Insofar as children may initiate play while alone, a sense of autonomy accompanies the evolutionary, exploratory grammar of free-form or imitative activities. In Western culture, there have been several watersheds for children’s play.

  PublisherDOI

• Discriminations Concerning the Article, “The”, and Capitalization: A Further Comment

  Culture · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy
  • Linguistics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biopower, Biopolitics, Biosemiotics: Entangling Mortalities and Moralities

  Recherches sémiotiques · 2021-04-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While biosemiotics moves in the direction of liberating both biology and semiotics from strict observance of the paradigms of the 19th and 20th centuries – via evo-devo-eco models and the ontological turn – we propose a glance backwards as well as a sharper focus on the social and sexual conditions of the present and foreseeable future. We bring together contemporary discourses on feminism, biophilia, biophobia, essentialisms, and denial, with the prescient ideas of biopower developed by Michel Foucault with respect to the nation-state. He addressed a bevy of pathologies endemic in the societies he witnessed at that time; these conditions persist and indeed have flourished, ranging from sexism, to racism, to classism, to technologism, to the outsourcing of work and the exporting of refuse, to the addictive mantra of “sustainability”, all culminating in society’s exercising of power over both life and death, both living and dying, both near and far. We also find biopower a suitable critical lens for pursuing the pathologies surrounding population – population as generated, as regulated, as ignored, as denied, whether or not acknowledged as being the work of wombs.

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamics of Saami Territoriality within the Nation-States of Norway, Sweden and Finland

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 9 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economic geography

  The Saami are the only indigenous ethnic minority of arctic and sub-arctic Fennoscandia and the Kola peninsula of the Soviet Union, where they have been living as hunters and fishers, then also as reindeer herders and farmers, for several millennia. Saami territorial habits have been interpreted by and their identities negotiated with the dominant societies organised in nation states for the past several hundred years, even though some trade, taxation and colonisation pre-dates the Viking era. The Saami are a single fourth-world people in four lands, with Saami dialects following traditional transhumance routes rather than national boundaries. Subsistence and territorial patterns characterising Saamiland today are rooted in a wide variety of traditional economic and ecological settings impacted by an equally wide variety of colonisation and resource extraction. In the mid-eighteenth century, a precocious ethnohistorical work was commissioned by and delivered to the Danish-Norwegian Crown by a Major Peter Schnitler.

  PublisherDOI

• Transcending Interview in the Curious Professions: Expert-Client Relationship in Means-oriented Dialogue

  Semiotics · 2020-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Moonwalk Memories

  Anthropology News · 2019-07-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Dínda L. Gorlée

  4 shared

• Paul Cobley

  4 shared

• Kalevi Kull

  University of Tartu

  4 shared

• Devika Chawla

  Myriad Genetics

  4 shared

• Floyd Μerrell

  Purdue University System

  3 shared

• Sara Cannizzaro

  IULM University

  3 shared

• Priscila Borges

  Universidade de Brasília

  3 shared

• Marcel Danesi

  Canada Research Chairs

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow, American Anthropological Association (1991)
• Fellow, The Center for Philosophy of Science, University of…
• Fellow, The American Scandinavian Foundation (1979)
• Fulbright Visiting Professor, Semiotics, University of Tartu…