Recent studies of socially situated ways of speaking have reflected a growing uneasiness with the tidy dichotomies (for example, formal/informal, polite/casual) that have informed sociolinguistic inquiries in the past. The ritual language of the Kamsa indigenous community of Andean Colombia presents a serious challenge to these familiar conceptual molds. In elaborating a semiotic constitution for this speech variety, I articulate a model founded on three interrelated variables -accessibility, formalization, and efficacy -that may prove relevant to the discussion of ritual and ceremonial languages elsewhere. (Ritual and ceremonial languages, South American Indian speech forms, semiotics.)

In the first years of the new millennium, Mexico experienced a wave of violence associated with the trafficking of illegal substances, and the deep-seated Mexican ballad tradition called the corrido has served as a chronicle of these events, facilitating a popular discourse couched in the sweet sonorities of Mexican song and bespeaking a heroic vision of history as witnessed at the grass-roots level. Here, in what was first delivered as an address to the American Folklore Society, I seek to get beyond the slick veneer of the narcocorridos, ballads that celebrate and glamorize the trade, to sample a zone of commemorative practice where narcocorridos share a space in the national consciousness with two additional manifestations of the contemporary genre: corridos of trafficking, which tell drug-world stories in a level-headed manner, and corridos of remediation, which seek to ameliorate the devastation wrought upon the Mexican people by the drug wars of the early twentyfirst century.

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Wright takes it that Wittgenstein's main contribution to philosophical reflections on self‐knowledge is an explicit refusal to engage in the task that gives the ‘Cartesian’ conception of the mental, its captivating power: the task of explaining the distinctive features of our epistemic relation to our inner lives. Wright claims to find in Wittgenstein a two‐pronged argument to show that a ‘Cartesian’ conception cannot meet the supposed explanatory need. The picture mislocates Wittgenstein's target. As Wright presents it, the ‘Cartesian’ conception with its observational model of self‐knowledge transparently fails to address the supposedly puzzling feature of our self‐knowledge—its being not just non‐inferential but also baseless. So we need a different answer to the question ‘Why is the conception of the mental that Wittgenstein attacks so gripping?’ and ‘How can we dislodge that grip?’ Wright's picture offers no insight here. He has given us no determinate explanatory problem for the ‘Cartesian’ conception to be seen as a response to, and no determinate philosophical activity for Wittgenstein to be understood as refusing to engage in.