Transacting the border: communicative frictions and semiotic struggles in a multicultural marketplace

This article explores how everyday communicative encounters in multicultural marketplaces function as sites of semiotic borders. Drawing on ethnographic research in Persian shops in western Sydney, the study examines how meanings circulate across communicative boundaries shaped by language, cultural norms, material practices, and sensory cues. Borders are conceptualized not as a fixed territorial or digital divides but as a fluid, socially constructed and situated process through which identities, knowledge, and meanings are continuously contested and reconfigured in interaction. While often seen as transactional spaces, marketplaces are also cultural contact zones where heterogenous semiotic repertoires meet, generating friction, misrecognition, and negotiation. The analysis focuses on moments in which culturally significant products, especially food, become entangled in discomfort or misunderstanding, revealing epistemic boundaries and the embodied nature of everyday bordering. It is argued that borders emerge not only through geopolitical or technological infrastructures but also within micro-level interactions, where talk, gesture, spatial arrangements, and material objects operate together as semiotic resources shaping interpretation, circulation, and resistance. These dynamics are further influenced by broader symbolic economies, including diasporic media, and transnational flows that link face-to-face interactions with mediated cultural meanings. By positioning the marketplace as a communicative interface between semiotic systems, this article contributes to debates on how borders are enacted in everyday social life and calls for greater attention to the affective and embodied practices through which knowledge, identity, and belonging are made intelligible.