false 1085138 3 The recent spread of ‘structuralist’ writing has been hailed as the dawn of a new age and condemned as an intellectual disaster but, like all fashionable diseases, it is more talked about than understood. Edmund Leach’s new book is designed for the use if teaching undergraduates in anthropology, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and related disciplines faced for the first time with structuralist argument; it provides the prolegomena necessary to understand the final chapter of Levi-Strauss’s massive four-volume Mythologiques. The objective is complex, the manner simple. Some prior knowledge of anthropological literature is useful but not essential; the principal ethnographic source is the Book of Leviticus; this guide should help anyone who is trying to grasp the essentials of ‘seminology’ - the general theory of how signs and symbols come to convey meaning. Although, in essence, a textbook, substantial portions of the argument are here presented for the first time; thus Section 16 contains an innovating contribution to general incest theory, and the analysis of the logic of animal sacrifice presented in Section 18 is an advance on anything previous published on this theme. The author’s core thesis is that: ‘the indices in non-verbal communication systems, like the sound elements in spoken language, do not have meaning as isolates, but only as members of set’; the book’s special merit is that it makes this kind of jargon comprehensible in terms of our everyday experience. 1071909 26 3 1976 Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected, an Introduction to the Use of Structuralist Analysis in Social Anthropology (Themes in the Social Sciences) total:7|5:3|4:3|3:1| 7 30 9 0 4 0 false false Mon Apr 27 06:08:35 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 27 06:08:39 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Fri Apr 24 21:02:02 -0700 2009 Fri Apr 24 21:02:02 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Sep 11 08:48:16 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 11 08:48:16 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Sun Mar 09 11:40:19 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 09 11:40:19 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Thu Jan 31 12:56:36 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 31 12:56:36 -0800 2008 0 0 false false Sun Nov 25 11:21:19 -0800 2007 Sun Nov 25 11:21:41 -0800 2007 4 0 false false Fri Oct 26 09:31:07 -0700 2007 Fri Oct 26 09:31:07 -0700 2007 5 0 true false Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 1994 Sun Sep 23 06:28:57 -0700 2007 Sun Sep 23 06:29:43 -0700 2007 5 0 false false Mon Jun 04 23:59:19 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 04 23:59:19 -0700 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=1085138