Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Tapir's Heart
• 2. We the Living
• 3. The Hole in the Sky
• 4. A Lock of Hair in a Ball of Wax
• 5. The Jaguar's Spots
• 6. This Is Your Making
• 7. Rocks That Talk
• 8. Between Myth and Dream
• Notes
• References
• Index

Promotional Information

Explores the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena

About the Author

Greg Urban is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals.

Reviews

"This is one of the most sophisticated explanations available on the many and varied links between language and culture... By constantly juxtaposing the sensible and the intelligible, [Urban] shows the adaptive qualities of culture and communication, and casts an old controversy about social organization in a totally new light. As abstract as this may sound, it is concretized with one of the best explications in print about the process of ethnographic fieldwork and how an outsider can go from observations of behavior to analysis and interpretation of historical and sociocultural patterns and processes." Choice "The only ethnographic work on a small scale society by a linguistic anthropologist which is accessible to scholars in other disciplines... A major and distinct voice on how language and culture work together." Benjamin Lee, Director, Center for Transcultural Studies, Chicago