Description
Book SynopsisTwo characteristics of human beings as a species are: the elaboration of our thought through language and symbolism, and the pluralistic nature of our systems of social organization. This book shows how these two characteristics are related by determining the conceptual structures that are fundamental to human thought and social organization.
Trade ReviewContinuing their collaboration, in this book Leaf and Read provide the view of kinship organization’s underlying cognitive processes and then lay out their formal analysis of kinship terminologies that should transform the field into a bona fide science equivalent to theoretical physics. It is a volume of formidable scope and clarity of exposition. . . .This book has potentially a very wide readership and should . . . be on the list of cultural anthropologists, evolutionary ecologists, archaeologists, linguists, psychologists, and applied anthropologists. * Anthropos *
Murray Leaf and Dwight Read propose a new theoretical outlook for anthropology – even ‘a new science’, as announced in the introduction. Human thought and Social Organization touches upon an ambitious range of topics, from cognition in the Upper Palaeolithic to kinship algebra and communication theory. Its wide array of subjects is also likely to appeal to scholars working in cultural evolution or cognitive anthropology, and especially to those embracing a formal-mathematical approach to social phenomena. * Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Institute *
… Read and Leaf, in this highly stimulating book, present a novel, coherent theory about the co-evolution of human thought and language on the one hand, and human social organization on the other. They do so by shifting the perspective from cognitive development essentially happening within the human mind, to viewing it as driven by people's interactions with the outside material, environmental, and social worlds. In doing so, they bring us a much more coherent and comprehensible history of human cognitive evolution than any I have seen thus far. -- Sander van der Leeuw Ph.D, Arizona State University
This book by Murray Leaf and Dwight Read is both brilliant and revolutionary. It puts socio-cultural anthropology in a context that understands human social behavior as cognitively “governed,” i.e., not generated by ideas but rather made interpretable, and therefore interactive, by mental rules. These “rules” of conceptual government finally allow serious algebraic-mathematical analysis of social-cultural behavior and idea systems as formal science properly grounded in relevant technical philosophy in a genuine evolutionary framework. -- F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Orthography and Notation List of Figures and Tables Preface 1. Introduction 2. Assumptions 3. The Organizational Rubicon of the Upper Paleolithic 4. Fundamentals of Human Social Organization 5. Elicitation of Kinship Terminology Structure 6. Theory of Kinship Terminology Structures 7. Construction of a Kinship Algebra Model 8. Kin Terminology and Social Structure: The Kariera Case 9. Formal Algebraic Construction of the Kariera Terminology 10. The Physical Farm Budget: a Social Charter 11. Idea-Systems and Communication Theory 12. Conclusion References Index About the Authors
