ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

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