Anthropology and linguistics, as historically developing disciplines, have had partly separate roots and traditions. In particular settings and in general, the two disciplines have partly shared, partly differed in the nature of their materials, their favorite types of problem the personalities of their dominant figures, their relations with other disciplines and intellectual current. The two disciplines have also varied in their interrelation with each other and the society about them. Institutional arrangements have reflected the varying degrees of kinship, kithship, and separation. Such relationships themselves form a topic that is central to a history of linguistic anthropology yet marginal to a self-contained history of linguistics or anthropology as either would be conceived by most authors. There exists not only a subject matter for a history of linguistic anthropology, but also a definite need.

As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world at large. What particle might this be? The word not. In Essay on Negation, Paolo Virno argues that the importance of the not is perhaps comparable only to that of money--that is, the universality of exchange. Negation is what separates verbal thought from silent cognitive operations, such as feelings and mental images. Speaking about what is not happening here and now, or about properties that are not referable to a given object, the human animal deactivates its original neuronal empathy, which is prelinguistic; it distances itself from the prescriptions of its own instinctual endowment and accesses a higher sociality, negotiated and unstable, which establishes the public sphere. In fact, the speaking animal soon learns that the negative statement does not amount to the linguistic double of unpleasant realities or destructive emotions: while it rejects them, negation also names them and thus includes them in social life. Virno sees negation as a crucial effect of civilization, one that is, however, also always exposed to further regressions. Taking his cue from a humble word, the author is capable of unfolding the unexpected phenomenology of the negating consciousness.

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each of which treats a theme of major importance in both the history and current practice of anthropological inquiry. Drawing its title from a poem of W. H. Auden's, the present volume, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others (the fourth in the series) focuses on the emergence of anthropological interest in "culture and personality" during the 1920s and 1930s. It also explores the historical, cultural, literary, and biological background of major figures associated with the movement, including Bronislaw Manlinowski, Edward Sapir, Abram Kardiner, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Born in the aftermath of World War I, flowering in the years before and after World War II, severely attacked in the 1950s and 1960s, "culture and personality" was subsequently reborn as "psychological anthropology." Whether this foreshadows the emergence of a major anthropological subdiscipline (equivalent to cultural, social, biological, or linguistic anthropology) from the current welter of "adjectival" anthropologies remain to be seen. In the meantime, the essays collected in the volume may encourage a rethinking of the historical roots of many issues of current concern. Included in this volume are the contributions of Jeremy MacClancy, William C. Manson, William Jackson, Richard Handler, Regna Darnell, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, James A. Boon, and the editor.

Compiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language — he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue — the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.

George Stocking has been widely recognized as the premier historian of anthropology ever since the publication of his first volume of essays, Race, Culture, and Evolution, in 1968. As editor of several publications, including the highly acclaimed History of Anthropology series, he has led the movement to establish the history of anthropology as a recognized research specialization. In addition to the study Victorian Anthropology, his work includes numerous essays covering a wide range of anthropological topics. The eight essays collected in The Ethnographer's Magic consider the emergence of anthropology since the late nineteenth century as an academic discipline grounded in systematic fieldwork. Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript materials, the essays focus primarily on Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, the leading figures in the American and the British academic fieldwork traditions. According to George Marcus of Rice University, the essays "represent the most informative and insightful writings on Malinowski and Boas and their legacies that are yet available." Beyond their biographical material, the essays here touch upon major themes in the history of anthropology: its powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired data. To provide an overview against which to read the other essays, Stocking has also included a sketch of the history of anthropology from the ancient Greeks to the present. For this collection, Stocking has written prefatory commentaries for each of the essays, as well as two more extended contextualizing pieces. An introductory essay ("Retrospective Prescriptive Reflections") places the volume in autobiographical and historiographical context; the Afterword ("Postscriptive Prospective Reflections") reconsiders major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology.

The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.

Winner of the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory, The Aztec Kings is the first major study to take into account the Aztec cyclical conception of time and treat indigenous historical traditions as symbolic statements in narrative form. Susan D. Gillespie focuses on the dynastic history of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan. By demonstrating that most of Aztec history is nonliteral, she sheds new light on Aztec culture and on the function of history in society. By relating the cyclical structure of Aztec dynastic history to similar traditions of African and Polynesian peoples, she introduces a broader perspective on the function of history in society and on how and why history must change.