Human Thought and Social Organization Anthropology on a New Plane [Paperback]

Continuing their collaboration, in this book Leaf and Read provide the view of kinship organizations 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.& 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.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.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#