[Xmca-l] Three Hau books coming in 2016

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Hello fellow and esteemed XMCArs,


Just a heads up that some fascinating books are coming out of Hau this year!


Here's info (and links) for three intriguing tomes...


First up, for all those feminists among us, you know who you are:


_Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life_

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo23679117.html

By Marilyn Strathern


Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when her publisher unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it has remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.

Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.


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Next, for the ludologists and imagineers:


_Why We Play: An Anthropological Study_

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo23679551.html

By Roberte Hamayon


Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its possibilities in an imagined environment or construct. But as Roberte Hamayon shows in this book, play has implications that go even further than that. Exploring play’s many dimensions, she offers an insightful look at why play has become so ubiquitous across human cultures.

Hamayon begins by zeroing in on Mongolia and Siberia, where communities host national holiday games similar to the Olympics. Within these events Hamayon explores the performance of ethical values and local identity, and then she draws her analysis into larger ideas examinations of the spectrum of play activities as they can exist in any culture. She explores facets of play such as learning, interaction, emotion, strategy, luck, and belief, and she emphasizes the crucial ambiguity between fiction and reality that is at the heart of play as a phenomenon. Revealing how consistent and coherent play is, she ultimately shows it as a unique modality of action that serves an invaluable role in the human experience.


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And third, there might be something here for all those linguists out there:


_Language in Culture: The Semiotics of Interaction_

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo23679295.html

by Michael Silverstein


This book offers a rich assortment of some of Michael Silverstein’s most important lectures at the University of Chicago over the past forty years, all of which converge on theoretical issues involved in the semiotic, cognitive, and sociopolitical study of language and communication. Together they provide an overdue home to an impressive body of thought that has otherwise only been available via unofficial distribution—in hand-written notes, audio recordings, and other media—by longtime fans and students.

Developing and employing semiotic concepts, these lectures concentrate on two central and inverse problems. The first is to understand how interpersonal communication is carried in and by the medium of language. The second is to understand how language is a defining factor in conceptual representations and mental knowledge. Exploring the diversity of sources of knowledge and the many forms of language they can be coded into, Silverstein details the modes of semiosis of which language is composed, in particular those that express cultural knowledge and conceptualization. A sophisticated study of language as a form of interaction, these lectures offer one of the most important contributions to linguistics and anthropological semiotics since Ferdinand de Saussure.


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While these are not specifically CHAT, they seem to resonate with previous discussions on the list, and hence may be of relevance…


Other upcoming books (and even ones available now) may be perused here:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/publisher/pu3432000_3432001.html


Hau is a marvelous upcoming publisher. Lots of great stuff...Stay tuned!


Kind regards,


Annalisa