Ethno-logic : the anthropology of human reasoning /

This rather solemn linguistic study reexplores anthropology's perennial dilemma: how to account for cultural diversity within the limits of human universality while constructing this very universality from the ever growing mass of detail on disparate communities and societies. Despite the panoranic sweep suggested by the title, this is in fact a narrow exploration of that dilemma. As a study of the way people reason, it reports Hamill's research on the relationship between language, culture, and patterned thought and makes what he calls his "start on a rationalist, Chomskian anthropology." Accordingly, he reminds us that people everywhere are born with an innate knowledge of logical structure from which they produce different logical patterns in different linguistic and cultural settings. They use these logical processes to create new meanings, sometimes contributing to the definition of common humanity and sometimes using these logical processes to define membership in social groups. Central chapters deal with error in the study of meaning; meaning and pattern in syllogisms; and propositional reasoning, subject pronouns, and syntactic time in Navajo. The specific data of the work are drawn from interviews with native speakers of Mende, Navajo, Ojibwa, and English. The study is intended for advanced students of formal theory in ethnopsychology and anthropological linguistics and as such need be added only to graduate-level collections in which those subjects are already well represented. -C. Morrison, Michigan State University