Michael Cole To the unwary reader, even the table of contents of this book will appear incon gruous. What notion, let alone set of principles, could bring coherence to the follow ing concepts: playing peekaboo with small children, aging, human alienation, con versations with Uzbeki peasants, toolmaking, sexism, the world of the deaf, the ecology of hunting groups? After sfhe has had a chance to scan the entire set, the reader can see that this book seems to center on language. But it clearly is not a book about linguistics. It is about a notion that combines two other notions that we usually find located in very different kinds of books, language and human nature. There is no widely accepted term for this combined notion. It does not fit into those ways of thinking of the world that have gotten us where we are. Walker Percy, philosopher novelist, succinctly nails the source of our problem: The importance of a study of language, as opposed to a scientific study of a space-time event like a solar eclipse or rat behavior is that as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar and comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man. (1975, p. 10) Once we reinvent this insight, its implications begin to work into our lives; our central problem becomes to figure out how to deal with the dilemmas it implies.

Inhalt
I. Homo Loquens, Homo Faber, Animal Economicum: An Anthropologist's Conception of the Dawn of Human Conduct.- 1. Toolmaking, Hunting, and the Origin of Language.- II. The Reconstitution of Humanity: Genesis of Language, Self, and Consciousness.- 2. The Role of Semiosis in L. S. Vygotsky's Theory of Human Cognition.- 3. Peekaboo as an Instructional Model: Discourse Development at Home and at School.- 4. The Implications of Luria's Theories for Cross-cultural Research on Language and Intelligence.- 5. An Interactionist Model of Language Development.- 6. Language and Alienation.- 7. Ontogenesis, Use, and Representation of Cultural Categories: A Psychological Perspective.- 8. A. Self-concept and Sexism in Language.- B. Sexism and Self-concept in the Language of Children: A Middle Childhood Survey.- 9. Aging, Work, and Youth: New Words for a New Age of Old Age.- 10. Beyond Societal Language: The Development of the Deaf Person.- 11. Some Sociogenetic Determinants in Human Development Revealed by the Study of Severely Deprived Children.- III. The Social Production of Language: The State of the Art.- 12. Report from an Underdeveloped Country: Toward Linguistic Competence in the United States.- 13. Descriptive and Explanatory Power of Rules in Sociolinguistics.- 14. Theoretical Prerequisites for a Contemporary Applied Linguistics.- 15. Second Language Learning: An Integrated Psycholinguistic Model.- 16. Using Language: A Sociofunctional Approach.- 17. New Horizons in the Study of Speech and Social Situations.- 18. Language as the Instrument of School Socialization: An Examination of Bernstein's Thesis.- 19. The Rise of the Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe: An Essay in the Political Economy of Language.- 20. The Impact of Informatics on Social Sign Systems.- 21. TheSemiotic Processes of the Formation and Expression of Ideas.- 22. Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Meaning of Meaning.- 23. Dialectics, Ethnography, and Educational Research.- 24. The Quantification of Knowledge in Education: On Resistance toward Qualitative Evaluation and Research.- 25. The Sociogenesis of Social Sciences: An Analysis of the Cultural Relativity of Social Psychology.- IV. The Paideia of Language: Historical, Educational, and Ethnic Praxis.- 26. Vernacular Values and Education.- 27. Language, Education, and Reproduction in Wales.- 28. Minority Languages in the Netherlands: Relations between Sociopolitical Conflicts and Bilingual Education.- 29. The Linguagenesis of Society: The Implementation of the National Language Plan in West Malaysia.- 30. Cultural Reproduction in the Bilingual Classroom.- 31. The Production of Ethnic Discourse: American and Puerto Rican Patterns.- Epilogue Guilem Rodrigues da Silva.