Do You See What I Mean?

Brenda Farnell is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and Invisible in Movement and Dance. She is coeditor of the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Nineteenth-Century Legacy2. Bias against the Iconic3. Geographical and Historical Spaces: Assiniboine Territory and the Embodiment of Deixis4. Moral and Ethical Spaces: Naming Practices and Visual Imagery in Nakota and PST5. Getting to the Point: Spatial Orientation and Deixis in PST and Nakota6. Storytelling and the Embodiment of Symbolic Form7. The Primacy of Movement in Assiniboine Culture8. ConclusionsAppendix A. Phonetic KeyAppendix B. Kinetic KeyNotesBibliographyIndex

"What is struggling to emerge is a theoretical framework in which the way that the different modalities of communication are articulated with one another can be understood. This book should be read by all those with an interest in the development of such a framework."—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "A major contribution to Native American studies, to cultural anthropology more generally, to linguistic anthropology, and to semiotics. . . . In one and the same book, Brenda Farnell reveals the power and precision of gesture in oral performance, makes major advances in the understanding of the storytelling process in general, and teaches us more about the world of Native Americans than we have learned in many a moon."—James H. McNulty