ABSTRACT
The anthropologist lives the symbols of his or her own culture, and by studying others he or she learns to recognize, and, at least to some extent, to manipulate, the symbols of that culture in place of his or her own. Botscharow fruitfully compares the semiotic tropologies of culture with early foreshadowing of symbolism and extracts from material culture evidence of significant cognitive shifts in the productive strategies of Homo erectus. In any human science, there is a persistent tension between praxis and symbol, action and meaning, behavior and thought. Symbolism as a complex network of interconnected meanings and related actions that govern behavior provides both constraints on change and a guiding matrix allowing for change. Creation of a new symbol is not random. New symbols partake of many of the network associations of the old.
