Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples - from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture.

Systems-centered therapy (SCT) brings an innovative approach to clinical practice. Developed by the author, SCT introduces a theory and set of methods that put systems ideas into practice. The collection of articles in this book illustrates the array of clinical applications in which SCT is now used. Each chapter introduces particular applications of SCT theory or methods with specific examples from practice that help the theory and methods come alive for the reader across a variety of clinical contexts. This book will be especially useful for therapists and clinical practitioners interested in sampling SCT, for those who learn best with clinical examples, and for anyone with a serious interest in learning the systems-centered approach.

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it.
Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.

It s a common complaint that a presidential candidate's style matters more than substance and that the issues have been eclipsed by mass-media-fueled obsession with a candidate s every slip, gaffe, and peccadillo. This book explores political communication in American presidential politics, focusing on what political insiders call "message." Message, Michael Lempert and Michael Silverstein argue, is not simply an individual s positions on the issues but the craft used to fashion the creature the public sees as the candidate. Lempert and Silverstein examine some of the revelatory moments in debates, political ads, interviews, speeches, and talk shows to explain how these political creations come to have a life of their own. From the pandering "Flip-Flopper" to the self-reliant "Maverick," the authors demonstrate how these figures are fashioned out of the verbal, gestural, sartorial, behavioral as well as linguistic matter that comprises political communication."

Make profits soar by converting casual consumers into apostles Rocket showcases the stories of sixteen entrepreneurs. It draws out the lessons that you can apply Monday morning in your business. Authentic and specific Boston Consulting Group case studies about the rocketeers/inventors who created brand legacies. For everyone who wants a business to grow faster than a competitor-this motivating book gives you a step-by-step approach to growth, share gain, and higher profits. Michael Silverstein is a senior partner and managing director of the consumer practice at BCG. Dylan Bolden is a senior partner and managing director at BCG. Rune Jacobsen is a senior partner and managing director at BCG Rohan Sajdeh is a senior partner and managing director at BCG.

The billionaire creator of a financial news empire wants to be elected Mayor of Philadelphia. He looks like a shoe-in until the man who runs his stock market music department is murdered. What follows is a manic romp that sucks in the world's wackiest detective (who now bills himself a freelance intellectual), a financial poet praying for the big break, a head hunter prone to extreme sexual expressiveness, a Philadelphia lawyer who will take anyone as a client, a homicide detective seeking true love, a municipal repair crew run amok, and a parrot with a tendency to become offensive. They all come together in Murder At Bernstein's, from the five-star reviewed author of Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan and The Bellman's Revenge.

Ambrose Bierce's DEVIL'S DICTIONARY was a delightful collection of quirky definitions, naughty verse and satirical pieces skewering an overblown and profoundly corrupt Gilded Age. Michael Silverstein's new DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF WALL STREET applies the same approach to today's overblown markets and their puffed up denizens. Its hundreds of painfully funny definitions, poems, and encounters featuring Selig Cartwright, Goldman Sachs washroom attendant, will make you laugh-and think.

Reviewers of this five-star comic novel have been ecstatic about its kinky humor, calling "Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan" "hysterically funny and outrageous," and "a very funny sci-fi, gothic horror." Michael Silverstein's book is a wild riff about some very strange doings under the streets of Gotham in 1973. A criminal society has taken root there along with a pollution-spawned new chain of life, both of which must be destroyed by an elite, secretly created military unit headed by a guy planning a coup d'etat. All that stands in the way of New York City descending into utter chaos, the country getting a military dictator, and the destruction of our present natural order, is a bumbling alternative newspaper reporter with landlord problems, and a pistol-toting feminist with anger issues. Joe Gandelman, Editor-In-Chief in Arts & Entertainment at The Moderate Voice wrote in his review of Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan: "The only question in reading this book is exactly where has Silverstein been HIDING all these years as a fiction writer? He is a GREAT writer and enthralling storyteller whose writing packs a hay-maker punch with vividly constructed scenes and punchy, realistic dialogue - a writer who easily elicits a chuckle or two (or more)... I could easily see him selling a script to Hollywood."

Morey Caine fought sewer-spawned horrors in Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan. Now in The Bellman's Revenge he confronts a demented scientist and a crazed Indian shaman, both seeking vengeance in a way that taps into the secret fear of every traveler. Morey himself, along with a former minor league ballplayer, must travel into the heart of American darkness in an expiring VW Rabbit to meet the monstrous challenge.

As Michael Silverstein discusses in his introduction to this new edition, the two foundational essays presented here are culminating moments in the scholarly history of North American indigenous peoples’ languages and cultures. Franz Boas’s “Introduction� essay (1911) initiates readers into the collection of grammatical sketches contained in the multiple volumes of the Handbook of American Indian Languages, underscoring critical issues of language in human cognition and its role in sociocultural variation. Twenty years earlier, J. W. Powell published “Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico� to accompany his Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) of the Smithsonian Institution. Powell interpreted the BAE’s vast collection of vocabularies through a classificatory perspective like those of geology, geography, and biology, thus organizing understanding of the hundreds of attested languages as members of linguistic families. Originally published in the same volume in 1966, these two essays form a cornerstone of modern indigenous language studies.  

Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples - from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture.

If politics as practiced is talk, then how does a political figure - especially an American president - talk politics? If someone can be all style and no substance, is there any actual political substance to style? "Talking Politics" looks at the alpha and omega of presidential image, its highs - Lincoln at Gettysburg - and lows - "W" at any microphone - demystifying the spun mists of political "message" on which an institution like the American presidency has always depended.

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it.
Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.