It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same physical shape-where, for example, a song is sung or a story retold. It is another thing altogether, as Greg Urban demonstrates, to think about cultural motion when something new is created-a new song or a new story. And this, the creating of new culture, is the overarching value of the contemporary world, as well as the guiding principle of the capitalist entrepreneur. From the Declaration of Independence to the movie Babe, from the Amazon River to the film studio, from microscopic studies of the words making up myths and books to the large-scale forces of conquest, conversion, and globalization that drive history, Urban follows the clues to a startling revelation: "metaculture" makes the modern, entrepreneurial form of culture possible. In Urban's work we see how metaculture, in its relationship to newness, explains the peculiar shape of modern society and its institutions, from the prevalence of taste and choice to the processes of the public sphere, to the centrality of persuasion and hegemony within the nation.

President Theodore Roosevelt once proclaimed, "Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions, and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions." But while corporations are ostensibly regulated by citizens through their governments, the firms in turn regulate many aspects of social and political life for individuals beyond their own employees and the communities that support them. Corporations are endowed with many of the same rights as citizens, such as freedom of speech, but are not themselves typically constituted around ideals of national belonging and democracy. In the wake of the global financial collapse of 2008, the question of what relationship corporations should have to governing institutions has only increased in urgency. As a democratically sanctioned social institution, should a corporation operate primarily toward profit accumulation or should its proper goal be to provision society with needed goods and services? Corporations and Citizenship addresses the role of modern for-profit corporations as a distinctive kind of social formation within democratic national states. Scholars of legal studies, business ethics, politics, history, and anthropology bring their perspectives to bear on particular case studies, such as Enron and Wall Street, as well as broader issues of belonging, social responsibility, for-profit higher education, and regulation. Together, these essays establish a complex and detailed understanding of the ways corporations contribute positively to human well-being as well as the dangers that they pose. Contributors: Joel Bakan, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Cynthia Estlund, Louis Galambos, Rosalie Genova, Peter Gourevitch, Karen Ho, Nien-he Hsieh, Walter Licht, Jonathan R. Macey, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Lynn Sharp Paine, Katharina Pistor, Amy J. Sepinwall, Jeffery Smith, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, Greg Urban.

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them. Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena. Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.