In studying the human subject and the way the human culture mirrors itself, the author redefines holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency".

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  PREFACE  ABSTRACT OF THE ARGUMENT  INTRODUCTION  I. THE HUMAN HOLOGRAM 1. To Be Caught in Indra's Net  2. Where Is the Meaning in a Trope?  3. A Sociality Reperceived  4. Our Sense of Their Humor: Their Sense of Ours II. THE TRAP OF !CONICITY 5. The Story of Eve 6. The Icon of Incest 7. The Queen's Daughter and the King's Son 8. The Consumer Consumed III. THE ECHO-SUBJECT 9. Echolocation 10. Imaginary Spaces 11. The Cakra ofJohann Christian Bach 12. The Near-Life Experience IV. CAKRA 13. Reinventing the Wheel 14. The Physical Education of the Wheel 15. Sex in a Mirror 16. The Single Shape of Metaphor in All Things GLOSSARY OF UNFAMILIAR CONCEPTS NOTES INDEX  

"Roy Wagner is a one-of-a-kind anthropologist whose books provide intense intellectual stimulation. His way of connecting the world of New Guinea to the world of anthropology is unique and, well, mind-blowing. . . . He writes books that you actually want to and will read more than once."—Steven Feld, author of Sound and Sentiment"Wagner asks, daringly, what it would be like to imagine one of the most significant of human activities, the activity of description or representation, as a self-scaling phenomenon. . . . One begins to glimpse a genuine 'alternative anthropology.'"—Marilyn Strathern, author of The Gender of the Gift