Nicholas J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson are at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

"The publication of this book is a sign of an important new development, which will recast anthropology. We have here a number of disciplines which, having previously shunned each other, are now genuinely working together in order to understand the specificity and the nature of human social life. - Maurice Bloch, London School of EconomicsThis is a landmark volume, that refracts anthropological knowledge at entirely new angles that can change in fundamental ways how we think about what we do and what we know. - Jane Hill, The University of ArizonaSocial science at its best: comprehensive, compelling, and incisive. Together the chapters of 'Roots of Human Sociality' provide a superbly-crafted and exceptionally wide-ranging account of how thought and culture create, and in turn are sustained through human social interaction. - Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, New School for Social ResearchReaders of 'Roots of Human Sociality' are treated to a wide-ranging feat of ideas and empirical findings, and the quality of the individual chapters is very high ... the volume is an exciting - and, at over 500 pages, abundant - peek at an emerging area of research. Few volumes of paper become ""classic"", but I suspect that this one will. - Gesture"

• * Introduction: Human Sociality as a New Interdisciplinary FieldN.J. Enfield and Stepehn C. Levinson* Part 1: Properties of Human Interaction* On the Human 'Interaction Engine'Stephen C. Levinson* Interaction: The Infrastructure for Social Institutions, the Natural Ecological Niche for Language, and the Arena in which Culture is EnactedEmanuel A. Schegloff* Human Sociality as Mutual Orientation in a Rich Interactive Environment: Multimodal Utterances and Pointing in AphasiaCharles Goodwin* Social Actions, Social CommitmentsHerbert H. Clark* Part 2: Psychological Foundations* Infant Pointing at 12 Months: Communicative Goals, Motives, and Social-Cognitive AbilitiesUlf Liszkowski* The Development Interdependence of Theory of Mind and LanguageJanet Wilde Astington* Constructing the Social Mind: Language and False-Belief UnderstandingJennie E. Pyers* Sylvia's Recipe: The Role of Imitation and Pedagogy in the Transmission of Cultural KnowledgeGyörgy Gergely and Gergely Csibra* Part 3: Culture and Sociality* The Thought that Counts: The Interactional Consequences of Variation in Cultural Theories of MeaningEve Danziger* Cultural Perspectives on Infant-Caregiver InteractionSuzanne Gaskins* Joint Commitment and Common Ground in a Ritual EventWilliam F. Hanks* Habits and Innovations: Designing Language for New, Technologically Mediated SocialityElizabeth Keating* Part 4: Cognition in Interaction* Meeting Other Minds through Gesture: How Children Use their Hands to Reinvent Language and Distribute CognitionSusan Goldin-Meadow* The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human InteractionEdwin Hutchins* Social Consequences of Common Ground N.J. Enfield* Why a Deep Understanding of Cultural Evolution is Incompatible with Shallow PsychologyDan Sperber* Part 5: Evolutionary Perspectives* Culture and the Evolution of the Human Social Instincts R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson* Parsing Behavior: A Mundane Origin for an Extraordinary Ability?Richard W. Byrne* Why Don't Apes Point?Michael Tomasello