Ideas, Dan Sperber argues, may be contagious. They may invade whole populations. In the process, the people, their environment, and the ideas themselves are being transformed. To explain culture is to describe the causes and the effects of this contagion of ideas. This book will be read by all those with an interest in the impact of the cognitive revolution on our understanding of culture.

Dan Sperber is Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. He has been visiting Professor at Princeton University, The London School of Economics and the University of Michigan. He is author of Rethinking Symbolism, On Anthropological Knowledge and, with Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cogntion (1995).