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WORDS IN MOTION: Toward a Global Lexicon. Edited by Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. 346 pp. US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4536-7.
In her introduction to Words in Motion, Gluck writes that "the book may be read in any order, since the links among the essays-both in patterns and in substance-are more salient than any collective argument or plot. (Indeed, this approach lends itself to expansion in digital form, where clicking rather than page turning would bring the links among words into instant motion)"(7). It is a challenge to review a book where the editors from the start foreswear pretense to anything but digital coherence. It makes one wonder why the volume was compiled for publication as a book in the first place.
In some ways this is a pity, as the essays included in this volume should offer much of interest both to the specialist and the general reader. The contributors are recognized experts on the societies they write about, and the "words" whose motions they trace...