Cultural Icons: Edited by Keyan Tomaselli and David Scott

Cultural Icons is an edited volume recently released from Left Coast Press.  I had the opportunity to review the book for the ARD website (Anthropology Review Database) and that should be up in a few weeks.

The book is comprised of some papers presented about the semiotic analysis of cultural/national icons.  It does this quite well, giving you the background information about the icons as well as the important information about how the icons have changed as national, international and social needs and experiences alter how the icons are framed in the culture.  Each of the papers cover an icon:  Nelson Mandela, The Eiffel Tower, The Little Mermaid, The Holy Lance, Britannia, etc.  What is nice is that once you finish this book, you have some idea how the theoretical applications of semiotic analysis can be brought to different icons and symbols.  That makes the book a very fine choice for students, who might learn alot of history of anthropological/culture studies/philosophical thinking but not learn how to apply such conceptual tools to the process of thinking about a subject.  That can be a very hard thing to teach.  For that reason I think the editors of Tomaselli and Scott have assembled a very good book.