This book explores verbal and non-verbal communication from a social anthropological viewpoint, drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in eastern Africa. It gives an overview of developments since the 1960s in the anthropology of language use and how these have influenced the author's thinking.

David Parkin is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK, where he was a Professor of Social Anthropology. His research focuses on the coordination of multimodal communication.