Thibault (English linguistics, U. of Venice) responds to the urgent need he sees for a materialist ecosocial semiotics that is able to reconnect body-brain processes and interactions both to the social and cultural practices that directly act upon human bodies, and to the ways in which body and brain processes directly participate in and are a constitutively inseparable part of people's meaning-making activity. There has been much discussion in the past few years of the role of the body and the brain in social meaning-making practices, he admits, but contends that those discussions have not moved beyond models of textual representation based on discourse and language. He finds in the ecosocial semiotics of Jay Lemke the different orientation that is called for. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR