Acknowledgements -- Foreword -- About time -- The historical persistence of total ideologies -- A misleading alternative to total ideologies -- Games, the alternative -- Sex, selection, and culture -- The long road to the canonical conception of culture -- The common descent of nature and culture -- Strategies and Players -- Part 1 Canonical games -- 1. Conflict -- 1.1History, the speeches, and the funeral oration -- 1.2 Pericles' problems -- 1.3 What to praise -- 1.4 In praise of Athenian culture -- 1.5 The city in crisis -- 1.6 The answer before dying -- 2. Coordination -- 2.1 Democracy, warfare, and the political system -- 2.2 The contrast of nature and conventions -- 2.3 To have a civic morality -- 2.4 Starting with signs -- 2.5 Exchanging signs -- 2.6 From signs to values -- 2.7 The political sign -- 3. Contract -- 3.1 Thorns in Augustine -- 3.2 The insufficiency of rhetoric -- 3.3 The importance of wisdom and happiness -- 3.4 The demise of the classical tradition -- 3.5 Undoing a labyrinth of doubts -- 3.6 Among digns -- 3.7 Which meaning? -- 3.8 Signs and things -- 3.9 Knowledge and semiosis -- 3.10 How and where to find the norms -- 3.11 The light within the heart -- Part 2 Ancestral games -- 4. Origin -- 4.1 The anthropological ideology -- 4.2 Cultural cohesion -- 4.3 Nature approximately -- 4.4 Predators and prey in interaction -- 4.5 Cooperation and conflict within species -- 4.6 Signs displayed -- 4.7 A natural typology of human societies -- 4.8 Toward sex -- 5. Sex, signals -- 5.1 The case for individuality -- 5.2 The case for sex -- 5.3 Live sex -- 5.4 The maintenance of sex -- The fall of the virgin lesbians -- 5.5 Winning without winning -- 5.6 Choosing a mate, selecting signs -- 5.7 Signs in a continuously drifting world -- 5.8 Deceptive and honest signalling -- 5.9 Why not deception everywhere? -- 5.10 Truth without conventions.

Part 3 Individual games -- 6. Strategies -- 6.1 Anatomy of the game -- 6.2 Complex utility -- 6.3 Adding up to zero -- 6.4 Pennies for your thoughts -- 6.5 Ruling the game -- 6.6 In equilibrium -- 6.7 Cutting and choosing the slices of a magical pizza -- 7. Players -- 7.1 The storm blast came -- 7.2 A ghastly crew of uncooperative players -- 7.3 Serving time -- 7.4 Unto others -- 7.5 The tit-for-tat blues -- 7.6 Someone's gotta give -- 7.7 It is not yellow -- it is Chicken -- 7.8 Signs of asymmetry and asymmetric players -- 7.9 Types, tokens, and inflated signs -- Afterword -- The cause of conflict between cultures -- Sexualized culture -- The traditional fallacies of cultural semiotics -- The future of cultural semiotics -- Notes -- References -- Index.