Is Western Civilization Disintegrating or Reconstituting? is a book that explores the foundational vocabularies created by the discipline of anthropology to describe the development of civilizations.

The text consists of five poems. Each poem is mostly derived from a different essay by Alfred Kroeber, one of California’s first professional anthropologists. The texts are heavily edited, altered, interpolated, and fragmented into free verse.

Taken together, the poems probe the uneasy relationship between rigorous knowledge and the tenets of moral relativism, and the reciprocal relationship between art and artifact. The perspective veers precipitously from small tribe-lets to continent-wide formations. The interpretation of primal myths sows new myths in turn. - Benjamin Lord