Basing this work on his ethnographic fieldwork in mountain villages of Japan's Kii Peninsula in the late 1980s (for a doctoral thesis submitted in 1992 to the London School of Economics), Knight (Queens U. Belfast) examines an issue relevant to any locale debating whether to re-introduce wolves. His analysis draws on the observation from structural anthropology that negative claims about certain animals are more symbolic than factual in basis. For example, several Japanese metaphors of human greed are expressed in terms of wolves. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)