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Abstract

In the context of an expanding suburb on the edge of a Canadian city, this paper explores the ritual of daily conversation, and the role of individual practice in bringing to fruition common cultural texts. It offers a re-working of the Geertzian notion of texts as cultural control mechanisms, and a reappraisal of Giddens' view of the sociology of action as the study of behaviors which may be legitimately divorced from their individual perpetrators and set alongside other reified social facts. It argues instead for a view of common cultural texts as incomplete: ambiguous shorthands and generalities. It is the practice of individual speakers which personalizes and particularizes them to specific circumstances. This individuals do in diverse fashion. Hence, the meanings which the texts come to express are neither necessarily consensual nor conventional. The form of an anthropological account of such routine occasions, therefore, should be to shuttle between collective text and individual activity, maintaining the general concept and the particular usage in a tension of opposites through which each is seen as affording social life to the other.

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Ritual Speaking in a Canadian Suburb: Anthropology and the Problem of Generalization

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