Abstract
■ Centered upon fieldwork as union labor in an Idaho sawmill, this article investigates the relation between labor, language and rules on the one hand, manager and managed on the other. Wittgenstein's `builders' — a form of life he created to show the relation between language and action — help us understand the sawmill's labor process and demonstrate how language, when used to rule practical action, `bewitches'. Wittgenstein, though often thought of as a theorist of language, will be invoked alongside Manchester school social anthropology's insights on conflict to frame what I will term rule fetishism. Rule fetishism occurs when persons (here managers) disavow their agency in relation to rules, ascribing instead agency to the rules themselves. Those managed in such social situations show they share Wittgenstein's understanding of rules when they regularly undercut authority, and demonstrate the impotence of rules (for example, by following rules exactly).
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