I am experimenting here with a blog that would relate to a class I am currently teaching. This Spring 2009, I am teaching Communication and Culture. It will mostly consist of thoughts than came to me after finishing a lecture. It is often the case that, while walking home, I wonder whether this or that point needed to be made more systematically.
For example, after the class on Saussure, and partially in response to a question about change and education, it came to me again that, at this point, it is what he started when emphasizing the arbitrariness of the sign is most relevant to the future of anthropological theory about culture and education, along with what he had to say about syntagms. Of course, I take arbitrariness much beyond where Saussure stopped, and will include all matters of classification (including the classification of human beings) as well as matters of processes (e.g. schooling as a means of socialization into participation). By direct implication, this means that arbitrariness unfolds in time and involves a possibly very large number of persons. It also implies that the very arbitrariness of the process will reveal itself continually to participants and so that they will have to keep telling each other what to do next (or what they should have done, etc.). This then directly ties to the major concern of ethnomethodology with ordering as an ongoing process.
This has to be particularly the case given that even a well-ordered event (say a joke, a class, a ceremony or ritual), that is a syntagm of parts having to be performed in “just this way” to work so that the working is not noticed (i.e. “grammatical according to native intuition”), will take time and be distributed along many participants, including many who know much about what is happening.
Thus the ongoing possibility of trouble and mistakes, as well as fun and change through mis-takes (Klemp, N., McDermott, R., Raley, J., Thibeault, M., Powell K. & Levitin, D.J. 2008).