phenomenon	alienation	community
mind	self	society
I	me	us
phenomenology	structure	polity

1. Premisse
   1. Let us accept that anthropology is a particular kind of work to be conducted by a particular group of people who are:
      1. constrained by the full institutional facts that control all intellectual work and all work in general, and further constrained by the patterns of authority that establish some work as "anthropology"
      2. enabled by the same facts to conduct the work that will be recognized as anthropology and, more importantly, by the general cultural processes that produce new forms of arbitrariness
   2. Let us similarly accept that made up facts (e.g. universities, disciplines, anthropology) are "real" in the sense that they cannot be escaped and that they must be continually reconstituted in the daily life of those who get in contact with these facts (e.g. all students who apply for admission to an anthropology department) and even more by those who get fully caught by these facts (e.g. the students who are admitted, the faculty who select students and run their examinations--in the Foucauldian sense).
   3. How have "anthropologists"--that is anthropologists from now on--been writing (since, as Geertz might have said if he had been Foucault, writing is the work that those in control use to discipline those who get fully caught) about this? I will play briefly with a simple model of the discipline over the past century anchored around the two figures of
      1. Benedict (via Boon on alternatives)
      2. Radcliffe-Brown (via Garfinkel on service lines)
2. Development
   1. These two figures are emblematic of an almost institutionalized differentiation within the discipline between "American" and "British" traditions that have now all but collapsed. They can also help us explore the dangers inherent in these two approaches to enabling/disabling "culture/social structure":
      1. if human beings participate actively in "their" culture, then this participation must make a difference in each individual's mental make-up and, possibly, it is this mental make-up that is the primary motor of full participation
      2. if human beings participate actively in "their" society, then, given that they did not individually make this society, it must mean that the society is an external and probably causal force
   2. Parsons' was the most (possibly extravagant) attempt at systematizing these takes on the main problems.
3. For example
   1. One can use the dual traditions in studies of language to illustrate the general nature of the difficulty by contrasting Sapir to Chomsky
      1. with Sapir bringing out the indefinite set of possibilities allowed through human communication while also becoming quite concerned with the implications for individual understanding of local restrictions on these possibilities (thus leading to concern with "multiculturalism")
      2. with Chomsky bringing out the the external (in this case neurological) limits on human communication which noting that these limited structures allow for an infinite number of new sentences (though leading with a concern with physical disabilities that is but an aspect of the social structuralist concern with order)
   2. In work on language all this is trumped by such work as Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of participation that builds on both the limits placed on understanding by symbolic patterns and on the sense, however unformulatable, that "meaning is what happens between the words." (this is closely related to Bakhtin on dialogism).
4. In conclusion, we have facts that are not determinant