These three lectures were
presented at Beijing Normal University in March 2001. I intended them to
be a general introduction to the main features of America and its educational
systems for a foreign audience I imagined to have little knowledge of American
constitutional history and current controversies. In the process of writing
these lectures, I found myself playing the possibilities implicit in the
word "constitution" as it is normally used in political speech
and as it is technically used in ethnomethodology. This might be a way to
develop the theory of culture (speech, discourse) as action, locally and
globally. |