20 than like mathematics, as is the current style."

Goodman's notion of the similarity between the exploration of language as it ought to be done and literary criticism echoed that of Glifford Geertz, writing from within the ranks of anthropologists at about the same time.

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript— foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (Geertz 1973:10)

This idea "remains theoretically underdeveloped", he writes later in the same collection (1973:448-9), "that cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials". He notes that such a notion of text carried beyond writing or speaking is not novel, but:

To put the matter this way is to engage in a bit of metaphorical refocusing of one's own, for it shifts the analysis of cultural forms from an endeavor in general parallel to dissecting an organism, diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code, or ordering a system— the dominant analogies in contemporary anthropology— to one in general parallel with penetrating a literary text.

Let me return to Goodman. Having mentioned the similarity to literary analysis, he continued:

...and, as in literary criticism, conversations and discourses fall roughly into genres, such as small talk, intimate talk, gang talk, public exchange of information, talk of different social classes, poems, journalism, dialogue, neurotic verbalizing, scientific exposition, e t c .

(My temptation was to overstate my own case here by noting aside the absence of "ethnography" ...but Sturgeon's pornography and science fiction didn't make Goodman's list, either.)

Each of these might have, roughly, certain distinctive characteristics of pronunciation, grammar, lexicon, concreteness of denotation, assertion of propositions, personal engagement of the speakers, modifying of the standard code, tone of voice, interplay of speaker and hearer, intermixture of the non-verbal, order of exposition, etc.

"I may be mistaken," Goodman concludes, "but I think that a reasoned description of such genres would tell us something about language that we have not been getting from linquists, anthropologists, and

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philosophers."

Goodman considers the argument from philosophy that we may establish rules governing the appropriate use of formal or

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vernacular language. Such has been effectively if not explicitly the case during the several heydays of evolutionist, functionalist, structuralist, and culturist reign over anthropology. And there may be those who feel the impending reign of an interpretationist formal language. This will not, I think, be the case. Geertz, our reigning anglophone interpretationist, tells us that "anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens... tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into an inspectable form... The ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it dow n . In do doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted" (1973:18—19).

My guess is that we could aid the inscribing of ethnographers if we could make Goodman's "reasoned description" of the genre (though, as Geertz has pointed out [l973:19n3]» "Self-consciousness about modes of representation (not to speak of experiments with them) has been very lacking in anthropology.") "What does the ethnographer do?", Geertz asks. Well, though it "may seem a less than startling discovery, and to someone familiar with the current 'literature', an

implausible one...— he writes." And therein lies the authority for so much of the informal at-tempts of this present writing: he writes.

Writing and Discourse J

Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behaviour.

This is, again, from Clifford Geertz (1973:27). My last long sections on Coming to Terms and Idiom and Genre were to illustrate the, albeit sorry, absence of any body of 'literature' which is generic to ethnography (and the absurdity of that editor who, with all the heft of a balloon, used the weight of "the authority of that genre called 'the ethnography"' to keep Isbell's dialogue out of print). Geertz continues, "In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself— that is, about the role of culture in human life— can be expressed." I have quoted Geertz on this matter because he neither eschews those "made-in-the-academy concepts and systems of concepts" which appear in his writings, nor does he hestate to "plunge into the midst of the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained". Simply, with my reading of Geertz we have a genre.

I know this is audacious (sounds audacious). But this is exactly how genres happen. Somebody writes something, sombody else reads it, and the reading makes the genre. Do I mean that everything now written in interpretive anthropology ought to be written like Geertz's stuff? No. But that is already starting to be attempted, and attempt after attempt is looking like Goodman said: only hack works conform to the genres. What I mean, then, is that a bunch of writing now coming into begin might read like it and Geertz's are in the same genre. This is how genres themselves are determined like natural history or literary criticism, "reasoned but a posteriori" . This is also a presentation of a theory of ethnography which is a

theory of reading, much in the same way that Geertzian "thick description" (or, I suppose, Geertz's thick description a la Gilbert Ryle) is a theory of the close reading of cultures, or Borges' writing is out of his theory of writing-as-reading, or Richard Poirier's notion of reading as cultural performance.^

But the only way for such a theory of ethnography as a theory of reading to take hold is to make sure that one of the ties holding such an audacious theory to what Frazer called, at the end of The Golden Bough, "the melancholy record of human error and folly" is a theory of reading itself. And it is in the light of this necessity that I have brought philosophers and writers to bear in this introduction.

I have suggested that meaning is the next-thing in any meaningful occurrence. When religious people ask what is the meaning of life they are talking about the next-thing after life (death or afterlife or the next incarnate life). When someone says "Close the door!" to another, the meaning is something like doorclosednow. ^

This brings us to the question of how do we know what the meaning is. This is a real can of worms: the can being philosophy or epistemology and the worms being 'knowledge of other minds', philosophy of mind, 'conjectures and refutations', innatisms. My view is this: We go to another society, hang around, make ourselves known, establish some kind of presence, get admitted (graduate from dopey observation to dumb participation), and see if we can figure out what they mean. That's how we get to know what the meaning is, what the meanings are— and the reason we'd better start participating pretty quickly is because until we establish ourselves in some of Tedlock's dialogues we will only be observers to other people 'making sense to one another' , and that will be at the risk of being left out. In the vernacular of the American Rocky Mountains we have to "move in on 'em". And this movement is not physical; it is mental. And it is mental according to a theory of mind which holds that minds are not individual (in the sense of one-to-one correlated with the brains of individual humans), a sense of mind as 'an aggregate of interacting parts or components in which the

interaction between parts is triggered by difference, where difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time' (paraphrasing Gregory Bateson, though it sounds like one of

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