For a Poetics of Social Life

Abstract

One of the burning issues in modern anthropology concerns the relationship between the individual and the larger society. Is society a kind of metallic grid that we all have to move through in lockstep? How many of us feel that it is? And yet how many of us have not felt that there were not simply limitations on what we may or may not do, but also outer edges that we could explore, tease, distort (“bending the rules”)? Just as a poem takes the language of ordinary discourse and makes it the object of its own attention, so a socially creative person can make something interesting out of ordinary conventions by pushing them to the very edge of violation, but no farther.