We turn now to the application to sociological (including anthropological) concerns of the apparatus we have developed. In section 7.1 we consider the relevance of our theory to the traditional concerns of social anthropology; in 7.2 we turn to the analysis of significant patterns of interaction in particular social systems.
Social theory and the study of interaction
We have explored some systematic and universal properties of language use addressed to face redress. But what bearing has all this on sociological or anthropological theory or research? What is universal and pan-cultural cannot, at first glance, be of cultural significance. That which organizes such low-level orders of events can hardly, it might seem, have any bearing on the mainstream sociological concern with social structure. Indeed the study of interactional systematics has been impugned by Giddens (1973:15) on charges of being ‘a resurgence of crude voluntarism, linked to what I would call a retreat from institutional analysis’. Moreover, he continues, the views ‘that the most vital aspects of social existence are those relating to the triviata of “everyday life” … easily rationalise a withdrawal from basic issues involved in the study of macro-structural social forms and social processes’ (ibid.).
One suspects that many social theorists, including some anthropologists, share these views. Nevertheless, in actual fact in social anthropology there has been a persistent if rather thin strand of interest in the way in which social relations of various kinds are realized in interaction. And this interest follows from the sorts of theoretical orientation that have been most influential.
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