macro 'n' micro

[David Samuels]

Holly Ogren's introduction (hi Holly!) has raised for me a question that
might be of more general interest, namely: with all the different
approaches taken by people on this list, what counts as "micro" and "macro"
from various perspectives?

I can't help think, for instance, that Greg Urban, certainly, and Joel
Sherzer, possibly, would be surprised to see discourse analysis opposed as
a "macro" theory to the "micro" of CA. Although I can see how that might
work, if one takes seriously Urban's linking of "macro-parallelism" and
"sociability" (and I suppose therefore "culture").

When I think of macro, though, I gravitate to names like Gramsci, Marx,
Croce, Saussure, Peirce, Hayden White, EP Thompson, Foucault.  That is,
"macro" to me means something along the lines of "metacultural" or
"metadiscursive" or "ideology" in the sense of things that rise to the
level of consciousness as "categories" - and thus trigger theories of how
the categories came to be (for they could have come to be because they're
real), or how they came to be naturalized/hypostatized/essentialized or
whatever-ized.  And the "micro" then puts the empirical test to that.

This also grows out of my conviction that we will never win any wider
arguments within the various disciplines so long as we fetishize "language"
or "talk" as somehow uniquely independent from other expressive modalities
(art, music, dance, gesture, etc.), which tends to make me suspicious of
CA. Again, this is an area where I see Sherzer and Urban making an
important contribution on the "micro" side: in the capacity for us to
understand questions of expression/style/communication in a cross-modal
way.  Now, to the extent that this implicates a notion of "culture" as
being built on the parallelistic or iconic circulation of "tropes" or
"elments of style" (to use the old Strunk & White phrase), I can see how it
might be thought of as "macro."

But I'd be interested to know more, and if anyone else has other ideas.

Best,



David W. Samuels, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
212 Machmer Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

VOX: (413) 545-2702
FAX: (413) 545-9494
email: samuels at anthro.umass.edu
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~samuels/