Preliminary Disciplines

The commonplace division of labor between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and sociology and social anthropology, on the other, is predicated on a nominalist error, the belief that institutionally embedded and named fields denote discrete phenomena. An influential and much-cited twentieth-century bellwether of this division was Susanne Langer’s distinction between “discursive” and “presentational” form, a polythetic distinction that tacitly constructed a metaphysic. An examination of social interaction in its most elementary form suggests that no such distinction is warranted and that, instead, a systematic account of social interaction transcends the boundaries of these and several additional “preliminary disciplines.”