N. 2 (2016): Studying Objectivation Practices

Abstract

Three case studies demonstrate the self-organization of social events: the situated practices of Tibetan philosophical debating, playing table games, and coffee tasting. The paper clarifies the mechanisms by which the self-organization of local affairs emerges and the extent to which local participants to a shared practice can take part in ongoing events. Events mostly drive themselves with their own momentum, but even the event does not know just where it is heading. While local participants are intimately involved, society moves according to its own vectors that exceed the participants’ control. These cases display how actors participate, patterning after each other, how they pick up ways of formulating and ways of knowing that follow from the previous speaker, and how they convert occasioned accounts and formulations into objective forms that can be relied upon by parties for organizing the local orderliness of their affairs.