The ethnographic case study presented in this article illustrates the institutional complexity and sociocultural significance of a midwestern American flea market. A conception of marketplace structure and function that incorporates informal and festive dimensions of consumer behavior is advanced. The article explores the relationship of primary and secondary economic activity. Buyer and seller behavior, marketplace ambience, the social embeddedness of consumption, and experiential aspects of consumption are considered at length.

A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market

Fonnal similarities sometimes clarify substantive differences. Consider the difference between Ruth Benedict' s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword (25) and David Lan's Guns and Rain (161), or the difference between E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (85), and Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (243). No one could fairly accuse Benedict of neglect of the historical terrain in her ethnography. She begins her study of Japan with historical inquiry and throughout her text is concerned with change as well as continuity. But as her subtitle indicates, her project was to investigate "Patterns of Japanese Cul­ ture," to describe what anthropological structuralists would later call a syn­ chronic structure or system in Japanese culture . On the other hand, Lan focuses explicitly on a specific historical situation. His Guns are not Bene­ dict' s Sword, a cultural archetype, but rather the means of destruction in a particular moment of Zimbabwe history. His subtitle, "Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe," declares his intention to investigate historically specific connections. While his study is clearly rooted in structural­ functionalism, his project is different, and inherently historical. Evans-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2155961.pdf

History, Structure, and Ritual

Ritual and relationships: Interpersonal influences on shared consumption

Essentially, this paper argues that the understanding of organization is insepar able from the organization of understanding. This argument is developed and sustained through detailed consideration of the problematics of interpretation and of representation in organizational analysis, focusing on the understanding of significant problems within a particular arena of activity (organizational symbolism). Accordingly, from an analysis of forms of narrative in organizational symbolism, the paper articulates issues that are fundamental to both the theory and practice of organization. Through such a consideration of paradoxes of tex tuality in the inscription of order, current concerns in organizational analysis become connected to long-standing problems in Organization Studies.

From Interpretation to Representation in Organizational Analysis: Postmodernism, Ethnography and Organizational Symbolism

The author delineates a previously unnoticed equivalency betweenEmile Durkheim's concept of collective effervescence andVictor Turner's communitas. The processual model of ritualand society contained within Durkheim's The Elementary Formsof Religious Life, similar to the one later developed by Turner,is then outlined. Durkheim's and Turner's models are compared,including their emphases on the alienating nature of social structure,and the necessity of a dialectical tension between it and collectiveeffervescence/communitas. Finally, the models are considered in lightof recent scholarship in transpersonal anthropology and the anthropologyof consciousness.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/29790651.pdf

Victor W. Turner

Papers

On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience@@@The Anthropology of Experience