Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge. Selected Readings is an anthology of readings in cultural anthropology and the sociology of knowledge, edited by
Mary Douglas and first published by
Penguin Books in 1973 in their series Penguin Modern Sociology Readings. The background to the selection and the treatment of the 45 excerpts provided was a course on
cognitive anthropology taught by Douglas at
University College London. She not only selected the readings, but also provided a general introduction to the volume and a brief introduction to each of the eight sections.[1] The theme running throughout is that "reality is socially constructed".[2]
Contents
A number of writers are represented by multiple excerpts in more than one section. Each is listed below only at first mention.
Part Five, "The Limits of Knowledge", again uses Wittgenstein and Husserl, as well as
Basil Bernstein.
Part Six, "Interpenetration of Meanings", provides an excerpt from D. R. Venables and R. E. Clifford, Academic Dress of the University of Oxford (1957), as well as from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), from an anonymous 19th-century etiquette manual (1872), from
Lucy Grace Allen's Table Service (1915), and from the 7th edition of Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (1943) by
Adrian Fortescue and
John Berthram O'Connell.