Concluding: On the Centrality of the Evanescent

Abstract

The issue of analysing and understanding the dynamics and significance of the oral communicative moment is not a new one. The previous chapter has outlined some of the approaches that have been taken in a number of fields of academic investigation. In 1895 one of the founding fathers of sociology and social anthropology, Emile Durkheim, pointed to the significance of a whole range of phenomena (which he was seeking to establist as ‘social facts’) that required their own method of investigation and an acknowledgement of their own disciplinary demands, some of which lay outside the ‘crystallized form’ of established beliefs and practices that were visible in ‘legal and moral regulations, religious faiths, financial systems’. These were no less social facts for Durkheim even though they were more fluid ‘social currents’ rather than social institutions. While his focus was upon establishing ‘rules of sociological method’ at the birth of the modern discipline of sociology, his description of ‘social facts’ that fall outside of the framework of social institutions chimes closely with the concerns that this book has pursued: Since the examples we have just cited (legal and moral regulations, religious faiths, financial systems, etc.) all consist of established beliefs and practices, one might be led to believe that social facts exist only where there is some social organization.