Blurring personal and impersonal levels of social experience obscures analysis

Evidence

To some extent, the institutions of industrial society justify a theoretical stance in which the personal-impersonal distinction remains blurred. But a study such as this one, of life on the margins of the modern state, requires that the difference between levels of social experience be kept in sharp focus. A similar problem arose when anthropologists turned to the analysis of kinship in stateless societies. Here the largest political groups, such as clans, are often represented as being like families. Yet Fortes (for example 1958).showed that the political and domestic levels were often contradictory and should be kept analytically separate. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2425

Categorization

• XREF: Fortes’s insistence on separating domestic from political levels parallels the reader’s need to keep Saramago’s order-breaking separate from order-restoring phases rather than conflating them.