ABSTRACT
Part of what it means to be a member of a culture is knowing the difference, and knowing how to talk about the difference, between riddles and jokes, tragedy and comedy, musicals and thrillers. Genre is, amongst other things, a matter of discrimination and taxonomy: of organising things into recognisable classes. In this respect it belongs to a much larger group of classifying activities that permeate every aspect of daily life, from informal and ad hoc ones like sorting out dirty dishes from clean ones, to more formalised ones like planning a meal or buying the right set of tools for a job. All of these activities involve the use of knowledges which are embedded in the flow of everyday practices.
