ABSTRACT
In my essay ‘Genre as Social Action’, I claimed that a genre is a ‘cultural artefact’ (Miller 1984:164; corrected version Chapter 2, this volume) that is interpretable as a recurrent, significant action. At the time I didn’t think very carefully about what I meant by ‘cultural artefact’. I was, in part, trying to emphasize that a rhetorically useful notion of genre should be grounded in the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of ‘acting together’ (in Kenneth Burke’s phrase), that we should look to ethnocategories of discourse rather than to the theoretically neat classifications that seemed to control most discussions of genre at the time. I was also, in part, groping toward an understanding of the problematic relationship between action and structure that, I now realize, has engaged many others in a variety of disciplines.
