ABSTRACT
For me, stepping into the world of social theory was a little like my first visit to an African market about fifteen years ago-a veritable overload of thoughts and sensations. From the standpoint of the entrance, the directions in which you can take appear limitless. Your eyes catch hold of strange, colorful objects of all shapes and sizes, stuffed into rows of stalls that branch off into endless intricate mazes. A dizzying cacophony of languages and unknown sounds and smells have an intoxicating effect. You take several moments to scope out your field of vision. You spot ordinary thingsearrings and fabric-whose uses are immediately evident. Other objects, a vegetable, for example, you only recognize as a vegetable; you have no sense of how it is to be prepared, or with what else it might be served, or what spices bring out its flavor. Finally, you choose a path, by instinct more than a sense of purpose or any confidence of what might be around the next corner. You come across beautiful sculptures and masks. You sense, even know, they hold symbolic significance and histories and perhaps practical functions, but while you recognize their beauty and the type of wood from which they’re carved, the meanings of these objects remain obscure.
