From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale

From Small Talk to Microaggression

From Small Talk to Microaggression

A History of Scale

Michael Lempert

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83248-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83250-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83249-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226832494.001.0001

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Names: Lempert, Michael, author.

Title: From small talk to microaggression : a history of scale / Michael Lempert.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024012453 | ISBN 9780226832487 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226832500 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226832494 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Conversation analysis. | Scaling (Social sciences)

Classification: LCC P95.45.L468 2024 | DDC 302.34/6—dc23/eng/20240510

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024012453

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Contents

Preface

1  Introduction: How Scale Broke the World

Part I  Fine-Grained Analysis

2  The Chattering Unconscious and the Tells of Talk

3  The First Five Minutes

4  The First Five Seconds

Part II  Small Groups

5  Rigorously, Manageably Small

6  Interaction Recorders

7  Interaction as a Liberal Technology

Part III  Micropolitics

8  The Interpersonal Gets Political

9  Interruption—and Male Supremacy

10  Tempest in the Transcript

11  Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

I am an interdisciplinary linguistic and cultural anthropologist who writes on social interaction. As a doctoral student, my interest in interaction was kindled by a minute of filmed face-to-face interaction that I studied for nearly four months. I pored over the transcript of talk I had prepared, which was dense with details, from spikes in loudness to pause lengths measured in microseconds. When my senses grew dull from replays, I was told to try muting the sound or watching in fast forward—which made those sixty seconds a strange choreography. Estrangement, I learned, was half the point of this microethnography seminar, expertly taught by Frederick Erickson at the University of Pennsylvania. Observing interaction with care required noticing what you ordinarily missed, and that meant a commitment to repeated scrutiny and experimentation with media playback.

Estrangement came somewhat easily in my case, because the clip featured two red-robed Tibetan Buddhist monks wrangling in speech and gesture over fine points of philosophy at a Buddhist center in Ithaca, New York. I had shot the video myself. I had switched into the social sciences from a humanities doctoral program in Buddhist studies. Transcripts of discursive interaction replaced seventeenth-century Tibetan texts but the substitution felt natural. Fine-grained analysis felt like another form of close reading. And Buddhist debate seemed to demand video scrutiny because this form of argumentation was visually arresting.

Erickson would sometimes pause to comment on debates about scale that haunted the study of interaction and threatened his seminar’s objectives—or at least its methods. How blinkered, a certain critic would say, that students should spend a whole semester on so little, when such data could hardly be representative of much and when urgent—larger, as the rote scalar idiom goes—issues loomed. This hands-on course was designed to impart a certain empirical sensibility about the density, subtlety, and complexity of face-to-face interaction. Limiting students to a single minute had pedagogical motivation; it was propaedeutic—not something to emulate in real research. Still, he took to heart the criticism he shared, acknowledging that his own science had evolved over the years and was no longer comfortably, complacently micro. He had coined microethnography long ago in the early 1970s, building especially upon American postwar traditions of research that used 16mm film to scrutinize interaction finely. His microethnography had also been torqued, improbably, by the civil rights movement. He trained his attention on interactions in schools, whose racial politics were notorious. With a small band of other educational researchers, he strained to pinpoint inequality and discrimination through close attention to transcripts of institutional interactions. For Erickson and many others like him, a mediatic, microscopic study of social interaction could expose power and domination at work within a key ideological apparatus in liberal capitalist democracies. The very idea that such fine-grained methods of knowing could be mobilized this way was somewhat contentious when he first proposed it, and deeply so when debates later erupted over what generally came to be called the micro–macro problem.

Indeed, not long after Erickson first proposed microethnography, a friend and fellow traveler urged him to drop the prefix micro and rebrand; otherwise, his friend warned, Erikson would get tagged as myopic, just as he had been. Criticism like this, which came in many forms but always suggested a failing that was at once epistemological and ethical, turned on assumptions about the scale of this object called interaction and the limits of methods understood to be observationally micro.

It is this criticism and its legacy that inspired this book. As a topic, interaction does not belong to any one discipline but has been important in several, including sociology (notably, the traditions of conversation analysis [CA] and symbolic interactionism), anthropology (linguistic and cultural anthropology), and linguistics (interactional sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics)—traditions I know best. From Erickson and others, I inherited a defensiveness about this object and its micro-oriented methods. Indeed, my own home field of linguistic anthropology has in general become well practiced at justifying its topics and its use—never exclusive use but use nonetheless—of what most find to be comparatively close, fine-grained, micro registers of analysis.

For fields like linguistic anthropology, scale has been a defining and generative problematic, not the least because the field itself has often been distinguished from others based on its scalar commitments, whether imputed from without—fairly or not—or passionately claimed from within the fold. From within, for instance, it has been customary to say that we differ sharply from CA in sociology. Yes, we, too, may study conversation, we say, but they are transcript-fetishizing empiricists who don’t contextualize expansively—socially, culturally, and historically—and instead try (in vain) to bracket this dense embeddedness to get at an unalloyed object. Our commitment to methodological expansiveness relative to rivals like CA has been about more than distinction, of course. It has led to generative, inspiring, thoughtful, illuminating scholarship. As a field, and as one of four subfields of anthropology, we also stand ready to respond to critics—including cultural anthropologists, our closest neighbors—who sometimes turn the same scalar argument we use on CA against us, as when they lump together traditions that study language and discourse and interaction and treat us as if we were all equally blinkered.

Even as the blustery micro–macro scale wars of decades past have largely subsided; even as many today, from critical geographers to flat ontologists, proclaim that the world doesn’t come pre-scaled and remind us that of course scale is constructed; even as scholars in linguistic anthropology like myself have devoted energy to defying critics who find our object small and our methods myopic, this history of criticism has proved surprisingly hard to shake.

To better understand this history of scale, I decided that I should rewind and watch again, to take another, closer look. I decided to look at the ways scale surfaced in and around the social sciences of interaction in the United States, especially during the formative midcentury when these sciences first crystallized.

This is not a history of interaction in the round. It is a critical anthropological history that, like the subfield of linguistic anthropology which I know best, is sensitive to the complexities of language, communication, and, indeed, interaction. I recover what scholars themselves experienced as problems of scale—problems that were by turns practical, ethical, political, epistemological, and ontological—that have come to shadow their study of interaction.

Nor does this anthropological history stay within the lanes of the lineages of interaction analysis that now exist. Asked how he’d describe himself back in 1980, Erving Goffman was characteristically cautious. He remarked on the speciation of branded research traditions focused on interaction and was reluctant to locate himself in any one of them.¹ Over the last half century, many areas have claimed an important place for interaction, including symbolic interactionism, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, microethnography, and linguistic anthropology, and while I make note of these distinctions from time to time, I am not primarily concerned with clarifying their genealogical relations let alone establishing how they might be assembled to offer a history of some superordinate object we may call interaction. Indeed, students of these schools may find themselves disappointed that this or that canonical scholar is not included or receives short shrift. As this is an anthropological history of interaction’s scale and not a history of interaction tout court, I have chosen to foreground scholars—some familiar, others not—whose work offers opportunities to reflect on the troubles over scale that are the concern of this book.

The scholars I do foreground share certain things in common. Nearly all turned to recording and playback technologies, from repurposed wax-cylinder dictation machines to 16mm film to proprietary interaction recorders. Although this is not a history of interaction, readers who seek such a history may find it helpful to see showcased here the long history of experimentation with medial technologies. But more important for this readership are the streams of research I discuss, which have been overlooked by discipline-internal histories of interaction. The ties between psychiatry—specifically talk therapy research—and interaction science examined in part 1 have been extremely important but largely forgotten. Neglected too have been feminist and educational interaction researchers from the ’70s, discussed in part 3, who started to study power, domination, and politics before other scholars of interaction did.

Discipline-internal histories of interaction in general also often skip over the midcentury in an effort to canonize early American pragmatists such as George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley, yet it was in the midcentury that interaction science took off, which makes this period and its ferment important. It is customary among linguistic anthropologists to complain about the way interaction science walled off its object as if it were autonomous if not irreducible, as if interaction were a distinct order of reality—to use Goffman’s famous term—with its own rules and regularities. I show how many midcentury scholars presumed something like this too, even if they didn’t always assert it or elaborate on it much, as scholars came to do in the ’70s and ’80s when scale became an explicit problem. If we are interested in how interaction became constituted as a domain of its own, then we must look beyond canonical figures like Erving Goffman and recover others who had once overshadowed him but later disappeared from view.

Finally, as I emphasize, the problems of scale chronicled here are hardly limited to the study of interaction, even though this object is a particularly telling one to examine. Analogous problems of scale have erupted repeatedly—if variably—and in wildly different fields, from seventeenth-century optical microscopy to twentieth-century social sciences like economics, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology; and these problems have not gone away, in part because these troubles have helped define fields. Scale is a dimension of knowledge-making that concerns not just how finely or coarsely we observe objects as well as how these objects are understood to exist; it has also affected how different fields co-exist. We cannot drop scale any more than we can step away from ourselves, but we can at least begin to appreciate how important scale has been not just epistemologically and ontologically in knowledge-making, but also in terms of conditioning interdisciplinary interaction. As an aspect of the methodological dispositions that characterize fields, scale has been by turns a shibboleth of disciplinary distinction, an ethical and political quandary, and, quite often, a knot to tease apart—or try to cut out, if it proves too stubborn to undo.

1

Introduction

How Scale Broke the World

I do not use ‘microaggression’ anymore, avows Ibram Kendi in How to Be an Antiracist. His influential 2019 book, which surged into public view during the mobilization against anti-Black racism that followed the brutal police murder of George Floyd in 2020, found fault with this familiar word. Black Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce had introduced it around 1970 to name the way white people subordinated Black people not just by gross, dramatic, obvious displays of violence but also and especially by less obvious but more frequent tactics involving interpersonal behavior. This was racism manifesting itself in microscopic fashion. To the untrained eye and ear, microaggressions could be hard to notice, yet such subtle blows . . . delivered incessantly had effects of unimaginable magnitude, for not only did they wear down an individual’s psyche and body and cause harm—including suicide; societally, they also made institutional violence possible. Indeed, the micro of microaggression denoted behaviors that were small only in some senses but not others. Taken individually, microaggressions were subtle and relatively minor but they were anything but so when you considered their frequency and effects, which is why they mattered. Overt violence against Black bodies was all too obvious to him when he wrote, but Pierce noticed something more pernicious, something that could persist even as the most extreme forms of racism subside. By itself a single . . . microaggression is relatively innocuous, yet with [the] cumulative, never-ending accretion of microaggressions, the result is to render the victim defeated, demoralized and tyrannized. For his psychiatry, it was only through addressing the interpersonal that you could treat the pathology and public health crisis that was racism.¹

Pierce’s word only found its legs later, in the 1990s, when social psychologists rediscovered it and applied it widely to the world—so widely that it became a shibboleth of progressive talk and target of conservative ire. Anti-racist workshops of many kinds, on campuses and in workplaces, have come to teach how speech and interpersonal behavior can cause harm. Yet the name came to trouble scholars and activists like Kendi who argued that interpersonal racism matters but think micro suggests—or at least has come to suggest—something small if not trivial. I detest its component parts—‘micro’ and ‘aggression,’ Kendi said, arguing that we drop the prefix micro and upgrade aggression to abuse—racist abuse. A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor, yet the prefix micro can seem to suggest this. The term microaggression, Kendi has written, downplays the gravity of the offense, fails to call anti-Black racism what it is, fails to convey the urgency for remedial action. What we need, by contrast, is zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers.² Pierce himself had been more provocative, arguing that microaggressions make their perpetrators complicit with murder.³

Kendi’s rebranding reveals his struggle to address the contested scale of interpersonal behavior, a term I will have much to say about shortly. It reveals his struggle to retain Pierce’s position that interpersonal racism matters profoundly. This, despite the fact that within progressive circles many counter that the interpersonal doesn’t matter as much as the institutional. One critique of microaggression is that the term misdirects, that it places undue focus on communication when it is structural or institutional racism that must be dismantled. Rather than being forced to choose between what appear as two scalar extremes, often alliteratively labeled the interpersonal and the institutional, many stress their complementarity and the risks of leaning too hard to one side. Take the sociologist of race, science, and technology, Ruha Benjamin. Her recent, public-facing book Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, is a corrective against her home field of sociology’s characteristic stress on the structural. While not abandoning structural change or the social movement activism exemplified by Black Lives Matter, she encourages the capacity for microvision, the need to consider a microscopic model of what it could look like to spread justice and joy in small but perceptible ways, so as to experiment at living moment to moment, situation to situation.⁴

I will soon ask that we take one step back from such vexing scalar antinomies for a moment in order to understand how they resemble questions that people have had about the scale of interaction for a very long time. Indeed, when Pierce first introduced microaggression more than a half century ago, many radical feminists were also arguing that daily communication mattered intensely, that seemingly small aspects of talk, from terms of address to speech interruptions to nonverbal behaviors like unwanted touches, kept women down in daily life. And it was daily life—not just, say, gender equity under the law—that needed transformation. Others within the women’s movement countered that the System, be it institutionalized gender discrimination or capitalism or both, mattered more.

And so the debate raged, echoing many, many antecedents. Consider a charge leveled at early English Quakers. This seventeenth-century movement had sought to reform speech and social interaction in a granular way. To cultivate indifference toward worldly status, they famously tried to avoid paying deference to other humans through honorific uses of second-person pronouns and through eschewing elevating titles and salutations and physical gestures of respect. Richard Bauman reminds us of a cutting rejoinder from William Penn aimed at all those who say Quakers strain at small things. First, nothing is small, which God makes matter of conscience to do, or leave undone. Second, since non-Quakers beat Quakers and imprison them for the way they interact, then surely such outsized reactions reveal just how significant these small things are.⁵

Rejoinders like these call to mind countless debates, inside and outside the academy, that turn on questions about the scale of social interaction. Talk among a clutch of people may feel instinctively small-scale in many ways, so if conversation is felt to have, for example, a racial or gender micropolitics, we may well wonder how this politics relates to a politics elsewhere. We may wonder not only about whether and to what extent fleeting speech and behavior matters in social life, but also how to assess interaction in general, how to weigh its importance relative to other facets or domains of social experience.

In A History of Scale, I focus on this kind of puzzlement, not because I want to settle what interaction’s true scale is, but because I want to insist that we study how people themselves struggle with questions of scale. To do this we will need to stop treating the interpersonal as a self-evident object and domain of its own, endowed with an intrinsic scale. I focus in particular on the sciences of social interaction in America which for some seventy-five years have been by turns fascinated and frustrated by the diminutive scale of their object of knowledge, and which have often had to justify why they look at so little so closely.

So closely, because what else befits a small object than fine-grained analysis? At its broadest, I look at the trouble that can come from trying to look at a thing closely, microscopically. This is a book about the unexpected effects of microscopy, as well as its allure. Not literal microscopy, involving, say, light or fluorescence or electron microscopes, but microscopy as a trope for how to know. The microscopy that concerns me belongs again to one family of sciences, the social sciences of interaction which, in America, first spread in the mid-twentieth century. As the heirs to these traditions will tell you, to know face-to-face interaction properly—which is to say, microscopically—you do not hover over one instrument but chain together several. Recording and playback technologies preserve and permit review of the sounds and images of humans talking. Faithful transcripts make legible not just what people say but exactly how they say it and sometimes also what they do with their bodies. Transcripts, in turn, allow you to conduct the fine-grained analysis necessary to know what happens when people interact. While some insist on returning to the richness of source media through repeated playback, for many others a transcript is what you analyze and is akin to a light microscope’s glass slide with specimen mounted on it.

Figure 1. Typical CA transcript whose conventions were first developed by Gail Jefferson. The transcript features nonstandard orthography intended to approximate the sounds of speech and special conventions to mark details such as speech overlap, pause lengths, and shifts in loudness. Emanuel A. Schegloff, Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65.

Transcripts assume many guises, from easily read records to dense texts that try to preserve how people speak and bristle with marks and diacritics legible to specialists. (While transcript is now the common term, suggesting conversion from sound to paper, the older typescript spotlighted the typewriter that made them.) At first many of these transcripts recycled conventions from play-scripts and novels, which tended to use standard English orthography and break up conversation into neatly delineated speaking turns. To heighten the naturalism, interaction researchers tried to restore to these texts the messiness of real talk by adding details such as interruptions, pauses, and dysfluencies like false starts (figure 1). Linguists marshaled their international phonetic alphabet to reveal the actual sounds of speech, and some even added signs for phenomena such as intonation and voice quality (figure 2). A few brave inscribers tried to show what conversationalists did with their bodies (figure 3). They used sound film to make the body visible and synchronize its shapes and movements with the flow of co-occurring speech (which was no trivial feat in the absence of nonlinear digital video playback; if you weren’t careful, frame-by-frame analysis could wreck acetate film).

Figure 2. A fine-grained transcript based on a sound recording that paired standard English orthography with highly detailed phonemic and paralinguistic transcription. Robert Everett Pittenger, Charles F. Hockett, and John J. Danehy, The First Five Minutes: A Sample of Microscopic Interview Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Martineau, 1960), 23.

These scholars of interaction imagined what they did as a kind of mediatic microscopy, a kind of close, granular viewing and hearing analogous in some way to the literal microscopes of the natural and biological sciences. Regardless of which recording and playback technologies they used, how they converted source media into the secondary media of paper transcripts and what importance these transcripts held, and, of course, how they went about analyzing these mediatic artifacts, most scholars of interaction—with some notable exceptions—have felt, and still feel, that mechanical recording is a must. No matter how powerful your memory or how well you observe, without media as capture and playback technologies, you cannot keep pace with interaction and retain its details. Interaction is too fast and fleeting, too rich and too subtle.

This mediatic science displaces a lot. Forget the tacit knowledge and savvy that comes from years of intensive socialization into life with other humans, socialization that allows you to make rapid (and usually accurate) inferences about what people mean. Forget the rules of thumb gleaned from everyday strategizing about interaction—not to mention the interpersonal dos and don’ts dispensed by cultural institutions of various kinds. As the empirical sciences of interaction came to insist, without recording-based microanalysis, as it is sometimes known, this object of knowledge will remain as elusive as respiration. We know we breathe, but reflection alone can’t tell us how or why.

Figure 3. Portion of an exceptionally fine-grained, film-based transcript that tracked body movement as a speaker utters I. W. S. Condon and W. D. Ogston, Sound Film Analysis of Normal and Pathological Behavior Patterns, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 143, no. 4 (1966): 340.

I will have quite a bit to say about what inspired this turn toward mediatic microscopy, but for now consider the sheer reach of the metaphor. That microscopy and micro- are bigger than any instrument is evident in the lexicon. Words like microscope—a neologism that dates to 1625—once denoted a narrow class of instrument but quickly inspired extensions like microscopic eye and microscopic vision for exceptional human sight, and microscopic intellect for a subtle, penetrating mind.⁶ Poetry could be figuratively microscopic; art, also. In the nineteenth century, micro- named sciences featuring microscopes, such as microcrystallography and micromineralogy, but micro would later baptize new areas of study, such as microeconomics, microsociology, and microhistory, which did not require that practitioners peer into optical magnifiers. If we leave aside the now infrequent use of micro- as a strict reference to the microscope and consider instead the broader discursive life of micro- (often meaning just small in size or extent), we can see that this prefix has attached itself to all manner of things: units like microhm, categories like microbe, instruments like micrometer, consumer appliances and electronics from microwave to microcomputer, and, indeed, the racialized violence of microaggression.⁷

In this book, I trace how social scientists repurposed recording technologies to pry into the recesses of human social interaction.⁸ As a study of metaphoric rather than literal microscopy, this book reminds us of the kaleidoscopic variety of microscopic sciences, with their different conditions of possibility, forms of technoscientific mediation, practical and epistemological labor, stakes and stakeholders, politics, ethics, and aesthetics. But this book is not solely about interaction and the microscopy used to know it but especially about a thing that would entwine, support, and constrict both: scale.

What Does Scale Mean?

The question cannot be answered, not immediately, as it is precisely what must be asked afresh. This book builds on an earlier, edited volume in which my contributors and I collectively experimented at studying scale in social life. This required that we try to bracket our scalar metalanguage to open ourselves to scale as a dimension of sociocultural practice.⁹ We argued there for a pragmatics of scale that sets aside our passionate arguments (what does scale really mean? How many scales are there and how do they relate?) in favor of examining the practices, techniques, and projects by which actors scale their worlds.

This requires patience, at the very least, with the word scale’s polysemy. Like any term that gets used a lot, scale means many things. In technical registers of scientific practice, scale can mean a quantitative or qualitative rating instrument, like a familiar five-point Likert scale that asks you to rank how much you agree or disagree. In cartography scale usually means the Euclidean geometric notion of uniform scaling, the idea that you can preserve an object’s identity—its proportionality—when you enlarge or reduce it. In microeconomics, economies of scale refers to an inverse correlation between quantitative output and total cost, where some goods can be produced cheaply only when production increases. A sense of scale familiar from social theory has to do with mereological part-whole relations, as with individuals imagined to function as contributory parts of collectivities, or localities nested or encompassed somehow within the compass of a nation-state or world-system.¹⁰ One reason not to purify scale and settle upon one definition is that distinct senses sometimes get combined in practice in ways that we should not miss.¹¹

In adopting an ethnographic stance on scale here, I will not define up-front and control the concept too tightly, because that would bleach out a notion that is rarely pure for its users, and it is the users I care about. Scale will serve as an anthropological caption for and approximation of an orientation and reality that sociohistorical agents themselves embrace, if sometimes only fitfully, unevenly, and aspirationally. My concern here is with scale as it manifests itself in and around scientific practice, but only seldom do the scholars I discuss stop and theorize scale let alone worry about terminological consistency. When prompted to talk about their methods, they may speak variously of close, fine-grained, microscopic analysis. When they reflect on the reality of what they study, they may say that they scrutinize face-to-face or small-scale encounters, which they contrast with larger units of human togetherness. Most often the actors I consider do not talk about scale so much as enact it quietly in their techniques, such as through the way they transcribe talk from recordings and strain to preserve ephemeral details that are usually lost.

But there is one basic distinction that is useful to make up-front in order to grasp many of the troubles of scale that fields have experienced, and that is a distinction between epistemological scale and ontological scale. Many in science studies would want to reject a distinction between epistemology and ontology, but we need to restore it for ethnographic purposes. Scale in its epistemological sense typically has to do with observation, as when interactionists aspire to scrutinize a few minutes of human encounter in ways they take to be close, thick, fine, granular, microscopic, and so on. Yet scale is also frequently used in an ontological sense, to refer not to how we observe or analyze but to how these observed or analyzed objects themselves exist. In a valiant effort to untangle the knot of scale in his field of human geography, Nathan Sayre makes a distinction between observational scale and operational scale, where the former is scale in its aforementioned epistemological moment, the latter in its ontological moment. Sayre separates these moments analytically in order to have us appreciate how and with what effects they come together in practice. He cares especially about the way the two can reinforce and naturalize each other such that they seem to fuse.

Sayre is right to steer our attention toward the intimate relation of epistemological and ontological scale, which is far more common and consequential than we realize. Familiar words like microorganism, for instance, can denote an organism revealed by a microscope as well as an organism that is itself micro, in the sense of being very small. As label or prefix, micro is often ambiguous in denoting epistemological and ontological scale, such that when people feel pressed to gloss it, they often find themselves sliding between the two. It is not that I wish to hold these two senses apart analytically in a bid to solve our troubles with scale. I separate these senses only to make us alive to their interplay. Again and again, I will highlight the productive back and forth between these two dimensions of scale. We will see how micro and cognate terms denote at once, or by turns, a fine-grained register of observation and a relatively small object, level, or order of social reality. We will see at other times how scholars become aware of what they take to be a troubling conflation of epistemological and ontological scale and work to disentangle and purify the two, as if to remind their peers—and especially their critics—that of course they know observational scale is just a matter of perspective, that the world itself is not carved up by scale.

There is much to appreciate about observational scale itself, apart from its entanglement with scalar ontology. Sayre also offers a definition of observational scale drawn from ecology that has analogs in other fields. Observational scale involves two parameters, grain and extent.¹² Grain here means units of measurement whereas extent means spatial and temporal reach. Consider a meter stick, he says, whose grain is a millimeter, extent is a meter, and which can be used to measure the length of all sorts of different things.¹³ The distinction between grain and extent shows up in many fields, even as it is understood and treated differently. As I note again and again in these pages, the two are almost always taken to be inversely correlated. If you want to cover a lot, spatially or temporally, most feel that you can’t do so finely, just as fine-grained analysis requires a concession: that you look at less. (This may get its matter-of-factness from the way humans get maximal visual acuity by fixing an object in their narrow line of sight.)¹⁴ Big data enthusiasts boast that they have the computational power to overcome this and do fine-grained and extensive analysis simultaneously, thereby unseating this conventional methodological wisdom; their ambitions notwithstanding, most think you must sacrifice extent for grain to look closely.

Sayre’s discussion of observational scale is elegant, though in privileging measurement, it cannot accommodate the variety of scalar epistemologies we encounter ethnographically and historically. Different fields have different investments in epistemological scale and have elaborated and debated it variously. And while I follow his lead in examining the epistemological and ontological dimensions of scale—as an ethnographic distinction—we must recognize that this does not exhaust scale as discourse and practice.

We need only remember the resonant contrast between thick and thin description, which Clifford Geertz adapted from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and made famous in his push for an interpretive anthropology. Thick description was what ethnographers provided, when they showed how humans imbued social life with meaning, revealing semiotically distinct kinds of winks where their scientistic peers could only see objectively indistinguishable blinks, as Ryle’s analogy went. Thick and thin were not directly about observational scale but quickly got linked to it, as Geertz capped off his discussion of thick description with a bold declaration of its final characteristic: it is microscopic. I will not reprise here all the memorable clarifications and qualifications that followed, like, the anthropologist characteristically approaches . . . broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters; "anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . .); they study in villages; they confront . . . the same grand realities and move from local truths to general visions without the frantic size-up-and-solve" strategies of other social sciences.¹⁵ Let us only remember how thick description became a sensorial trope for a scaled register of disciplinary knowing. Whether visual or haptic, the thick-thin contrast conjured a sense or feeling of epistemological scale—what contemporary linguistic anthropologists would understand as qualia (sensory experiences of abstract qualities such as heat, texture, color, sound, stink, hardness, and so on, as Lily Chumley writes).¹⁶ Thickness and thinness chained together associations that stretched beyond epistemology—and beyond observational scale—and thus had implications for scholarly being as much as knowing. Not unlike the multimodality of lifestyle commodification, where dress, bodily comportment, hair style, and so on, get so tightly bundled that, in tugging on one, you pull up the rest by implication, so, too, have scalar distinctions often become forms of distinction that involve a whole characterology (what kind of scholar, with what attributes, with what politics, would choose to go thick or thin, close or distant, micro or macro?). Although I devote my energies to understanding the epistemological and ontological life of scale, at times I follow scale beyond itself. I note, for instance, how the small scale of the interpersonal could be gendered and binarized as soft, or how a supremely focused, doggedly microscopic gaze could instead be gender-coded male; how scrutiny of the small could be politically subversive for the way it promised to expose and end domination in everyday life, or how it could be a symptom of a slow, patient (read: complicit) liberalism. To study scale ethnographically is to go beyond it.

But how should we do this? Bruno Latour once advised that we should not settle scale in advance, because scale is artifice, the actor’s own achievement.¹⁷ In social theory, he complained that "we tend to think of scale—macro, meso, micro—as a well-ordered zoom. Zooms, panoramas, the local"—these are effects, and we need to appreciate what they do and how they are enacted. But the problem with exploding the analytics of scale at the same time that we call for its study is that we usually stop at demolition. Indeed, until recently, few studies made scale-making an explicit focus, with some notable exceptions.¹⁸

Ethnographically, studying scale-making requires reflexivity, for as Gabrielle Hecht reminds us, scale is "both a category of analysis and a category of practice."¹⁹ This reflexivity does not just require the usual anthropological bracketing of readymade distinctions so that we don’t impose them on what we study. It must also include a serious investigation into how we—within and across our respective fields—scale our objects of knowledge.

This does not mean that scholars of interaction invented interaction’s diminutive scale, as we might say in an older, constructivist idiom. People hardly need a science to tell them that interaction is comparatively small, because they are primed to discover this scalar truism through the way they habitually interact. As the ethologists of human interaction like to observe, when we talk face-to-face, we tend to stand close. In open spaces, we congregate in clusters, in what Erving Goffman called eye-to-eye ecological huddles,²⁰ so as to monitor each other’s communications with ease. Greetings and leave-taking expressions bound off conversations in time, opening and closing them, as if these were discrete and finite. Words can sometimes reinforce this. Apart from whatever else the metonymic expression face-to-face may suggest, it confirms scalar intuitions. It suggests a physical immediacy of human copresence and contact that we tend to contrast with spatially and temporally distributed and highly mediated kinds of human connectivity, be it digitally mediated or what not. This scalar ontology of interaction, this version of conversational reality as a compact, neatly perimeterized event, with channels dug by interactants themselves, is not the only one available, however.²¹ By contrast, conversationalists themselves sometimes become acutely aware of the porosity of their little huddles and the extraordinary reach of their talk. (As