Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life

Front matter

Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life/ / li

EDITED BY E. Summerson Carr Michael Lempert

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Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Introduction: Pragmatics of Scale

PART ONE. SCALAR PROJECTS: PROMISES AND PRECARITIES 1. Projecting Presence: Aura and Oratory in William Jennings Bryan’s Presidential Races Richard Bauman 2. Interaction Rescaled: How Buddhist Debate Became a Diasporic Pedagogy Michael Lempert 3. Shrinking Indigenous Language in the Yukon Barbra A. Meek

PART TWO. INTERSCALARITY: IMAGINATION AND INSTITUTION 4. Scale-Making: Comparison and Perspective as Ideological Projects Susan Gal 5. Balancing the Scales of Justice in Tonga Susan U. Philips xi viii CONTENTS

Part Three. Predatory Scales: Encompassment And Evaluation

7. Scaling Red and the Horror of Trademark Constantine V. Nakassis

8. Semiotic Vinification and the Scaling of Taste Michael Silverstein

9. Going Upscale: Scales and Scale-Climbing as Ideological Projects Judith T. Irvine

Acknowledgments References Cited Contributors Index

233 235 251

1.1. 1.2.

1.3.

7.2.

ILLUSTRATIONS

William Jennings Bryan, 1896 27

Bryan campaign poster, 1896, “Cross of Gold” speech 28

“Blowing Himself around the Country; political cartoon from

Bryan's whistle-stop speech in Wellsville, Ohio, 1896 34

National Phonograph Company advertisement 41

Suggestions to record dealers for a “Bryan Window” 45

William Jennings Bryan windows 45

Census data on language in Canada from 1996, 2001, and 2006 73 Aboriginal language endangerment in the Yukon Territory, Canada 77 Languages spoken by Kaska First Nations populations 81

Speaker competence in relation to potential role as aboriginal language instructor 84

Individuals who could potentially gain fluency in Kaska quickly 84 Fluency scaled in relation to potential to learn 85

Fractal recursions in Gabor and Galasi’s argument 108

“Monolith” 137

Scaling the monolith, still from 2001: A Space Odyssey 141

Docking relations 150

Docking relations 150

Scaling disaster: head of the Tsunami Evacuation Interpretive Trail 151 Christian Louboutin’s registered trademark for “a lacquered red sole on footwear” 160

Yves Saint Laurent’s “DNA of the Brand—YSL Colors” 161 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

73. Au-Tomotive Gold keychain, VW registered trademark, and VW key chain 176

8.1. Evaluative dimensions of the serial phases of the aesthetic encounter with wine 190

8.2. The “eucharistic” semiotics of aesthetic evaluative discourse 197

8.3. The “aroma wheel” 200

8.4. Advertisement for Colombian coffee growers 205

TABLES

. A Wine-Tasting Note by Sir Michael Broadbent, Formerly of Christies 189

. Genre Structure of the Wine-Tasting Note of Table 8.1, Exemplifying

Register Usage 191

. Tasting Notes on 2007 Puligny Montrachet, Folatieres 193

Genre Structure of the Wine Advocate Wine-Tasting Note of Table 8.3, Exemplifying Register Usage 193

. Genre Structure of the Stephen Tanzer Wine-Tasting Note of Table 8.3,

Exemplifying Register Usage 193

. Wine-Note-Like Coffee-Tasting Notes from a 1991 Starbucks

Customer Flyer 204 Starbucks’ Explanation of “Barista Talk” for Its Retail Customers 206 Barista “Rant” about an Encounter with a Noncompliant Customer 207 xi

Introduction

Pragmatics of Scale

In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?

—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK

How can one man fathom the sheer magnitude of a sperm whale when all that lie before him are skeletal remains? Melville forewarns that landsmen are not equipped to imagine something so great, their brains being yoked like cattle when it comes to matters of scale. Thus, he assigns his narrator, Ishmael, a daunting task—that is, to communicate the leviathan to those who cannot see, nor even imagine it for themselves.

To that end, Ishmael is intent on producing a “particular, plain statement” that “touch[es] the living bulk” At first, he resorts to measurement. He makes a “careful calculation” of the whale’s length and circumference, converting what one could measure of the bones with certain equipment on hand to the weight of the behemoth’s past flesh in tons. Ishmael grows the whale by way of numbers, thus relying on the authority of quantification. Still, this quantification is apparently not enough, since Ishmael exploits professional allegiance as well as arithmetic to do his scalar work. His calculations are based on citing, and relying upon, Captain Scoresby, whose surname not so subtly suggests that quantifications must be socially qualified. In this, Ishmael concedes that the problem of scale eludes any hope of unadorned description. He finds that he must rely on rhetoric to make big and render real both the bygone “living bulk” and the actual skeletal remains that now stand before him.

Sensing that neither the appeal to maritime expertise nor the cool, authoritative objectivity of measurement can transport the innumerate landsmen, Ishmael offers a poignant analogy so as to better apprehend the whale’s greatness. He scales the whale in reference to the human body: one ton, he reckons, equals thirteen men, which means that the whale “considerably outweigh[s]” a whole village. Through this calculus, he zooms out from the most immediate comparable unit, the whaler’s own body, until he reaches that of a village, thereby offering a palpable sense of enormity. Ishmael thereby dwarfs, in aggregate, the members of his audience, just as he once had been dwarfed by the towering beast in the awesome event of the still unanalyzed encounter. In other words, his exercise in scale is a lesson in perspective, an attempt to get his land-bound audience to see what and how the whaler has seen. After all, if the leviathan is to be made myth out of a single man’s phantasm, the whaler’s calculations must be collectively apprehended.

In describing the whale, he goes on to suggest that there is something enduring, if not eternal, about its qualities, thereby further enriching a statement that once promised to be simple, empirical, plain. Scaling, it turns out, may organize not only spatial relations but spatiotemporal ones as well. Indeed, when one tries to apprehend things and their qualities, a present moment may be linked to and authorized by a moment figured far back or projected forward in time. In order to determine when and where we are, we may evoke a grand continuity, if not an evolution. The scaling of the whale in temporal terms is evident as Ishmael continues:

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.

Here we see that a ready sign of frailty, of death—a creature's very skeleton—is represented as that which endures like heavy masonry. Indeed, Ishmael begins this passage implying there is something mighty, if not godly, in the Gothic construction of the whale. However remote to the imagination the creature may at first have seemed, note that the leviathan is ultimately rendered approachable by even the most ungodly among us, from pool sharks to cannibal urchins.

Note further how Ishmael offers this gift of perspective to his audience by way of explicit comparisons, reminding us that scaling not only involves manipulating standardized measures but deploying metaphor as well. In tracing the vertebrae, Ishmael moves analogically from spirelike majesty to childlike play, and from the solid, heavy greatness of the past to a highly malleable, quotidian present. He sets before the mind’s eye an array of things whose qualities and relations give both the impression of a great spatial and temporal scale, and a vantage from which to study it, a view from somewhere. The passage thereby reminds us that, as human beings, we are uniquely endowed with the powers of perspective, which unyoke the imagination and allow us to steal, play with, and ultimately manage even the most initially awesome spectacles of our worlds. After all, we can see that the huge is but a marble or a pool ball if we look at it in a certain way. When we scale, we orient, compare, connect, and position ourselves so that “even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play?

Like Melville’s account of one eloquent oarsman, this volume demonstrates that the scales that social actors rely upon to organize, interpret, orient, and act in their worlds are not given but made—and rather laboriously so. For to scale is not simply to assume or assert “bigness” or “smallness” by way of a ready-made calculus. Rather, and as we have seen above, people use language to scale the world around them. Indeed, even the greatness of whales must be discursively forged out of comparisons and distinctions among potentially scalable entities (bones, men, villages, spires, billiard balls) and qualities (weight, height, length, circumference, and structural integrity). Although things can be made big though analogy, scale-making always also entails drawing distinctions, between the bigness of a whale’s rib and the smallness of a marble, for instance. As an inherently relational and comparative endeavor, scaling may thus connect and even conflate what is geographically, geopolitically, temporally, or morally “near” while simultaneously distinguishing that nearness from that which is “far.” Similarly, scaled hierarchies are the effects of efforts to sort, group, and categorize many things, people, and qualities in terms of relative degrees of elevation or centrality. Think, for example, of the way one entity or domain seems to encompass another, as with maps that subordinate localities within higher order administrative units, or of the way nation-states are commonly thought to hover “above” communities.

The fact that scaling involves vantage points and the positioning of actors with respect to such vantage points means that there are no ideologically neutral scales, and people and institutions that come out “on top” of scalar exercises often reinforce the distinctions that so ordained them. In other words, the scales that seem most natural to us are intensively institutionalized, and that is why collectives readily accept that the leviathan of the State or God hovers above landsmen, or that one realm of political or ritual authority encompasses another. Yet people are not simply subject to preestablished scales; they develop scalar projects and perspectives that anchor and (re)orient themselves. Working from the premise that scale is process before it is product, this volume is dedicated to explaining how, why, and to what ends people and institutions scale their worlds.

THE PROBLEMS OF SCALE

Over the last several decades, a diverse group of scholars across a range of disciplines have suggested that scholarly analysis is yoked by limited understandings of scale.’ For instance, the problem of scale has been taken up concertedly in cultural geography so as to liberate “procrustean research that attempts to fit complex spatial politics within the narrow confines of a handful of conceptually given scales such as the local, national or global” (Moore 2008, 211; see also Marston 2000; Taylor 1982). Critical geographers, like Erik Swyngedouw, have underscored that “scalar configurations [are] the outcome of socio-spatial processes that regulate and organise social power relations” (2004, 26). And, in an effort to capture the manifold ways in which actors can in turn manipulate and sometimes defy the scalar formations they confront in social life, geographer Neil Smith wrote a set of influential essays on scale-”jumping” (1992) and scale-”bending” (2004).

Critical theorizations of scale can be found in a number of other disciplines, if far too rarely. In gender studies, the division of the “private” and “personal” versus the “public” and “political” has been addressed as a problem of scale, with scholars working to add empirical and theoretical weight to the feminist adage that the personal is political (e.g., Berlant 1997, 2008; Gal 2002; Steedman 1987). Many in science studies have insisted that in order to theorize the travels and translations of forms of knowledge, informants’ scalar distinctions, like “bench-to-bedside,” must be interrogated rather than simply adopted (Sunder Rajan, and Leonelli 2013; see also Lynch 1985; Yaneva 2005). And in sociology, the enduring methodological standoff between the “macro” and the “micro” has led to a number of recent proposals, perhaps most prominent and compelling of which is Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which begins with the assertion that there are no intrinsic differences between these so-called domains of sociological study (Callon and Latour 1981; Callon 1986; 2013; Latour 2005; see also Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel 1981). The task of the analyst, they further suggest, is to leave behind a priori scalar distinctions and instead empirically track how social actors carve and cleave—or scale—their worlds.

The problem of scale has long been a concern in anthropology as well, as we attempt to connect what we conceive as events with the longue durée, fleeting face-to-face interaction with durable social institutions, or the long arm of global media with discrete points of its putative reception. In a sense, anthropology from its inception has been preoccupied with matters of scale, focused as we have been on questions about what is particular to the places and peoples we study, and what, if anything, is shared by humanity as a whole. For over two decades now, ethnographies of globalization have complicated cartographies that break the world into discrete nation-states and exposed networks and flows that may intersect with such official geographies of power but are often orthogonal to them (for example, Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997; Chu 2010; Helmreich 2009). For instance, Arjun Appadurai’s (2006) Fear of Small Numbers reflects on the manner in which “cellular globalization, whether that of “terror” networks or transnational activists, threatens to dispense with the nation-state, for ill and for good. Similarly, in Alien Oceans, Stefan Helmreich underscores that the “local and global are effects—not preconditions of how genome science [that he studies] is narrated” (2009, 173).

A few anthropologists have concertedly and critically examined the scalar habits of the discipline. For instance, Marilyn Strathern, who defines scale as “the organization of perspectives on objects of knowledge and enquiry” (2004, xvi), suggests that anthropological analysis is, in its very essence, a scale-making endeavor. It is so because ethnographers must find ways to cope with cultural complexity so as to make it legible, and to do so, we tack back and forth between different ways of looking at the same things, whether through different sets of eyes, with different degrees of focus, or with different ways of relating to our object, as distinctive, singular, composite, or metonymic.

Anthropologist Anna Tsing, who originally took up the notion of scale in her 2008 book Friction, worries that “scale has become a verb that requires precision; to scale well is to develop the quality called scalability, that is, the ability to expand—and expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements” (2012, 505; see also 2015). What is lost, she asks, when we continue to think in metonyms, as if the corporation is just a “bigger” version of the individual, for instance? In light of these questions, Tsing urges anthropologists to interrogate “ideologies of scale” (2000, 347) and attend to “scale making” projects (2000, 2012, 2015). Along similar lines, James Ferguson (2006) has written about how stubborn “topographies of power”—that is, conceptual scales that project that the international, national, and civil stand in tiered relationship—make it difficult if not impossible for analysts to track how contemporary African politics actually unfold, as nongovernmental organizations use state letterhead and guerilla armies fight having been trained in China and funded by American right-wing churches. Like Latour and Callon, he suggests that social analysts should be prepared to travel analytically on a “flatter” terrain in order to appreciate how scales are produced and used to structure knowledge and social relations.

Indeed, anthropologists have grown increasingly impatient about scale as a heuristic, though alternative analytics have been hard to come by. Consider an essay in the journal Cultural Anthropology, in which one young anthropologist notes that many in the Occupy Movement have been captivated by the scalar antinomies of “the local” and “global, geopolitical categories that they then ethically elaborate into a narrative of the corrupt “They” of global finance versus the communal, democratic, activist “We” (Glück 2013). He urges anthropologists to follow the lead of the most sophisticated of the Occupy activists, who have jettisoned such seductive scalar tropes and refocused their energies on reimagining and erecting alternative scalar formations like “interurban” networks and “Inter-Occupy.” This pragmatic approach to questions of scale can be found in a handful of recent ethnographies, such as Timothy Choy’s (2011) account of how Hong Kong environmentalists build scalar analytics through which they can project various forms of “specificity,” and Stefan Helmreich’s (2009) ethnography of marine biologists’ fascinating attempts to scale the sea. This important work notwithstanding, even those of us anthropologists who document scale-making projects still regularly slip back into assuming that scales are ontological givens, suggesting their stubborn grip on our thinking.

In linguistic anthropology, more specifically, a critical interest in scale began to emerge as the spatiotemporal boundaries of its objects of analysis—such as “language, “discourse; “interaction,” and the “speech event”—were questioned rather than assumed. The rediscovery of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings encouraged attention to the pervasive presence of other voices in what apparently single speakers say and made it difficult to maintain that speech is ever anchored in any one place and time. Accordingly, research in the past decade on “interdiscursivity” and “intertextuality” has stressed just how porous the spatial and temporal boundaries of communicative events can be. Rather than treat episodes of communication as if they were always already neatly circumscribed, linguistic anthropologists have instead effectively explored how event boundaries and interevent relations are forged by actors through discursive practice itself (see especially Agha 2005). Indeed, the actors we study habitually point to, cite, reanimate, and repurpose text and talk that they understand to be located “elsewhere” in time and space, thereby troubling our very sense of where they stand. In taking seriously actors’ busy event-linking, relation-making labor, one acquires a keen sensitivity both to process and practice, a sensitivity that we, in this volume, share.

In sociolinguistics, some scholars have turned to scale to expose how languages under globalization are “organized on different, layered (i.e., vertical rather than horizontal) scale-levels” (Blommaert 2010, 5), an insight indebted in part to Wallersteinian world-system theory. Indeed, standard languages are frequently imagined and institutionally positioned as translocal compared to other language varieties, which has obvious consequences for the perpetuation of social and political inequities, given that competence in a standard language is unevenly distributed in multilingual nation-states. In this sense, language is seen as a resource that enables or inhibits scalar mobility. Sociolinguistic research also considers how actors negotiate and sometimes help reproduce preexisting scalar formations with the aid of language. For instance, Jan Blommaert (2007, 6) offers this elegant little illustration:

Student: “Tll start my dissertation with a chapter reporting on my fieldwork?

Tutor: “We start our dissertations with a literature review chapter here”

The tutor, explains Blommaert, (2007, 6), performs what he and others call a “scale-jump” “in which s/he moves from the local and situated to the translocal and general, invoking practices that have validity beyond the here-and-now.”

A sensitivity to language, combined with an attention to the capacity of actors to negotiate scalar distinctions, is notable in Charles and Clara Mantini-Briggs’s (2004) ethnography of conspiracy narratives in the 1992-1994 cholera epidemics of eastern Venezuela. They describe how health officials racialized indigenous victims, blaming their indigeneity for their failure to distinguish natural from cultural causes of disease and their habit of turning to traditional healers when they should have chosen biomedical care. Assumed by the state to be trapped by this dense locality, indigenes responded defiantly. Specifically, they hatched conspiratorial narratives, which “involve impressive leaps of scale, as they connected the deaths of relatives and neighbors with racial conflicts, national policies, international relations, and transnational corporations’ (Briggs 2004, 175). Not only did their stories about cholera seem to “leap” between what was already understood to be local and global (a common feature of conspiracy reasoning, as Fredric Jameson [1992] and others have remarked [Marcus 1999]), but they often did so with such force that they pierced that scalar imaginary itself, “making the notion that members of ‘traditional’ communities cannot see beyond local horizons or rigid cognitive patterns and fixed points of reference seem ludicrous” (Briggs 2004, 175). The question remains as to whether the now common trope of “leaping” or “jumping” scales (see also Smith 1992) denaturalizes or reifies the scalar divides being crossed.

In pursuing the ethnography of scale, we will inevitably find that tropes like scalar “leaps” or “jumps,” or the often-used idea of scaling “up” or “down” do not mean any one thing across cases and should not be treated as stable analytic terms. Furthermore, these tropes hardly exhaust the dynamics of scale but rather invite us to recognize that there is much more drama to scale—plot and character, stakes and consequences—than generic, analytical scalar distinctions suggest. In all these cases, we want to remain critical when actors or analysts naturalize what they claim to cross, bend, or leap over, as if such scales were always already there, waiting to be inhabited, manipulated, or traversed.

SIGN ACTIVITY AND THE (UN)MAKING OF “MICRO”

AND “MACRO”

Despite all these thoughtful interventions, the problem of scale persists in anthropology and beyond. Think, for instance, of the continued adherence to the macro-micro distinction and tendency to assign political economy to the former, face-to-face interaction to the latter. Think, too, how we continue to divvy up academic labor accordingly and not uncommonly with a lack of respect “as when anthropologists alternate between accusing one another now of myopia, now of panoptics” (Strathern 2004, xv). This disrespect stems in part from a conviction that scalar perspectives in scholarship, institutionalized as they are in our disciplines (e.g., micro versus macro sociology or history or economics), limit what and how we can see and know. Disciplinary scaling is felt to have epistemological and, by extension, ethicopolitical consequences. Ignore, say, the capitalist world-economy, and we will fail to see the real, systemic causes of inequality, making our research not just blinkered but complacent. Alternatively, humanist critics typically complain, for instance, “that analysis in terms of the world-system entails a fatal disrespect for culture, or subjectivity, or difference, or agency, or the local” (Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi 2011, 5).

Again and again, we find ourselves intellectually stymied in micro-macro standoff. While many of us feel that such a priori scaling of social and intellectual life is unproductive, even obfuscating—and have had plenty of reminders that this is so—we continue to rely upon categories such as macro and micro as if they were something other than the products of our own or others’ classifying activities (cf. Barnes 2001). We ontologize scalar perspectives, rather than ask how they were forged and so focused. Indeed, it is all too easy to proceed with our analyses as if the oft-critiqued but still-convenient tiers of macro, meso, and micro were the ready-made platforms for social practice, as if social life simply unfolded in more or less intimate, proximate, local, grounded, or contained situations.

How might we open up analyses beyond these stubborn scalar distinctions so that we are then in a position to understand the scalar practices of social life? This volume responds by paying special attention to the semiotic means by which social actors and analysts scale our worlds. In doing this, we circumvent familiar prejudices about the purportedly inherent micro scale of signs, including the widespread assertion that the origin of language is in the minds of discrete individuals, or that face-to-face “interaction” is inescapably local. After all, such a view scales language use before our investigation can even begin. Nor do we assert that sign behavior is somehow foundational—a view that would risk smuggling back in the idea that semiosis is somehow underneath other, more macro orders of existence, perhaps even generative of them.

Rather, we take a semiotic approach because we regard it as an especially powerful ethnographic strategy for showing how scale is a practice and process before it is product. Inclined to explore how event-boundaries and social relations are forged, figured, and sorted by actors through their discursive practice, we can elucidate the process of scaling with marked clarity. Ethnographically, the chapters that follow document the complexities of scale as it is produced and experienced in the social worlds we study, challenging the presumed fixity of ready-made analytic scale(s). Embarking from the conviction that social analysis should resist the urge to “settle scale in advance” (Latour 2005, 220), we are especially interested in elaborating the work required to bring scale into being and make it matter in social and cultural life. Accordingly, we do not wish to pin down the definition of scale or list all possible scalar distinctions, nor even to catalogue the ways it is made in the fields that we study. Instead, we encourage an empirical and theoretical openness to learn about social life and action by examining the diverse ways that scales are conceived, cultivated, practiced, and institutionalized.

THE PRAGMATICS OF SCALE

To attend to the pragmatics of scale means—most fundamentally—to take a critical distance from given scalar distinctions, whether our own or others, and focus instead on the social circumstances, dynamics, and consequences of scale-making as social practice and project. Since scales are the more or less stable effect of people’s conceptual and practical labor, we begin with an inquiry into how the fields we study have been scaled as they have, whether in relation to the bigness of a whale, the intimacy and efficacy of a communal here and now, or the qualities of some media that prompt people to call it “mass.” We assume that the scales we encounter in our studies have been built—that is conceptualized and materialized—for the convenience of scale-makers, as pragmatists in their own right. But since scale-making projects are also often institutionalizing projects, in which a particular way of seeing and being is socially enforced (Gal this volume; Irvine this volume), we are especially careful to attend to power in the pragmatics of scale—that is, how some positions and perspectives are privileged at the expense of others as scales are institutionalized.

If in one way our approach to scale is pragmatic in the most colloquial sense of analytically prioritizing situated practical matters over general principles, readers may also find evidence of an affinity with, if not an allegiance to, the early American pragmatism of writers such as Peirce, James, and Dewey. Along these lines, this volume examines not just how scale materializes but also how and why scale matters. Indeed, the chapters that follow ask what scalar distinctions illuminate for social actors, empirically speaking, and how these distinctions serve as the basis of practical action. After all, scales are useful, in part, because they help people orient their actions, organize their experience, and make determinations about who and what is valuable. As we will see, scaling can allow us to imagine some things, encounters, or events as status elevating, as Silverstein (this volume) shows for wine and wine talk, or democratizing and intimate, as Bauman (this volume) shows as he chronicles William Jennings Bryan’s populist speaking tour in 1896. Communities can be constituted in part by scalar regimes, as when a nation-state engaged in a politics of recognition uses scalar methods to monitor and “respect” the health of its minority citizens (Meek this volume). To be sure, scales are ways of seeing and standing in the world, and as such, they are also instruments for political, ritual, professional, and everyday action. Consider that the whole field of American social work education has been organized into subfields of micro-, meso-, and macro-level practice. To study scale, then, is to examine how the ideals of social life stand in tension with notions of what is practically achievable. In this sense, we treat scale as a problem that social actors, as pragmatists in their own right, seek to solve.

Last but not least, we speak of a pragmatics of scale to signal our interest in sign behavior as an especially effective material for scale-making. Yet whereas pragmatics, as a branch of linguistics, is perhaps best known as a method for demonstrating the influence of social context on meaningfulness, we do not wish to assume context in advance, but instead look at how contextual boundaries are discursively drawn by social actors who differentiate one place, time, social position, or experience from another. In other words, we are centrally interested in how scales are assembled, made recognizable, and stabilized through various communicative practices. For if it seems obvious that a whale is huge, we must remember the semiotic labor of one whaler stitching together a mass of bones with so many discursive threads.