Ray Jackendoff impressed me in a talk last night with a tour de force of cognitive science applied to social life—what Erving Goffman would have called performance in everyday life. Author of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Jackendoff holds out the hope that a model inspired by language might illuminate many facets of social life. He wants to know: what structures of the mind might lead to structures of culture?

It's a hard line to toe because, although recently cognitive scientists have made a lot of press by criticising (what they call) postmodernists' handwaving arguments that all is socially constructed, there are real difficulties in articulating an authoritative theory of cultural difference from the point of view of one's own culture (which is necessarily the point of view from which one works). When structuralist anthropolgists undertook this project fifty years ago, asserting that there was a universal structure to human culture—though it manifests in many different ways--they ended up with a bunch of tenuous and general propositions that tell us little about who we are. To make two distinct things look the same, they had to discard significant features.

More on this to come.