As I suggested in chapter 1, a basic issue with which the multimodal framework is concerned is the relationship between, in conventional terms, individual and culture (or society). In that chapter I spoke of Type I and Type II ‘readings’ of the ‘social manifold’, corresponding to what Popper, Agassi and others have termed ‘individualist’ and ‘holist’ perspectives, and I suggested that we might look for a third type of reading (Type III) that belonged to neither category.

Both Type I and Type II readings have been important in the history of anthropology and the other social sciences. To the extent that anthropology has been a study of ‘cultures’ and/or ‘societies’ rather than of individuals it has tended to Type II formulations. An insistence on Type II formulations was the essence of the Durkheimian position, and it is not surprising that Louis Dumont, in many ways a self-consciously Durkheimian anthropologist, declared this to be the central social-scientific insight, the ‘sociological apperception’ (Dumont 1970: 39ff.). He could as well have said the ‘anthropological apperception’, at any rate with reference to the British and French traditions of social anthropology, and to an influential part of American anthropology.

At the same time, it has been generally characteristic of anthropology that such theoretical work as has taken place within the discipline has been done by people who were also involved in ethnographic field research with specific human societies (as contrasted with, for example, sociology, where many of the most significant theorists have done little or no empirical research).