Afterword: What is an institution?

What is an institution?We successively examine definitions provided by Durkheim, Mauss, Parsons, Goffman

and Berger, and Luckman. Whilst anthropologists acknowledge that the stuff of human institutions is ‘the

combination ofmodes of actionwithmodes of thinking’, somehow they have seen the epitome of that embodied

in the compulsory organisations of modern, state-run,Western society. The paper argues for the abandonment

of representational solutions, which operate with a Cartesian view of mind; sociocentric solutions, which

view groupness as unitary and teleological; and individualist solutions that fail to see people as constituted

in ontogeny through intersubjective attunement. Human sociality and human understanding must not be

separated from the world, but persons do not pre-exist intersubjective attunement and this operates through a

process of triangulation between self, other and world where all elements are intrinsically involved.