In your post on cloudiness, which I’ve also only just read, you talked about the outdated Geertzian model of the self. Problem is, there are a lot of social rules that require one to act as if one had a Geertzian self. If one comes into contact with the police, with a psychiatric institution, one is required to put on a successful performance of a Geertzian self. The alternative is not very cloudy; the alternative is being locked up, which isn’t nice.

I like Goffman very much; when I was hauled off to a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Niagara Falls I did not know what answers I should give, at short notice, to the questions put. I thought: I don’t really need a lawyer, I need a sociologist.

I agree that there are cultural rules, but it is because they are invisible that it is easier to assume a shared culture until those rules are broken. Take your example of a party : it will no doubt include talkers and listeners, some who will talk for ‘too’ long and others who do more listening.

So what a quiet unassuming anthropologist may be able to bring to a party is not only an uncovering of the rules, but an interpretation of them as key to what actually defines a conversation.
Those who hold forth longest are often those who view conversation not as an exchange but as a forum for debate based on clever argumentation. Conversation is perhaps simply situated along a continuum that goes from idle gossip (perhaps the closest one will get to a postmodern conversation) to antagonizing and divisive debates. And a good party will often consist in maintaining equilibrium while moving along that continuum where conversation has a place and its rules that are partly set up in contrast with the place and rules of other forms talk (not all of them being an exchange).
In short, if the party is to be a success, it is the host and hostess (or at least one of the 2)(admittedly, a polite guest would also do) who need to be good anthropologists, subtly highlighting the rules without discouraging freedom of expression.
But this would be close to suggesting that cultural rules are in fact the social rules of politeness that only become cultural if content is suitably intellectual… (I’m getting stuck)

I am not much of an anthropologist and haven’t done the necessary readings, but perhaps the case would have to be made with a dinner party full of anthropologists. I am quite sure some will hold forth from starters through to dessert and the listeners and prompters will quickly fall into their role of both making conversation (in a literal and positive sense) and encouraging the speaker to dig him/herself into an ever deeper hole. Can an anthropologist go to a party and be both the one who holds forth and breaks the rules and the one who plays the game by the rules?