The Inside of the Thars in Relation to the City's Mesocosm

This chapter has been a miscellaneous tour of some of the forms that are located within the thar s and their component units. Much of it is not directly relevant to our main questions in this volume, and the chapter is a sort of an appendix that has broken loose and drifted forward into the book. As we have remarked, however, these smaller structures are those that most intimately affect the learning and experience of individuals. These are the successively smaller and successively more private cells in which people have their intimate relations, and where they are most closely observed, punished, and rewarded. They provide forms that the public symbolic order expresses or uses or must struggle with. They are in the background for the concerns of the rest of this book, but will be of greater importance, along with those aspects of family and private religion and of rites of passage and the like which we have managed to keep in the appendixes at the back of the book when we elsewhere bring individual experience to the center of our concerns.