The emic view on extended family living offers a piece of advice on this point, that the

junior and senior generations should live far enough apart that when the daughter-in-law brings

her husband’s parents soup, it will be neither too hot to drink immediately, nor too cold to drink

at all. What a snapshot shows, then, depends on the prosperity of households, among other

things. At one time my wife and I rented one of three houses standing on one property. The

oldest, ours, was over 100 years old. When the owner built himself a new house immediately

adjacent, he left the old one standing to rent out. And when it eventuated that he and his wife

would not have a son in addition to their daughter, they built a third house on the property for

their daughter and her husband, whom they adopted, and which couple gave them a grandson

and a granddaughter who lived with their parents in the newest house. A standard census would

reveal two Japanese nuclear families living on this property. My landlord and his wife with her

mother in one house, their daughter and adopted son-in-law and two children in another, all

understood themselves to be living together as one four generation ie.

Marvin and Ingle (1999) deploy Durkheimian taboo in their thesis that to realize the

concept “nation” in American civil religion, any but the greatest sacrifice is too little. The core

of their understanding requires that action be able to unify alternative and ostensibly

incompatible interpretations of symbols. For Marvin and Ingle symbolic action creates this

effect through taboo, the strategical refusal to speak or have spoken, do or have done. In their

fully reflexive Durkheimian totemism, the flag is the ritual instrument of group cohesion where

“The totem secret, the collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death

of its own members at the hand of the group” [italics in original] (Marvin and Ingle 1999:2).

“If bodily sacrifice is the totem core of American nationalism” [italics in original]

(Marvin and Ingle 1999:4), In this conception, symbol and strategy are indissolubly linked.

While “plausible deniability” rather than classic notions of taboo more accurately characterizes

actors’ strategical maneuvers in day-to-day contexts, nevertheless here too word and deed form a

gestalt: “Violence is an essential social resource, just as denying this constitutes an important

group-making tool” (Marvin and Ingle 1999:8). This “not being able to talk about something,”

that something necessary and important to group solidarity and even group existence can only

function as long as it is not talked about makes society work, even as it keeps us from

understanding our own collective creations.

“Barnum’s Egress” reliably shows the way out of this dilemma. Everyone not speaking

at all lets everyone still seek strategic advantage even in situations characterized entirely by

falsehood, as they purposely fail to problematize the situation, deliberately but tacitly refusing to

identify the situation as one even permitting, far from requiring, explicit comment in the form of

a question such as “What is going on here?”

Taboo then takes the act of not saying to the third power, turning this Pareto-optimal

strategy into an explicit virtue of conservatism which preserves the social relationships

maintained by the system of distinctions in play. Both a system of classification and a system of

social relations are necessary for us to know the difference between the infinite number of things

we don’t say and do because they remain undistinguished within the still merely possible, and

those few we don’t say and do because they are taboo, aside from whether we could or could not

bring ourselves to say them, even should we want to do so.

These professors selected their very best students, married their daughters to them, adopted them, and made them their successors to the extent they could control their succession. They were successful in so many cases because they had already selected the most capable and promising candidates in the country, many of whom they had trained themselves.

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