Container and Contained

Just to follow up on the end of my last post: Part of the way that Russell gets past the container/contained metaphor isn't just to look at a single activity system but rather to look at the ways writing circulates around multiple activity systems, and he argues that we should look at the changes and boundaries of these systems.  Janet Giltrow argues that one way to do so, one way to seek out the boundaries (although one way that is probably insufficient alone) might be to look for meta-genre.  To paraphrase Burke, we can look at the ways people talk about their talk-about in order to reveal the boundaries of their practice, the prescriptions, proscriptions, prohibitions, advice, differentiations, activities, generalizations, rationalizations, and the like that help participants delimit the situations in which they work and move.  If nothing else, this seems like a pretty good methodological move that you can keep in mind as you go about articulating and asking questions in the various sites you're moving in.