Allow me to pile on a bit — in a positive way. Your book seems to me a wonderful illustration of something Victor Turner wrote,

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.

“Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors.” In Victor Turner, ed., Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 23.

Thanks so much for your kind words. Honestly, I was a little disturbed myself when some of that language started making its way into my thoughts and writing (not heteroglossia, though, which is like catnip for linguistic anthropologists). But what kept coming back to me is that many of these concepts really did resonate with me in terms of understanding the ethnographic material I was working with. So what I tried to do, rather than just drop them in the text as familiar jargon, was to sort of operationalize them through carefully working and re-working them through the ethnography.

For me, one of the useful things about theory in anthropology is that, if used well, it can help bring together lots of seemingly unrelated phenomena and illuminate overlaps and consistencies between cases that might otherwise go unnoticed. But if your theory is impenetrable and/or unwieldy, or you aren’t clear enough about how exactly it matters to your ethnographic particulars, then that capacity to do some bridging work pretty much disappears. So I spent a lot of time trying to lay out a) what a given theorist was saying, and then b) how these concepts apply to design in Sweden, with the hopes that they could also easily be used as a way to identify and understand and critique overlaps and consistencies that may exist in other ethnographic domains. I’m sure folks will disagree with both my a’s and my b’s, but that’s OK, I think the exercise is totally worth it.