From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale By MichaelLempert, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2024. 300 pages

Like Michael Lempert, I was trained to revere the small, to regard Ray Birdwhistell's Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos as a sacred text, to transcribe conversational pauses to the nearest tenth of a second and document each laughter pulse faithfully.Lempert and I weren't trained by the same people, but we have many common ancestors in our family tree.(I remember a certain graduate school professor's delight at learning that I'd been made to read Edward T. Hall as an undergraduate.)Lempert's book, which promises a history of scale, is more properly described as a history of the micro, as the most contentious and seductive pole of the scalar continuum.It is, importantly, not just a history of what was once called "microanalysis," though that figures into it.Rather, from an anthropological perspective, Lempert attempts to account for what ideas about the "micro" have done culturally in a range of social fields.To take the obvious example from his title: the point of talking about microaggressions, for feminists or critical race scholars, is that they aren't "micro" at all; their seeming smallness conceals their widereaching social effects (or so the argument goes).From Small Talk to Microaggression presents a historical perspective on the ways that perceived smallness has been taken up as a problem (or opposed to the "bigger" interpretive pretensions of the social sciences) as well as a panacea, or a means of grounding these "larger" interpretive claims empirically.It's timely, but Lempert asserts that it's always timely; these scalar tensions are inescapable and recur in ways that are sometimes surprising and sometimes predictable.In light of the contemporary crisis of replicability in the quantitative social sciences, for example, Lempert would invite us to see early attempts to "ontologize" the social (through microscopy, or principled attention to "small" details) as an articulation of similar anxieties about where to locate social life.Closer to home, if philosophers and their allies accuse anthropologists of pursuing "political acceptability" at the expense of "disinterested inquiry" (Vanderbilt Report, 2026), might not anthropologists be tempted to "go micro" and ground our findings in the ever more "microscopic" details of culture, per Geertz?Recursivity aside, the book's signal contribution is Lempert's impressive genealogical work of showing that what linguists and anthropologists might have thought "belonged" to us-the consistent tension between macro and micro in our methods and emphases-is, in fact, a historical development that profoundly shaped other disciplines and political programs in the twentieth century.Moreover, interaction analysts have often been in contact