If constitution goes on in the everyday practices of a form of life, then it makes sense that to answer questions about constitution we need to study these practices. One way would seem to be firsthand contact with the form of life through ethnographic fieldwork, but, as we have seen, ethnographic accounts that claim to describe what is “behind” everyday actions and events such as the cockfight, which are written for outsiders and are immediately removed from the form of life they represent, face insuperable problems of veracity. When fieldwork is understood as participating as a member and then writing a disinterested description of the order of a form of life, it is inherently dualistic.

Are there other ways to study practices? It might be objected that in considering only ethnography I have been unduly narrow in my exploration of the ways in which we could study constitution. Certainly other methods and conceptual frameworks exist for the study of practical interaction. In this chapter, I want to consider two of them, both of which are, at least ostensibly, focused on exploring the relationship of constitution between individual and society, between member and form of life. These two are critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conversation analysis (CA).