Every day we live amid relics of time. Fossils of our past that live in laws, in institutions, in policies and practices, and in a vast repertoire of habits we inherit from generations that precede us. Just like the rocks that surround us, these cultural and institutional “givens” compose an “action environment” that shapes how we live and move and act. We experience their givenness in the simple refrain “This is how it’s done.” The very givenness of these realities is a false invisibility: because we don’t see them, we are unaware of how we’re shaped by such inheritances and how they
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