These reflections originate in an encounter I had with Mary Douglas in the mid‐1980s, when she had a regular visiting appointment at my university. Arriving at my office for the first time one day before we headed to lunch together, she paused at the threshold to take in the wall of volumes before her and exclaimed “My favorite book!” before making a beeline for the one item in my Douglas collection that you are probably not picturing. The book she singled out was Rules and Meanings (hereafter R&M), a compilation claiming “philosophical forebears for a course of anthropology that I like to teach” (9). Published in 1973, R&M is subtitled The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, Selected Readings. This anthology's 319 pages comprise forty‐five selections by thirty‐four different authors from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and more, including a few surprises: for example, writings by someone identified only as “Mrs Humphry” (author of Manners for Women, a 1897 etiquette guide), by the avant‐garde composer John Cage, and by the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Hermann Hesse, whose works (e.g., Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game) were 1960s countercultural best sellers.