To the extent that this microhistory of the ordinary takes inspiration from anthropology, it does not look to Durkheim, or even Geertz, who share important assumptions about the uniformity of cultures and the social scientist's ability to find a single key to those cultures. It relies much more heavily on Erving Goffman's work on social interactions, and the Norwegian Fredrik Barth's stress on the incoherences, heterogeneities and conflicts within cultures, best grasped on a “micro” level. This microhistory claims not to read a culture as a static text, but rather to investigate processes of change and conflict in as detailed a manner as possible. In this sense, as Jacques Revel has noted, it remains close to “the old dream of a total history, but this time reconstructed from the bottom up.” It also tends to pay very close attention to the ordinary conventions and formulae employed in its sources, because to a large extent its purpose is precisely to track and understand changes in the conventions and categories through which individuals understand the social world.