This study enters the closed and secluded community of a British embassy. It enters a cultural milieu, a setting where a group of self-identifying people with certain shared beliefs engage in a set of distinctive and mutually intelligible practices and tries to gain a more complete understanding of its norms, values and expectations. In particular, it investigates the role of the weekly gathering of Heads of Section as organizational ritual and symbol of collective experience, conveying cultural norms, interpretations and expectations. The work is essentially anthropologically-informed and inspired, while at the same time guided by a profound interest in and concern for language and communication. Apart from linguistics and anthropology, the study relies on and expands upon existing methods and views in a variety of other independently established disciplines. It draws on the sociological writings of Goffman, the philosophical work of Durkheim and Turner, the political ideas of Marx and Weber and many others
