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unrelated information. (Simply knowing of the Smithsonian Institution allows us to imagine what's being talked about when we hear the world "institution" again, and this is true even when we mistakenly refer to it as the Smithsonian Institute.) We are fond of saying that you can't tell a book by its cover, but people are not books and books don't neck or argue.

But if people at a bus stop are not an institution, are a group of people running down the street, shouting and making, say, threatening gestures? We might not know exactly what they are doing (chasing the assailant of an elderly woman or someone that's just taken the bicycle from a neighbor kid or just hurrying to catch the last drumbeats of a parade), but we will likely guess that they have gathered just for some specific occasion and that they will not remain together after their emergency, so to speak, is over. In any case, they do not, at the moment, comprise an institution.

What of the firemen? We certainly can call fire departments institutions: they've been around since before there was a United States. The local fire departments are institutions, insofar as they've been on a particular street in a particular neighborhood ever since anyone can remember, but the firemen come and go and the ones that comprise the current fire department are pledged to fighting fires and accomplishing any other tasks that they are called on to perform. But the formalized duties of the firemen were written down long before the current firemen were assigned.

In this sense, the fire department comprises at least three different kinds of groupness: the fire department as institution; the current firemen assigned to the local department as an organized group, in that their duties and responsibilities are previously defined; and the firemen called to extinguish this particular fire, in that for this fire there is a temporary division of labor (duty and task assignments) that remain in force until the fire is out. The firemen called to or that volunteered for duty after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were assigned a variety of duties and tasks (for example, looking for survivors and extinguishing fires to make those duties and tasks more manageable) that they performed until the fires were out and until supervisors concluded that there were no more survivors or remains of the dead.

As an aside, we can say that when firemen came into Lower Manhattan or Arlington, Virginia, from other boroughs,

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