Received: from acs4.bu.edu (ACS4.BU.EDU [128.197.154.40]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.7.6/8.7.3/CNS-4.0p) with ESMTP id KAA18700 for ; Mon, 12 May 1997 10:39:28 -0600 (MDT) Received: (from conroyt@localhost) by acs4.bu.edu (8.8.4/) id MAA55156; Mon, 12 May 1997 12:38:22 -0400 Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 12:38:21 -0400 (EDT) From: thomas conroy Subject: Re: Ethnomethodology To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu cc: Sociology Graduate Students -- International In-Reply-To: <199705121615.MAA32274@sable.cc.vt.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 12 May 1997, Jeff Janosko wrote: > I think Alan's definition of ethnomethodology is essentially > correct, but too general. Certainly, ethnomethodology is the study of > phenomena from the perspective of the participant. That perspective, > however, is profoundly influenced by one's social location; so, "all that > ethnic stuff" is significant. Sorry, but I must disagree, in that ethnomethodology (EM) is not so much the "study of phenomena from the perspective of the participant," which would be the assumption of such programs as symbolic interactionism, Weberian historical reconstruction, narrative analysis, and as you say below, phenomenology and social constructionism. EM abstains (ie., brackets) individual participant's "meanings." One way to see this is to read thwe work of conversational analysis, in which what an utterance "means" can be seen through its semantic content, its linguistic or para-linguistic form of expression, and perhaps most significantly, its structured location (within a system of turns). Analysts, when doing CA, avoid assigning particular subjectivities on interactants, unless these are somehow made publicly available, as, for instance, in emotion displays. > A discussion of phenomenology may help you to better understand > ethnomethodology. Basically, phenomenology views reality in terms of > subjective experience. In this sense, there are multiple realities; reality > is constituted by one's view of it. Agreed, but the whole point of Garfinkel's famous "breaching experiments" was that not any subjective experience goes. I may suddenly shift my constitutive expectancies of what I am doing while sitting at the dining room table with my family. I may play a game of taking what others say completely literally and responding to them as such. As Garfinkel says, however, I would be breaching the intersubjectively established order. What I would be doing would be weird and, in the first instance, rejected by my audience. Not anything goes. I need to see how the constitutive rules work and how they are used in any given instance. > Ethnomethodology is related to phenomenology. Ethnomethodologists, > however, are particularly interested in the ways that people produce > meaning. In other words, individuals do not create their views of reality > in a vacuum; they utilize systems of meaning that they create through > interaction with others. You should read _The Social Construction of > Reality_ by Berger and Luckmann for a detailed discussion of ethnomethodology. Two comments: Berger & Luckmann (or at least Berger, with whom I've studied some) are more or less hostile to EM, which they see as trivial. Also, while it is true that EM is, in part, dervived from phenomenology, another root is the logical grammer work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Malcolm, Winch and others, a program which sees human science as the study of rule governed activity systems. The Manchester school of EM has developed this particular line within EM; one primary example of this within EM is Harvey Sacks' studies of membership categorization, the current works compiled in the recent publication CULTURE IN ACTION. Tom Conroy Boston University