Message-Id: <199705121754.NAA16632@sable.cc.vt.edu>
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Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 13:54:27 +0600
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: Jeff Janosko <jjanosko@vt.edu>
Subject: Re: Ethnomethodology
Thomas,
        Thanks for the excellent critique of my comments.  I must admit, I'm
jealous of your opportunity to study with Peter Berger.  Jeff

At 12:38 PM 5/12/97 -0400, Thomas Conroy wrote:
>
>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
>