Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 05:33:21 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970513073301.3757a720@pop.uvm.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Re: Ethnomethodology
Good job, Z R-F: best succinct presentation of ethnomethodology I seen so far...

....and now for a Harold Garfinkel story.

Once upon a time, I had a very bright student.  His name was Bill B.  Bill
took a course with me in SocPsych and, in passing, learned a bit about EM
and breeching techniques as an intellectual tool with which to make visible
the sociology of it all which lurks behind so much human behavior.

Bill finished college, drifted around a while, came back for the Ph.D
program at a land grant university in colorado which we can call, CSU.

Bill hung around a while then dropped out to play his guitar some more;
and to learn about life in less sheltered venues.  

But Bill came back and finished his doctorate...much to my great pleasure.
I had worked with his uncle, Charlie Brown, a Catholic Priest, in the 60's
on a variety of interesting things so had taken both an avuncular as well
as mentoring interest in Bill.

His doctorate was in social psychology...and focussed upon the folk methods
by which social realities are created...and the meaning of the process for
postmodern sociology.  

One day, Bill mentioned that he had sent a letter to Harold Garfinkel along
with a few questions and a few ideas upon which he, Bill, would like 
colleagial comment.  I nodded and asked to see what reply HG made.

A week or so later, Bill brought in a letter from HG.  It was simple and
succinct.  'Fuck off,'  HG had written.

My heart sank; my sympathies rose on behalf of Bill.  What a terrible thing
to do to a budding ethnomethodologist.  After my initial anger wore off, I
began to wonder why Harold G. would do such a thing.

Was it in the form of a breeching experiment...if so, what normative structure
did G. wish to expose and how would he know the experiment paid off.

Maybe he expected Bill to say/do something.  Maybe he expected Bill's Committee
to do something.  Maybe he expected ASA to censure him for his gross ill temper.

Then, it came to me.  It was not a breeching experiment at all.  Harold
Garfinkel
was simply being himself....a first class ass-hole.

The years went by.  Whenever I heard from Bill or whenever the name
Garfinkel came
up, I reflected upon that nasty little note.  I knew that, one day, our
paths would
cross.  That Garfinkel would be in the same room as some meeting or another and
that I would have a chance to ask him, insincerely, about the point of that
'breeching experiment'...and in public forum, embarrass the hell out of HG.

15 years or more later, my chance came.  'Twas in Detroit...or maybe S.F.;
Garfinkel
was featured speaker in a session.  I drifted down to the room about the time he
was scheduled to speak...went early so I could get a good seat...visible to one
and all...then I would stand and ask as many nasty questions about the
episode in
as friendly and innocence manner as could I muster.

The room began to fill.  Eager young grad students came first.  Then older, more
established academics filed in to worship before the master.  I glowed with
eager
anticipation of suitable end to the breeching experiment...I would ask him, in
all good will, what purpose had he in such message...what consequence did he
expect
....what justification might one have to risk destruction of a grad student...as 
though I were merely curious.

Garfinkel came in.  I was appalled.  He was a shrunken, doddering husk of a man.
I could not bring myself to rip and rend as such a helpless critter.  Before he 
began to speak, I got up, left the room and walked away.  I smiled to myself and
thought of Bill B.  I wondered if Bill would approve my decision to leave G. to
die in peace.  Wondered if he could have made the meeting memorable; made the
lost exchange interesting in either scholarly or polemic terms.  I shrugged.
Such
a critter was not worth either mercy or cruelty.  

                                End of Story


....or is it.

                                                                        TRYoung


At 02:38 AM 5/13/97 -0400, you wrote:
>On Mon, 12 May 1997, Dave Alan Coon (: wrote:
>
>> Is ethnography one form of ethnomethodology?
>
>It could be, but usually is not. The "ethno-" part certainly refers to
>studying people in 'natural action' situations, but ethnomethodology has
>room for an experimental approach (via breeching actions taht serve to 
>bring out taken-for-granted assumptions of action by intentinally
>acting agaist expectations and thereby shaking your informants
>taken-for-granted notion of reality) that is usually a no-no in
>the deep-immersion anthropological ethnography, or the interview-based
>sociological variant. The suffix "-methodology" is quite important because
>it refers to examining the methodologies that interactants use to create,
>infer, and act in social situations (very much like the social scientist,
>hence also a reflexive emphasis on the scientist's own
>ethnomethodologies). The interactive assumptions of doings in social
>situations seems to me to be a different level of analysis than
>anthropologists' emphasis on larger (extra-situational) strategies and
>culture or sociologists' emphases on aggregate (and thus
>individual) beliefs and values (I know I am painting very broad brushes
>about anthro and soc here). 
>
>Ziggy Rivkin-Fish
>Sociology, Princeton
>
>
>
TR Young
Sociology
U/Vermont
TR.Young@uvm.edu