So last weeks topic (yes, i'm a tad behind, i've had a slightly hectic past week but normality will resume shortly, i assure you) was Ethnomethodology Part one. This posting will focus on the Heritage reading which analysed Garfinkles work on ethnomethodology and his zaaaaany experiements about the way people interact and how these interactions actually work instead of just falling apart instantly (it was also really long and quite dull. I am not a fan of Heritage).
Before we get into discussing anything, it should be mentioned that ethnomethodology translates pretty much into 'people methods', or, more specifically, the methods people use to successfully act and interact with others. So Garfinkle takes the Micro approach to ethnomethodology, which revolves around the theory that social interactants use 'recipe knowledge' to figure out how to act and interact in different contexts. To clarify the term 'recipe knowledge', i take it to refer to how recipes arent like rules; they don't have to be followed exactly and can be changed and improvised for your gluten intollerant friend, or just used loosely as an inspiration. This contrasts with the Macro approach which suggests that people interact and act due to rules of conduct that are imposed upon them by some big silly invisible man in the sky who nobody can actually find, and without these rules nobody would have any idea what to do and would just run around willy nilly trying to lick peoples shoulders when they want to greet them and then wonder why they just had their nose broken by their neighbour.
Along with 'recipie knowledge', we can begin to understand how people interact with people and their environment by understanding the Documentary of Interpretation theory. This basically states that we interpret people, interactions and other lovely things using prior experience with similar things/contexts as well as assumed shared knowledge. In other words, even if we've never encountered a specific thing before, we attribute some kind of sense or meaning to it from other encounters that are sort of similar, and we can have a conversation with someone using pronouns, other reffering words and generally being not 100% specific (which was found in one of those zany experiments is actually kinda impossible) because of an assumption that each understands what the other means, and each has similar past experiences with that sort of context.
Garfinkle seemed to have a lot of fun just generally messing with peoples heads. He conducted a series of breaching experiments, where he got a bunch of people to act slightly wierd in conversations or games and such and recorded how the subjects reacted to these breaches in normal conduct. He was quite surprised by how quickly interactions could deteriorate when conversational norms based on assumed knowledge were breached, and the viciousness of some of the responses to the breaches suggests how threatened people can feel when people act in unexpected ways, or question the conduct 'recipe'. Garfinkle also found through his experiments that, even in a scenario conducted in an entirely senseless manner, the subjects of the experiments were subconsciously compelled to interpret the interaction in some way, and attribute some kind of sense to the event, even if that sense ran along the lines of "he/she is insane".
Wow. This is way longer than i expected. Brevity obviously isnt my strong point.
Reference: Heritage, J. . 1984, 'The morality of cognition', in Garfinkle and Ethnomethodology, Plity Press, Cambridge, pp 75-102
Ok so ethnomethodology – what is it really?
ReplyDeleteI agree with the comments expressed above, however I believe that it can be discussed further. So ethnomethodology can be basically broken into two parts; ethno being the study of people and method as being the process of how Garfinkel understood the techniques and processes in which people operate within everyday life.
I also was not a fan of the reading. It was very tedious and took me a few goes to even understand what he was trying to say (I had to do the presentation on it to ), however it does present some valid points and gives a good overview of Garfinkel’s work. As discussed in my presentation, his work has also been cited by over 3000 people, so what he is presenting is obviously very relevant to different aspects of sociological study.
I would also like to offer the article cited below for further reference to the topic. The article doesn’t provide an overview of Garfinkel’s work like Heritage, however compares the theory of ethnomethodology to the idea of systems theory of world systems theory (being the study of the worlds ‘systems’ and trying to clarify or interpret the overriding principals of society which can be applied to all different kinds of research practices around the globe) and gives a mostly a macro approach to ethnomethodology and then relates this the phenomenology of Schutz (p.585).
The article concludes by presenting systems theory and ethnomethodology as totally different approaches to the understanding of social theory, (and again if you can get your head around what the article is trying to put forward), and in a funny round about sort of way present a good understanding of the opposite theories. Liu also reviews the crazy theories that Garfinkel originally presented and compared them to systems theory (p.591- 593).
Surprisingly (to me anyway), he presented the same results; that each interaction was reliant upon its own ‘internal history’ (p.593).
References:
Liu,Y.C.(2012). Ethnomethodology reconsidered: the practical logic of social systems. Current Sociology, Vol 60 (5) pp. 581-598.
Heritage, J. ( 1984). ‘The morality of cognition’, in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Plity Press, Cambridge, pp 75-102