More Studies in Ethnomethodology

Kenneth Liberman

Description

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association

Pioneered by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and '60s, ethnomethodology is a sociological approach rooted in phenomenology that is concerned with investigating the unspoken rules according to which people understand and create order in unstructured situations. Based on more than thirty years of teaching ethnomethodology, Kenneth Liberman—himself a student of Garfinkel's—provides an up-to-date introduction through a series of classroom-based studies. Each chapter focuses on a routine experience in which people collaborate to make sense of and coordinate an unscripted activity: organizing the coherence of the rules of a game, describing the objective taste of a cup of gourmet coffee, making sense of intercultural conversation, reading a vague map, and finding order amidst chaotic traffic flow. Detailed descriptions of the kinds of ironies that naturally arise in these and other ordinary affairs breathe new life into phenomenological theorizing and sociological understanding.
Acknowledgment
Foreword by Harold Garfinkel
Introduction

1. The Local Orderliness of Crossing Kincaid

2. Following Sketched Maps

3. The Reflexivity of Rules in Games

4. Communicating Meanings

5. Some Local Strategies for Surviving Intercultural Conversations

6. “There is a Gap” in the Tibetological Literature

7. Choreographing the Orderliness of Tibetan Philosophical Debates

8. The Phenomenology of Coffee Tasting: Lessons in Practical Objectivity

Conclusion: Respecifying the Husserl’s Phenomenology as Situated Worldly Inquiries

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438446202
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Lenore Langsdorf, editors

MORE STUDIES IN ETHNOMETHODOLOGY
KENNETH LIBERMAN
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liberman, Kenneth, 1948–
More studies in ethnomethodology / Kenneth Liberman.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in the philosophy of the social sciences)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4619-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ethnomethodology. 2. Phenomenology. I. Title.
HM481.L53 2013
305.8001—dc23
2012017397
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

There is not a worthy idea in this book that did not have its seed in the vision of Harold Garfinkel, who was my teacher for forty years. Much the same can be said about the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit of these studies and reflections. The majority of topics are borrowed directly, including most of the research projects designed to teach ethnomethodology to students. In particular, games-with-rules, pedestrian crossings, using way-finding sketch maps, and analyzing conversations all originated in one or another of Garfinkel's seminars at UCLA during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and were part of the pedagogy of Garfinkel's teaching. Over the course of my own thirty-year teaching career, I have managed only to extend some ideas. The research assignments associated with these topics proved tried-and-true in teaching my students ethnomethodology, and here I have collected some of our best discoveries. They are revisitations of seminal matters Professor Garfinkel first discovered decades ago.

Harold Garfinkel and Kenneth Liberman
FOREWORD

In 2005 I had the occasion to reread a set of notes that Kenneth Liberman had prepared during a two-term seminar at UCLA that he attended in 1979–80. When he was my student, Liberman had developed a special ability to write down quickly nearly every word I spoke while keeping a strong hold of its significance as he did so. At the conclusion of one course, he gifted me a complete set of these notes, which ran to more than 60 single-spaced typewritten pages.
When rereading those notes nearly three decades later, I was struck by how well they captured the freshness of many ideas central to ethnomethodology. During one of Ken's visits in 2006, I asked him to consider rewriting the notes with an eye to turning them into a book on ethnomethodology. Ken replied that he would reread the notes himself, as part of his preparation for his own lectures on ethnomethodology during the 2006–7 academic year at the University of Oregon, and then let me know what he thought of the merits of the idea.
By mid-2007, Ken also became convinced that the notes would serve well as part of a textbook on ethnomethodology. He suggested that certain aspects would require additional discussion, in line with developments in ethnomethodology since 1980, and he was eager to add some of the successful pedagogical tools he has developed himself during the course of his own 25 years of teaching ethnomethodology. Since Ken has been teaching ethnomethodology in two courses at the undergraduate level—a course for sophomores and juniors (Interaction and Social Order) and a course for seniors (Ethnomethodology)—as well as one course on social phenomenology at the graduate level, he has developed his own illustrations, expositions, and exercises for directing students to competence in ethnomethodology.
I urged Ken to take full license in expanding his notes, suggested that he be designated as author for the text, and thanked him for accepting the responsibility for seeing such a unique collaboration to publication. The resulting volume takes its place among a growing collection of publications that place in the hands of readers the skills exercised in the course of ethnomethodological investigations and analyses.
Harold Garfinkel, Los Angeles, October 21, 2008
INTRODUCTION

These are studies from ordinary life—each topic originates with a society of people who are collaborating naturally in doing practical, everyday tasks. The thinking they do is also a public activity, and their thinking acquires its direction and vitality from that public life. The perspective of these social phenomenological investigations comes from what I like to think of as the “old school” of ethnomethodology, inquiries that retain the original radical quality of investigations into how people assemble meaning and produce local orderlinesses in their ordinary lives. The “radical” here refers to going to the root of people's mundane apprehension of their world—how they put it together, how they maintain coherent understandings, how they concert their behavior and their understanding with others, all captured in their emergence in the way that Edmund Husserl (1969, 153) proposed by his use of the term “radical.” All of these studies bear a debt to phenomenology, but at the same time they amend and respecify social phenomenology's program in ways that I hope will prove fertile.
Nearly all of these studies originated as classroom-based research, either in my own classes or in the undergraduate and graduate courses of my professor, Harold Garfinkel. The few topics that did not begin as collaborations with students in a classroom were nevertheless presented to students and had many of their themes worked out and settled there. For 25 years, I taught three courses in the field of ethnomethodology for the University of Oregon: a graduate seminar in social phenomenology, a course in ethnomethodology for upper division undergraduates, and a course for sophomores in social phenomenology designed to prepare undergraduates to handle the challenging work of the upper division class. Discouraged by the number of students cheating on tests at my university and by an epidemic of plagiarized papers downloaded from the Internet, I followed the lead of my own professor and required my students to undertake actual worldly studies, upon which I based my student evaluations. This had the additional advantage of affording to students the opportunity to learn phenomenological and ethnomethodological ideas not only theoretically but from their own studies of real worldly affairs. All of these studies were collaborations that took place over many years of university instruction. Almost always the students worked in teams, since that way their ideas and energies were able to augment each other. It fostered a unique pedagogy, of which this volume is a record.
As Harold Garfinkel mentions in his Foreword, these inquiries were collaborative. Even the pedagogy was collaborative, and we had to learn from each other how best to explain these matters, as well as how to explore the many technical phenomenological issues that are investigated here. I collaborated as a student with Prof. Garfinkel and as a teacher with my own students. And both sets of collaborations were fueled by a sense of wonder. My students responded well not only to the intrinsic interest of these social phenomenological topics but by the authenticity that their own real discoveries fostered in their work. In particular, the crossing Kincaid study and the study of taste descriptors of coffee unfolded as revelations to my students and myself, and I eagerly shared them with Prof. Garfinkel during my visits with him; fortunately, he was able to make important critical recommendations about these inquiries as they developed over the years. So collaboration is truly the operative word for this volume of studies.
I am especially grateful that Prof. Garfinkel retained faith in my ability to capture much of this material in a way that did not lose its ethnomethodological originality nor compromise its radical character. As soon as I realized that I would need to add the discoveries of my own teaching to those of Prof. Garfinkel, I was further gratified by his enthusiastic support of that idea. Additionally, it was kind of him to insist that I be the sole author, even though the majority of ideas in this volume were his. Despite this, during the few years that I read to him the early versions of these chapters, he would at times offer the remark, “Where's the credit?” or “Those are my ideas!” And at an occasional point he would scold me for not referencing his thinking. He would say to me, “Just make sure you fully credit me for these ideas!” I kept repeating my offer to make the volume a co-authorship, but he held to his view that it should be my book. By 2008 Harold was legally blind, and during my reading of some chapters I would emphasize how many references to him, not only to published work but also to classes and seminars, I had included in my citations. These references were quite appropriate since the idea of this volume began with his reading of a collection of my typed notes for a couple of his seminars.
It may be said that much of the fame and notoriety of ethnomethodology was derived from Garfinkel's intellectual allure, or what amounted to real genius. But that came at a cost. Among his students Prof. Garfinkel was known for his protean character, and even his closest students could never really be certain what kind of reception their work would receive on any first-time-through presentation. Harold would be supportive during one