18 - Ethnomethodology
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Chapter 2, “Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities"
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Chapter 3, “Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: the Documentary Method of Interpretation in Lay and Professional Fact Finding.”
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Chapter 5, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person.”
Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology's Program. Chapter 6, "Instructions and Instructed Actions"
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742516427
About Harold Garfinkel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Garfinkel
Sacks, Harvey (1972) ‘Notes on police assessment of moral character’. In: David Sudnow, ed. Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press: 280-93
David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand, Part I - MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ways-hand
Michael Lynch 1988 Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body
Doug Macbeth 2012 Some notes on the play of basketball in its circumstantial detail, and an introduction to their occasion
Ken Liberman, The Phenomenology of Coffee Tasting: Lessons in Practical Objectivity, in: More Studies in Ethnomethodology, SUNY Press 2013
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5633-more-studies-in-ethnomethodolog.aspx
Dusan Bjelic & Michael Lynch (1992). The work of scientific demonstration - Newton and Goethe theories of color
Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities, Harold Garfinkel
RispondiEliminaAs always I tried to understand the headline of the reading so I googled it to understand it meant that it’s a way to describe how people use different methods in order to understand the society they live in, and that this methods people use to understand the society they live in are very much fixed in people's natural attitudes.
Anyhow, as for the reading it was very interesting to read and immediately reflect that we have “ familiar scenes”. Could be because we assume its morally right or wrong or an agreed act of agreement of society we live it as “natural act of life”. However, as we build this familiar scene we don’t notice it anymore, its unnoticed act in the background of our life. We might say we do but we barely do unless we were disturbed by “special motives” as Garfinkel was quoting Shutuz.
Garfinkel explained that sociologists pay attention more and stand from close but an outsider point because they are seeking and establishing a “special motive”. Following, he used situations and experiments based on his students to highlight unseen or unspoken variables in our lives, which we don’t usually notice and means to challenge and discover it.” From these experiments, it was interesting when he started with experimenting common understanding in our daily life using spouse dialogue very casual where it was brief but there was much unsaid words that were understood only between them, their expressions, relation to previous events were noticed.
This highlighted that we base on common understanding on the anticipation that persons will understand, the occasionality of expressions, where we don’t explain everything, the specific vagueness of references, the retrospective prospective sense of a present occurrence, waiting for something later in order to see what was meant before. Also when it was consciously done that you experiment to ask questions that are normally overlooked people find it weird. For example, x: I feel tired. Y: how tired physically, emotionally or bored?. X will tend to find it weird that you ask for this details since its take for granted if it late and you say tired its physically.
On another situation in an attempt to understand "seen but unnoticed" background, it was abstract to perceive persons, relationships, and activities without respect for their history, as if you had amnesia, but that’s difficult to sustain. Because at first when u watch from outside your family for example you realize things that you never noticed about your family and intimacy but later if you want to keep the same attitude its gets harder. And that’s for number of reasons but mostly that the families themselves response were very harsh and surprising to any new attitude.
Garfinkel continued with number of other experiments to further shed the light on how we can challenge common understanding. But, more interesting he discussed how there is a social dope and how our understanding of “natural situation” is due to an already established expectations from people around us based on our background and reality. And concluding with the major reasons of “natural situation” modifications, by explaining that we out to see world through different shades of glasses using ceremonial, instrumental tools, new world, cultural stranger, growing into something else and finally conscious decision to be a social observers.
David Sudnow with this article offers a portrait handicraft of jazz piano improvisation with the goal to describe jazz from a player’s perspective, without consulting the expert opinions of other practitioners. This because, according to the author, “the performer, especially one who self-consciously takes up a complex activity with as strong an intention to master its accomplishment as to try to reflect rigorously upon the experiences of doing so”. He is guided only by the concrete particular problems, not by the methods of analytic science. So its is a privileged point of view. S. analyze in the first pages, in vey detail way, the structure of the score for a beginner who want to learn to play jazz, that are the chords. The chords are the first important step because nearly every song has a more or less unique harmony (chord sequence), but progressions from one chord to the next follow narrowly defined rules, so that most tunes share many common chord sequences. At this stage of learning chords, beginners are naturally very embarrassed because they are very careful to watch where put their fingers. But for song play it’s not enough to grab chords cleanly, or only to move smoothly in tempo from one to the next. It is necessary developing an embodied way of accomplishing distance. “A grasp develops of the setting of the keyboard and its dimensions relative to the hand’s and arm’s moving extension from the body’s center, and in time this skill becomes so refined and generalized that precise alignment at the center isn’t even needed.” Once that the beginners, after months of practices, play without look their hands, they can try to improvise. This passage is the most interesting point in which the author focus on. He tries on himself this experience and the main question that he ask himself is: where the hand should go? So to bypass this empass his teacher gave him a particular chord he can get a characteristic jazz sound by playing a particular scale. “Of course to talk of this characteristic jazz sound is like saying a certain r is characteristic of French”. And it worked! In conclusion, this is an ethnographic work that reports in very detail ways not just what happens but.. the interesting thing is that the scholar himself records his condition of beginner, describing what are the different stage, moods, sensations, that may characterize any beginner .
RispondiEliminaMemo-
RispondiEliminaHarvey Sacks: Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character
The article starts with the following thought: in western societies deviance is often related somehow to appearance. Whoever is a bit out from the crowd is suspicious. Generally the study examines the aforementioned phenomenon.
The author is examining the police work in order to define and explain the phenomenon of appearance. The police sometimes are working on cases with the public in order to catch the suspect. Many times they need the contribution of people who witnessed the crime. There is no investigation in the cases without a „proper” portraiture. However these facts raises some questions. For instance: Whether can we trust the enthusiastic civilians portraitures or Shall we treat the confused witnesses as reliable sources?
The other reason why the author relies on the police is the merely fact that policemans are experts. Obviously because of their job they can recognise the „deviants” (based on their appearance) with a higher probability. From the study perspective the most significant aim of the police is to: „maximize the likelihood that those who will turn out to be criminals and who pass in view are selected, while minimizing the likelihood that thoso who would not turn out to be criminals and who pass in view are selected”.
Simplified: the police are focusing to recognize the criminals who are working to remain unrecognizable. The author presents a great example in order to highlight the issue of recognizable and unrecognizable attitude. According to Sacks the homosexuals intends to be recognizable in the eyes of other homosexuals, meanwhile they are trying to stay as unrecognizable as it possible in the eyes of the majority.
Garfinkel - Instructions and Instructed Actions
RispondiEliminaThrough this text, Garfinkel introduces the approach that originated out of criticism of mainstream sociology, which he argued imposed sociological categories on the ordinary person.
The literal meaning of the word ethnomethodology is ‘peoples methods’, and this is exactly the focus of the approach. More concretely, the aim of the ethnomethodological approach is to investigate how members of society construct and manage their sense of social structure by examining taken for granted realities.
To conduct a breaching experiment Garfinkel stressed out that you must enter a social situation imagining you are seeing things for the first time, therefore not bringing any background ideas or presumptions, and
to monitor what happens. Garfinkel stated that you would find there is chaos and confusion in most instances.
Therefore, as argued, the ethnomethodological approach is
useful for the understanding of the everyday functioning of society as it is a step closer to understanding, for the reason that it is an interpretation of everyday life by the same means as the people that it claims to study. Moreover, it criticises how commonsense knowledge goes unrecognised, and is undeserving of the significantly inferior status it holds next to scientific knowledge.
Garfinkel also argued that, inescapably, other sociologists themselves use commonsense understanding to attempt to explore and study the social world.
Thoughts on Garfinkel’s “Instructions and Instructed Actions”
RispondiEliminaEthnomethodology is about the study of methods and practices that people use to construct the social world. This particular paper is about the careful scrutiny of the ways of using as well as the elements/component of instructions and following instructions. Garfinkel hopes to illuminate the often taken-for-granted character of instructions.
The author did not give a definition of instructions. Rather, he presented the ‘family members’ of instructions. These are the ‘norms, directives, regulations, laws, commands, orders, rues, standards, plans, programs, budget, maps, manuals.’
The instructions contain a series of steps. However, there are unsaid steps in an instruction. In Garfinkel’s example of assembling a chair, counting and identifying the parts is not included in the written instructions, but is an important step.
In analyzing instructions, some of the concerns could be ‘factual adequacy, completeness, ambiguity of expressions, followability, correctness of procedures and unique correspondence of representation and object’. Following instructions (rules-in-use)
I am particularly interested in the cases of wearing lenses inverted while playing chess. This tells us that following instructions is not just about knowing the rules of the games, but being able to maneuver while using your lens. The player with inverted lens can not plan his/her move because he/she lacks the phenomenal details (where the chess pieces are positioned, why are they in that position, what are the possible next steps, etc.)
Harold Garfinkel - Studies in Ethnomethodology (Chapter 3)
RispondiEliminaCommon sense knowledge of social structures: the documentary method of interpretation in lay and professional fact finding.
In this chapter, Garfinkel describes how the discovery of social structures and common culture has been a discovery from within; the social scientists managed to transcend the structures they are part of and Garfinkel describes how members of a society use knowledge and procedures purposely to reach a goal. More specifically the author attempts to describe the work whereby decisions of meaning and fact are managed, and how a body of knowledge of social structures is assembled in common sense situations of making a choice.
The documentary method of Interpretation
A first and main problem in observing and documenting social structures and events, is the fact that the observer needs to wait for future events in order to be able to accurately decide what he in fact is looking at. By doing so, he learns what it was that happened earlier and therefore observers find themselves in (particularly ethnographic or linguistic studies) settings where they cannot presuppose a knowledge of social structures. To overcome such problems, Karl Mannheim described "the documentary method of interpretation" in which he explained that "...an identical homologous pattern underlying a vast variety of totally different realizations of meaning" so even though the (outside) observer might be oblivious to what actually is happening in a way that he can literally understand what he sees, Mannheim states that actions (/gestures) can be observed and seen in the underlying pattern without knowing the actual meaning of this action. This meaning can be derived from the documentary evidences which, in turn, can be interpreted on the basis of what is known about the underlying pattern.
Examples in sociological inquiry
The documentary method has been used in every area of sociological investigation, most clearly explained from the areas of community studies and survey research when a researcher has to decide what the respondent had in mind when providing the recorded answer. The documentary method is used whenever the researcher constructs a natural history via a process of selecting and ordering of such life events. The potential pitfall for the researcher is the point at which the reader of the study report asks how the investigator decided the correspondence between what was actually observed and the intended event for which the actual observation is treated as evidence. Are the actual observation and the intended occurrence in fact identical in essence? Interpretation is key at this point; the researcher and the reader need to interpret the situation in the same way (or need to at least see the interpretation of the other) as members of a community of co-believers.