Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1992 08:55:00 CST
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         Gary Shank <P30GDS1@NIU.BITNET>
Subject: ethnomethodlolgy vs ethnography repost

just got this off the ethno line.  thought it might be of interest
here.    gary shank

Allow me to put in my two pence worth on these related subjects.

I was intrigued when a recent correspondent revealed he thought this
was an ETHNOGRAPHY hotline. Gene Lerner has since wondered how this
error could arise. It seems to me Ethnomethodology (EM) is different
from Ethnography (EG) but nonetheless they share something fundamental.

I understand EG to be, etymologically, "writing about people". It
started with Tacitus, the Latin writer. When the Romans could not
defeat the Germanic tribes militarily, they sent an anthropologist
to check them out. Classic ethnography is writing by and for _us_
normal civilised literate Westerners, about _them_, exotic
pre-civilised oral peoples, inhabiting remote marshes (those Germans)
jungles, mountain regions or frozen wastes. So the _object_ of
enquiry is a _strange_ people. But the method of enquiry, _writing_
makes them understandable to us in our familiar literate Western
way, makes them familiar, overcomes their strangeness. It seems to
be a "humanistic" premise of the method that the fact they are
people means that "really" they are going to turn out to be familiar
even though at first they "appear" strange. [Greil and Marcus,
_Writing Ethnography_ deals with this matter in an interesting way.
(Citation from memory, may be inaccurate.)]

I understand EM to be, etymologically, "people's methods", and as
pursued by Garfinkel, "members' methods". It turns EG around. The
object of enquiry is not a _strange_ people, but, we ourselves.
However the connection with EG goes further than that. According to
Garfinkel we are to treat our familiar everyday lives as strange,
in order to study them just like an ethnographer would. (One of
G's experiments was exactly that: getting a student to behave like
a stranger in his own home, and describe how it looked and felt,
how he was treated and treated others.)

A problem with this is, what do you do after you have treated
everyday familiarity as strange-for once you start writing about it,
you may it familiar again. Here I think ethnomethodologists have
diverged, and many strange solutions to this problem have been
tried and led off in diverse directions. (I'm thinking especially
of the various writings of Alan Blum, Peter McHugh, Stanley Raffell
and their co-workers over the last 20 years.)

Garfinkel himself has seemed to many "strange" in his solutions. In
particular his own writing style is one which insistently challenges
the reader's efforts to make it familiar, to take it for granted.

It seems to me however that a mainstream solution to this problem
exists in the practice of Conversation Analysis. CA, as I see it,
seeks to locate itself in familiar everydayness, what Sacks calls
"ordinariness" or what Pollner calls "mundane reason" in order, from
there, to investigate members methods for going about making their
own lives familiar. The "strangeness" is therefore a step you have
to take, analytically, in order to see something worth investigating
at all. But the analysis is only complete when you have made the
strangeness familiar again, through writing about it.

This is where, I think, foundationalism arises. The CA assumption,
drawing on Garfinkel's EM (though, as I say, it is not the only way
to draw on EM) and, further back, drawing on EG, is that mundane
reason, ordinariness, everyday members' methods are the bedrock of
social life ("bedrock" is Wittgenstein's word). Every social
phenomenon has ultimately to be explained by reference to that
bedrock. If, for instance, "social class" or "gender" exist as
social phenomena, it is in and through members' methods for
doing [class] or [gender] (for instance, in members' membership
categories and members' versions of category bound activities
relevant to 'class' and 'gender' distinctions), and these are going
to be visible _not_ in answers to questionairres _nor_ in interview
responses _but_ in naturally occuring and observable everyday social
life. In setting out to simply describe that everyday social
life, ethnomethodologists are being true to the ancient craft
of ethnography. But their foundationalism, ie their insistance on
ordinary everyday activity as the grounds of social life, gives
ethnomethodological ethnography a particularly sharp cutting edge.

Brian Torode

Sociology Department, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
btorode@vax1.tcd.ie.bitnet
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