{"id":1548,"date":"2004-05-27T23:07:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-27T23:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~frers\/cgi-bin\/blosxom.cgi\/socialsci\/040527-garfinkel.html"},"modified":"2010-04-30T17:14:51","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T15:14:51","slug":"getting-back-into-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/?p=1548","title":{"rendered":"Getting back into gear."},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I did my presentations at the college, graded last semester\u2019s papers, and finished the hopefully-to-be-published conversation analysis article I can hopefully can fully re-engage with the actual work on my dissertation. Today I read some more Garfinkel. Referring to my short essay Am I an Ethnomethodologist<\/a>, you can see that I haven’t read Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology<\/em> at that point in time – this was one of the theoretical gaps that I definitely wanted to close before I start to write my dissertation. Well, I am happy about having made that decision. It is quite an inspiring, if sometimes cumbersome read. Here’s a small citation:<\/p>\n

To treat instructions as though ad hoc<\/em> features in their use were a nuisance, or to treat their presence as grounds for complaint about the incompleteness of instructions, is very much like complaining that if the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way one could see better what was keeping the roof up.<\/q>[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 22]<\/p>\n

Another favorite:<\/p>\n

Although it may at first appear strange to do so, suppose we drop the assumption that in order to describe a usage as a feature of a community of understanding we must at the outset know what the substantive common understandings consist of. With it, drop the assumption’s accompanying theory of signs, according to which a sign<\/q> and referent<\/q> are respectively properties of something said and something talked about, and which in this fashion proposes sign and referent to be related as corresponding contents. By dropping such a theory of signs we drop as well, thereby, the possibility that an invoked shared agreement on substantive matters explains a usage.
\nIf these notions are dropped, then what the parties talked about could not be distinguished from how<\/em> the parties were speaking. An explanation of what the parties were talking about would then consist entirely of describing how the parties had been speaking…<\/q>[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 28f]<\/p>\n

And finally, if you have ever asked yourself what to study as a professional sociologist, here is Harold’s answer:<\/p>\n

Not a method of understanding, but immensely various methods of understanding are the professional sociologist’s proper and and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena.<\/q>[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 31]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I did my presentations at the college, graded last semester\u2019s papers, and finished the hopefully-to-be-published conversation analysis article I can hopefully can fully re-engage with the actual work on my dissertation. Today I read some more Garfinkel. Referring to my short essay Am I an Ethnomethodologist, you can see that I haven’t read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[190,382,383],"class_list":["post-1548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-science","tag-dissertation","tag-ethnomethodology","tag-harold-garfinkel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2731,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions\/2731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}