[xmca] Re: Ethnomethodology genealogy

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Bud-- If you send me a pdf of the chapter, I will post on xmca as papers for
discussion. That would be great.

If you have not seen Arne Raeithel's genealogy of cultural
historical/activity approaches, it is at mca in the same locale.
mike

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Bud Mehan <bmehan@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Thats about right--a topic I took up in 1975, in that minor sociological
> classic: the Reality of Ethnomethodology--I can make the chapter on
> pre-cursors available if you wish
>
> On Mar 11, 2009, at 3:22 PM, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> The trailing messages were getting really long, so I have truncated them
> using a slightly different
> subject line. Hope this does not screw up the conversation.
>
> I thought the genealogy that Martin traces below is really helpful.
> Does everyone have Arne Raeithel's genealogy of CHAT which is somewhere on
> the
> xmca website? It would be great to add to it for the links back to LSV and
> CHAT.
>
> mike
> -----
> Martin's note:
>  Martin Packer to eXtended
> show details 7:40 AM (7 hours ago)
> Reply
>
> Ed,
>
> I think you're right to see a connection between ethnomethodology and
> continental philosophy. The standard story about Garfinkel is that there
> were two main influences on his work. The first was Talcott Parsons,
> director of his doctoral thesis, who considered people to act on the basis
> of unconscious motivations that were the result of needs internalized
> through socialization. This is what Garfinkel later referred to as the
> 'judgmental dope' model of action. The other influence was Alfred Schutz, a
> phenomenological sociologist who emphasized the continually active
> character
> of human consciousness of the social world. Schutz proposed that each
> individual is continually interpreting and typifying the events and actions
> they see around them. Social science, he insisted, should build its
> concepts
> on these first-level common-sense, everyday constructions. Very different
> from Parsons' view, but the activity that Schutz focused on was very much
> individual and cognitive. Starting there it was difficult for him to
> explain
> how people can interact together to produce a shared, intersubjective,
> reality. (His students Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann tried to fill this
> gap in their famous book 'The Social Construction of Reality.') What
> Garfinkel has done is locate the activity of interpretation and recognition
> in action itself, as something practical and social.
>
> Schutz was a student (and research assistant) of Edmund Husserl, and so
> Garfinkel would have been likely to explore other writing on phenomenology.
> I've heard he was found in his office with a copy of Being and Time, and
> one
> can also see allusions to Merleau-Ponty in his writing.
>
>
>
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