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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