| Ethnomethodology is literally “the study of people’s methods”, in particular the way people make sense of the world and how they communicate their understanding of it. Ethnomethodology is based on the Verstehende Soziologie of Max Weber and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz. As a sociological movement, ethnomethodology was founded by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the early 1960s, who outlined his main ideas in his book “Studies in Ethnomethodology” (1967). Later, ethnomethodological approaches were adopted and adapted in many social sciences, including social anthropology.
Functionalists as well as structuralists assume that the social world is essentially orderly, although they explain this order in different ways. Ethnomethodologists, however, believe that social order is more or less illusionary. Social order exists first and foremost in the mind and practice of actors, not as a social system independent of such actors. Hence the social world is and will always remain a precarious creation that needs to be maintained in ongoing everyday practices.
The analysis of such ongoing everyday practices is the focus of this seminar. A second focus is the more theoretical assumptions that go hand in hand with this analysis. The course starts with basic reading on ethnomethodology, in particular the writings of Garfinkel and his successors. The course then looks into some ethnomethodological studies. A particular issue will be imagined communities as online groups that play with new forms of expressive communication beyond physical presence. They transcend “natural” boundaries that formerly defined communities and society in general and thus pose a challenge to social anthropologists that often tend to privilege the local and processes of localisation.
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| Introductory Reading:
Coulon, Alain, Ethnomethodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
Francis, David / Hester, Stephen, An Invitation to Ethnomethodology: Language, Society and Interaction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Garfinkel, Harold, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Malden MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing, 1984.
−, Ethnomethodology’s program: working out Durkheim’s aphorism. (edited and introduced by Anne Warfield Rawls) Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
Patzelt, Werner J., Grundlagen der Ethnomethodologie. München: W. Fink, 1987.
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