So let me just talk a little bit about ethnomethodology, what that is, pretty darn controversial.
Does anyone know what ethnomethodology is?
One? No?
Well, it's probably something good to get clear on.
So, it's the theory of sociology, but it was very sort of antagonistic to the leading sociological theories of the day.
Some of the characteristics of ethnomethodology is that it sort of focuses on, well, first of all, microstructures.
We're not talking about large social structures, we're talking about small group interactions, local managing environments, microinteractions.
And we're looking at people, ordinary people, common folk, and their everyday routines and activities.
And I need to go shape up.
And not just their everyday routines and activities, but their knowledge of those, of the everyday, the common sense of the everyday.
What was on a Monday?
One of the things that makes ethnomethodology particularly radical at the time is this.
So, you're thinking about, one way of thinking about society might be thinking about society in terms of preset rules like a game, where you follow those rules.
You can think about like a board game or a game of chess or something like that.
It's got the set social rules already set down and then you put the people into those roles and then they interact according to those rules that are already there somehow.
So this is interesting question, you know, how do those rules get there?
Obviously at some level the people are involved in the creation of those rules.
And rather than thinking about things in terms of sort of this preset structure, what we have is something far more open and improvised and being developed on the ground level by the folks that were studying ethnomethodology.
So how do they, as it were, how constitute these rules? How do they help constitute in their everyday interactions the social reality?
It's not like the social reality, you dump them into it and see what they do and play their roles.
How do they help constitute that social reality? So it ends up being in a way more open and more improvised on the ground level.
So one of the things you'll see is a long section that, you know, probably too long for us now in this chapter where Garfinkel is going out of his way to try to show that what's going on is not necessarily meeting the characteristics of what we'd expect from a game.
Remember that?
This is because, in part, he wants to distance himself from other sociological theories.
And one of the guys he's really after is of Gotham.
And so he's got some miscarriages that we'll talk about a little bit.
They're actually, I think, less important for us now.
But that's just kind of what's going on with that, Sean. And why he's sort of beating this point about how it's not a game.
We'll talk about why it's not.
Okay, so let me just mention a couple of the key features of New Mexico.
What was even an example of New Mexico?
The problem is, like, ah, he, she, they, so forth, right here, now, are context relative with what the reference is.
And so one of the key ideas about methodology is that a lot of all terms are indexical in the sense that what they mean always ends up being context specific.
You can't really abstract what it's going to mean when you give them context.
So, for example, the concept of criminality might mean one thing in, like, you know, an LAPD context.
And it might mean something completely different, right?
In a university dormitory.
So it's going to shift.
And only if it shifts not only as a context sensitive, right?
So it's going to depend on how we interpret it in any different context.
It's also open.
So the thought is that you're never going to be able to really be able to give a satisfying definition of these concepts.
Is that what it's going to, like, be open?
Something about Dover?
I'm not going to be able to.
Okay.
And then a second key feature is reflexivity.
You know, if people often think of reflexivity, I would, again, give a good example, right?
Self-reference.
Refer to myself.
Talk about myself.
Move myself, et cetera.
We think of reflexive.
The way in which reflexivity is being used is a little bit different, though.
And it's very, in some ways, closely connected to the way in which Butler uses the idea of a performative.
But before we give the example of the marriage vow, which someone says, I do.
And in the right context, right, this is a very particular kind of doing that has considerable social import and consequences to action.
Or the issue of a promise and so forth.
This is the idea behind reflexivity that often, when we talk about something or describe something,
what we're actually doing is, this is part of the practice.
This is part of the everyday practice of the routines, is actually talking about what we're doing.
So graphic was big on this idea of ways in which we justify or account for what we're doing.
So we give reasons for what we're doing and what we're doing, right?
And this exhibits kind of reflexivity in that it's part of the routine.
It's confirmed intelligibility is part of the routine.
While it seems that it's really, as it were, descriptive or explanatory, it's actually doing something much, much more.
It's part of a kind of social engagement whereby the social reality, the social fabric, it can be brought into existence.
It's a tricky concept.
Sometimes an adult you have to share quite understand it.
It's sometimes still that way.
The good example of reflexivity of this type is...
Do you remember Bambi's presentation for the first day, where there was kind of an explication of various different terminologies and stuff like that?
And this has become very writtenized.
I see this very kind of specific Chang'e 101 workshop being conducted almost by road.
This is the procedure that you follow.
And it's done by way of elucidating what the concepts mean.
This is what transsexual means.
This is what transgender means.
We have to be careful to separate gender identity from sexual orientation and so forth.
And it's done in a way that elucidates or explains to us what the concepts mean.
As I also talked to you about, I myself am very worried about how these concepts are used differently in different contexts.
How does this Chang'e 101 presentation serve as reporting to lockdown or fix the concepts?
How does it accomplish this?
How does it do it in a way in which it makes it seem as if it's elucidating the concepts?
It's not like I'm stipulating what it means.
I'm explaining to you what this means.
So it's a description.
There's a kind of reflexivity here, where on the one hand, it's looking like it's a description,
but actually what's going on is something much, much more.
There's a whole social practice involved.
What makes sense to you guys?
Greg Nicholl was also controversial for this idea of breaching experiments.
His idea was that a lot of the work that people do to sort of constitute social reality ends up getting hidden,
and people like covering it over.
And there's a very sort of strong interest in trying to make sense of things,
even things that don't make sense, sort of assimilate into our framework.
So if you really want to see how the structure is actually going,
when people are actually doing it underneath, how sort of the rules are actually being negotiated,
what you need to do is really do something radical that sort of messes with people's head,
that sort of like messes things up, makes them, you know.
So for example, you know, if you think of like, you know, that's why a game is tic-tac-toe.
And then what I do is I put an O here.
What do you make of that?
We come up with some sort of thing, well, you're trying to give us an example of what Garvin was talking about.
You find a way of understanding this, making sense of it in terms of some sort of narrative.
The idea is to do something that sort of places this sort of social fabric and jeopardy
so that we can get a better look at it.
This was also an inversion of what was happening where there was kind of a focus on social stability
in Garvin I to point to places in which it was disrupted,
and he thought that by pointing to places in which it appeared to be disrupted,
there was a vantage point in terms of what was going on.
Because for him, and this is to bring us back to the sort of main point about
what's really interesting with ethnic methodology is that it's not that we have this structure that just kind of sits there,
and now it's like running like a clock.
You don't need to worry about it.
This idea is that you've got to constantly work on it.
You know, it's constantly achieved, it's constantly managed, we're constantly doing it,
we're constantly working on it, it's constantly in jeopardy.
If you don't keep doing it right, it's not just going to happen on its own,
but so is this ongoing process by which this stuff is constituted.
And to really sort of expose that, he felt that you needed to do these kind of breaching experiments.
The case is radicalized when we get to Agnes because she's not a breaching experiment,
but when we focus on pieces like this, or at least this is Garth Finkel's idea,
we can focus on people like Agnes and talk to Agnes and see what Agnes is doing,
when people are saying what Agnes.
Then we can draw lessons about the way in which people are dealing in gender or sex on a regular basis.
How does this become part of the social fabric?
That's an interesting question, it's a methodological question.
I have some reservations about it, I'm not sure that I can fully articulate them now,
but maybe you'll help me formulate them a little later on.
I'm not sure this is exactly right.
I'm not sure that what we learned from looking at cases like Agnes,
I think we have to be really careful about what this is going to show us in general cases about gender.
Of course Garth Finkel realizes that, but this is a whole sort of methodology that we might want to bear in mind.
And also let's bring back the sort of political worry that I started with, and remember,
we're just pretending we're sociologists, there's also the whole political dimension of this.
If this is the point that we're going to use Agnes to study gender,
then this is the whole issue of the politics of the theory.
This is actually sort of...
You get so far?
