Talking politics

This paper revisits the author’s Ph.D. research in the Department of Social Anthropology
at the University of Manchester during the early 1960s. Wes Sharrock also
was a PhD student there, and they shared dissatisfactions with the predominant
approaches to sociology at the time, and turned for inspiration Winch’s critique of
social science and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. At that time they also became
acquainted with the empirical alternative to sociology offered by ethnomethodology.
This paper describes how insights inspired through frequent and long conversations
with Sharrock inspired the approach the author took in his observational
study of active members of a local political party. The study was focused on ‘The
Left Wing’ of that party, but rather than treating talk of ‘The Left’ as a representation
of a stable ideological group, the study paid close attention to the discursive
use of the distinction between members of the local party leadership, and elucidated
the changing membership of ‘The Left Wing’ and the occasioned relevance of being
included in that category. The study suggested that ‘talking politics’ was not a
merely a matter of talking about politics, but was an expression of and constitutive
feature of local party politics.