Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

Members share the same ‘categorization devices’ of objects in the world and how these might be properly expected to occur in their lives, in what sequence and with what ramifications, and conjoined with what activities: ‘babies’ can be expected to ‘cry’ and ‘mommies’ can be anticipated ‘to pick them up’. Once members have perceived a possible eventuality, the ad hoc meaningfulness they have arrived at may divert them from testing other possibilities. However, the latter are equally prescribed. Members will share the same lexical system such that a range of possible alternatives is also supplied for different points in the meaningful sequence of events: ‘infants’ also cry, and ‘fathers’ also do the ‘picking up’. Rules of relevance per situation will tell members which lexical ranges to expect to hear when.

Fellow travellers

Clearly there are overlaps between the issues which Garfinkel et al. are treating and their ways of proceeding and other schools’ and social analysts’. Berger and Luckmann’s portrayal of ‘the social construction of reality’ has already been referred to, and mention might also be made of attempts by Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, and other so-called ‘action theorists’ to account for the continuing structuration of social milieux without recourse to Durkheimian notions of social facts as sui generis—to notions of social arrangements reproducing themselves without the mediating effects of individual agency (cf. Rapport 1990).

But more particular overlaps and borrowings between ethnomethodology and anthropological work might justifiably be alluded to. In Clifford Geertz’s theory of common sense (1983), for instance, there is a parallel debt to Schuetz. Common sense is a taken- for-granted set of matter-of-fact assumptions, Geertz begins, which claims to be the immediate deliverances of experience and known by anyone in their right minds, but which is better understood as an ordered body of considered thought, a cultural system of learnt symbols. As such it will differ from one society to another. Nevertheless, its style, its way of knowing, the attitude to life which it engenders, the tone in which its wisdom is expressed—these may have a universal quality. To wit, common sense is a totalizing, ambitious and dogmatic frame of thought, claiming to strike at the heart of how things are. It pretends to knowledge which is natural and inevitable, practical and easily accessible, plain, obvious and earthy. Moreover, it is where most people in most places spend most of their social (intellectual and emotional) lives. Only intermittently do human beings see their lives in other than practical down-to-earth ways. And even then, more theoretical, religious,

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ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

scientific, or aesthetic perspectives only come into play to make up for certain insufficiencies in the explanatory force of common sense. In most situations of human life, the cultural system of common sense, employed together with one’s peers, is sufficient for making life meaningful. At certain non-everyday moments—a ritual, for example— a different cultural system of meaning, mood and activity can be brought to bear whereby everyday happenstances become recontextualized— perhaps in ‘ultimate’, sacred terms. Nevertheless, this non-everyday light thrown on the commonsensical serves to elucidate and thereby bolster the latter, so that members return to its system of significations and significance more solidly rooted. Indeed, it is out of the commonsensical that all more theoretical systems of meaning have grown, and they retain a dialectical relationship to it; in transcending common sense, they complete and maintain it (cf. Geertz 1971:90–112).

In the work of Esther Goody et al. (1978), there is a recognition that it is from seemingly trivial, micro-social, linguistic forms and processes that the building blocks of social structure are made. At the same time, social interaction is shaped by general ‘goals and constraints anchored in the wider social structure’ (1978:2). Indeed, each culture will possess a predominant interactional style and ethos, and prescribe a certain ‘interactional systematics’ (1978:288); here will be ‘patterns that are daily replicated by countless individuals’ (1978:245). Hence, the dialectic: interactants behave according to a common set of rules concerning how properly to proceed, and successful interaction serves to reinforce this repertoire of culturally standardized strategies of expression and representation. Under the aegis of such rules, moreover, meanings come to be successfully negotiated and managed, and selves presented.

Part of the interactional systematics of a culture will be what John Gumperz and Deborah Tannen call ‘frames’ and ‘contextualization cues’ (1979:307–8).These amount to a constellation of surface features of interactional style which direct participants into interpreting the content of conversation in particular ways and as particular types of activity. Contextualization cues channel interpretation so that some common background knowledge is unconsciously brought to the fore and some reserved for other occasions. Hence, there exists a conventionalized co-occurrence between such features of conversation as: prosody, phonology, lexical choice, turn-taking, interjection, rhythm, timing, breathiness, volume, tone, somatics, formulaicism and thematic progression.

A further part of a culture’s interactional systematics will be what Kenneth Pike calls ‘emic units’ (1964:55). Cultures, he explains, cut up

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ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

and classify the world into ‘emes’—units of information and behaviour—and thus cause their members to perceive and expect certain possible experiences; culture members will share a knowledge of ‘emic spots’ at which certain unit behaviours and their class of alternatives are likely to occur. Conversation becomes a matter of negotiating which objects of experience are being represented, and their possible alternatives, and which behaviours are appropriate. Since the verbal and the non-verbal are inextricably bound, since emic units of language seamlessly give onto ‘behaviouremes’ (1964:58), the emes of a culture are part-and-parcel of a unified phenomenon of behaviour, of thought, speech and action, through which all purposeful human activity is socially structured alike.

Ethnomethodology and ethnography

One difficulty in applying ethnomethodological analysis more widely to ethnography is the knowledge demanded by the analyst of his or her informants’ language. Few anthropologists working outside their mother tongue will have the competency to subject their data to the requisite micro-social focus.

One attempt explicitly to treat non-Western ethnography according to ethnomethodological tenets, however, is provided by Moerman (1988) who compares Thai conversation with American. Moerman’s intent is a ‘culturally contexted conversation analysis’ from which may issue a scientific account of how experienced moments of social life are constructed, and the ongoing operation of the social order is organized. ‘[I]n every moment of talk’, he explains, ‘people are experiencing and producing their cultures, their roles, their personalities’ (1988:xi).

Moerman sets out his case using 58 pages (out of a total of 214) of transcripted and annotated conversational segments between both Thai and American speakers. These he describes as ‘interactive processes’ which speakers enact largely unconsciously. They are acquired schemes of expression for: ‘the intentionless invention of regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu 1977). So encompassing and coercive are members’ common interactional systems—whether Thai or American—that in both cases they routinely make ‘single sayable somethings’ with exact timing and without error. In both cases, their conversations derive from and by-and-large replicate common worlds of sense, orientation and experience.

See also: Code, Common Sense, Discourse, Interaction

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FORM AND CONTENT

FORM AND CONTENT

This conceptual distinction is most usefully introduced by reference to the seminal work of Georg Simmel (e.g. 1971, 1980).

Any social phenomenon has two inseparable elements, Simmel suggests (echoing a Kantian distinction between appearance and actuality): form and content. The form of something is its structure, its skeleton, its grammar. Forms amount to categories and collections of categories, taxonomies, schemata, languages, rotas, systems of classification. Moreover, the world and its aspects only become possible matters of experience and knowledge when constituted by forms. Forms negate the continuity of matter by introducing the distinctions that make things separate. Thus, forms specify the conditions under which it is possible to have a certain kind of experience and acquire a certain kind of knowledge. Forms, in short, are objects and the relations between them: objects like morality, sexuality, flirtation, prostitution, eroticism, love, household, society, history, bourgeoisie, drama, religion, death, science, art, literature and anthropology; and relations like hierarchy, complementarity, symmetry, correspondence, obviation, metaphor and metonymy. Forms mediate the human experience of the world: the human world can be said to be formally constituted.

Furthermore, forms are synthesizing processes. Forms are the means by which individuals come together, negotiate continuing relations and affiliate into groups. Through a sharing of language and other formal, classificatory systems, individuals are able to meet in regular and routine interaction: are able to make ‘society’. Society represents individuals interacting under the aegis of common forms, individuals using forms in conjunction and compatibility with other individuals; and one can think of an amalgam of different types of society as forms are used among members: in precisely the same way or with marked differences, in cooperation or in opposition, with complementarity or with mutual exclusivity, with simultaneity or with sequentiality, in face-to-face settings or at a distance, with mutual knowledge or without.

Perhaps a definitive human characteristic is the multiplicity, the diversity and heterogeneity of forms which are used to mediate human relations with the world, however. For forms are humanly invented, and a plurality of languages, perspectives, conceptual and mechanical schemes serve to constitute a plurality of worlds of human invention. No one form or set of forms possesses a privileged logical, ontological or epistemological status over any other, and use of particular forms is a matter more of contingency, of tradition, of rhetoric, of strategy, of power and of practical implication. A particular set or fund of forms,

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linked over time, might be described as a ‘culture’, and to belong to a culture is to share a knowledge of the normal use and proper practice of a fund of forms. Moreover, as with the amalgam of types of society, one can imagine a continuum of types of culture members, in time and space, running between those who share all, some and none of the same cultural fund of worldly forms.

The discipline of anthropology, for example, would represent a particular culture (as would any number of other ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’ (Boon 1982:231)), its members possessing alike knowledge of such formal objects as: fieldwork, functionalism, ethnography, Azande witchcraft, the Kachin, Clifford Geertz; and knowledge of such relations as: procuring a set of informants, writing up fieldnotes into a thesis, publishing a literature review, getting the Current Anthropology treatment, representing the Manchester School (and everything else down to pageformatting (Brady 1991b:13)). Those who use these cultural forms adequately, compatibly and in conjunction with other members at a particular time and place, can be said to belong to an ‘anthropology society’.

In the Simmelian portrayal, then, a fund of cultural forms provides a medium of interaction through which individuals come together; the fund is their means of sociation, of setting up a society between themselves and claiming to share a symbolic reality. To belong to a society means to use the same cultural forms for the construction of reality. Cultural funds, however, are never static. For forms are in perpetual historical processes of variation and transformation, so that cultures amount to sets of objects and relations in constant flux. To understand why is to appreciate meaning or content. Forms are invented, we have said. In fact, they are the products of individually intentioned mental and physical activity, of individual agency. Individuals create the forms by which worlds come to be made and experienced, and by which ‘others’ come to be met. This they do in order to satisfy any number of different drives and secure any number of ends. Individuals make and use forms so as to fill them with a diversity of personal meanings; they give them sense and significance particular to their own lives: their purposes, interests, desires, needs, beliefs, values, and so on. It is this which makes up the content of their forms. Moreover, it is this individual usage which causes their collective exchange; individuals continue to bring cultural forms to social life, continue to make society and share culture, for the purpose of expressing their individual meanings.And yet, since content is fundamentally distinct from form, the same content is able to find expression in many different forms, and the same form is able to house any number of different contents. Hence, no

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