Picking Over Garfinkel’s Corpse (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by jalfro on 2025-03-06

A response of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1

The title of Livingston’s paper should read ‘Garfinkel’s broken promise’. EM has produced many studies of the type which Livingston complains are missing from Garfinkel’s oeuvre, some produced by Livingston himself. Nevertheless, Livingston is apparently upset that Garfinkel himself produced none. It is difficult to see why.

Livingston begins with a critique of the four themes identified by Maynard and Heritage in Garfinkel’s work.

  1. He is correct to assert that it is activities, rather than appearances which are “the primary phenomenon”, if only because it is activities, rather than individual perceptions which are the empirically available data.
  2. He is no doubt also correct to insist on the uncomfortable generality of ‘documentary method’ as a gloss for sense making activities, though he might acknowledge (as Maynard and Heritage hint, and especially as he references a particularly myopic review by Coleman) that much of the detail is supplied in other chapters of Studies. His claim that “Garfinkel’s Rendering Theorem is a more incisive characterization of the research and theorizing practices of disciplinary sociology,” which turns out to be central to his argument, is less certain.
  3. Maynard and Heritage themselves seem uncertain of their third theme, though it is worth pointing out that sequential analysis is not merely important to CA; any action, linguistic or not, derives meaning from the context of what has gone before it. It has always seemed to me that the notion of ‘first time through’ is a way of acknowledging this temporal aspect of social order. It is difficult to see how EM could ever abandon this approach.
  4. Finally, he is correct to point out the emptiness of “any […] first principle.” In a culture still dominated by an ideology of asocial individualism, it no doubt remains important to stress the social, indeed the “moral” nature of human life. But once the Hobbesian demon has been banished, there is no possible analytic role for the usage. After all, members continue to generate social order even when they do not (in the ordinary meaning of those words) understand or trust one another. “Trust” can only survive as a theoretical term if it takes on a purely philosophical complexion (i.e. if it ceases to mean anything much at all).

Maynard and Heritage’s paper then, is shown to be promoting something of a myth regarding the coherence and progressive development of the discipline. Livingston is proposing a much less sanguine version. He correctly identifies a lacuna in Garfinkel’s work: his unwillingness to engage in the production of detailed descriptive studies of work. This appears deeply ironic, since the whole thrust of his thinking was to reject theoretical speculation and focus on carefully observed naturalistic observation. Garfinkel correctly theorised the failures of theoretical sociology, but manifestly failed to escape the same theorising tendency. But does this amount to a ‘broken promise’? Garfinkel pointed to a direction in research. Others, including Livingston himself, would seem to have fruitfully pursued that direction. If, like Moses on the mountain, he cannot complete the journey, then should this in itself occasion disapprobation?

Filed under Ethnomethodology

Tagged

Comments are closed.