Abstract
Setting out to understand “indexicality” and its significance in Ethnomethodology, it is first necessary to trace the history of the ideas of Harold Garfinkel. From his early commitment to find “order” in his Harvard dissertation, Garfinkel finds himself in California defending Parsons’ Structural Functionalism while confronting Goffman and Symbolic Interactionism, based in Simmelian, Schützian Sociology. From the audience of students shared with Goffman, Garfinkel puts aside the “situation” of Symbolic Interaction in favour of a process, “Indexicality”, abandoning theorising in favour of ethnomethodology as the means to understand “order*”. This paper, then, demonstrates how indexicality works and proposes completing the tasks that Garfinkel set out in the Studies to disclose the taken-for-granted, the left out, bounded by caveats like No-Time-Out and For-all-practical purposes.
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Notes
Strangely, Lazarsfeld was recruited and achieved the empirical base for the ‘hard science’ that Parsons wanted to promote. His Marienthal study which established his reputation in Germany was a piece of pure ethnography (Lazarsfeld et al. 1933/1971). He was a Vienna Circle contact of Carnap and Neurath (more later) and was on the faculty in Newark when Garfinkel was an undergraduate.
Originally, when I read Garfinkel’s dissertation in 1996 and in parallel studies of the work of Simmel and Schütz, I convinced myself that Garfinkel had re-directed his dissertation in mid-course to mollify Parsons, his supervisor, who had given him the statement of his position that Schütz had sent to Parsons to try and engage Parsons in discussion, to seek some recognition from Parsons of Schütz’s standing in European, if not US Sociology, and to find a teaching position commensurate with that recognition (Wagner 1983; Grathoff 1989; Barber 2004). I could see no other justification either for Garfinkel’s contrasting of Parsons’ work with that of Schütz as a Parsons’ supervised dissertation. I could not see that Parsons would propose such a topic or agree to supervise given his refusal to engage directly with Schütz. At an IIEMCA gathering in Manchester in 2001, I had an opportunity to put this thesis to Harold. Although some 50 years after, Harold said the Schütz argument in his dissertation (some 150, or so, pages) was drawn entirely from Schütz’s Multiple Realities paper, which he had studied, with others, while he was in Newark, circa 1935-1938. As the foregoing suggests, I was not convinced by Harold’s account and had heard a number of suggestions, not least from Edward L. Rose, that Harold’s memory could be selective. He was, however, very forthright in his account so I am bound to accept the veracity of it (see also Psathas 2004: 31, fn. 53). I would be most interested to know if there is a contemporary or annotated copy of the Schütz-Parsons correspondence in the Garfinkel archive at Bentley College.
Order* is: “Professional sociology and EM agree that the animal they are hunting is the production and accountability of order* in and as immortal, ordinary society. Not any old immortal ordinary society, but immortal, ordinary society really and not imaginably; actually and not supposedly; and these evidently, distinctively, and in detail. For both, every topic of order, reason, logic, meaning, and method is to be discovered as the workings of immortal ordinary society” (Garfinkel 2002: 171).
Collins makes this point more forcefully when he notes that many of Garfinkel's circle were students of Goffman: “But they were at Berkeley, not UCLA” (2013: 1).
See interviews with Charles Glock and Saul Mendlovitz in Shalin (2008).
The significance of this quote to Ethnomethodology should not be underestimated. Dorothy Swain Thomas taught and supervised Edward L. Rose when he read Anthropology at the University of California (Personal communication, Rose 1997).
Rose, Sacks, and Garfinkel had secured funds from the USAF to undertake research into decision-making. Sacks and Rose were looking to develop a “talking machine,” the Talion Maker, with an associated program called Simmscript. Sacks’s (1963) paper Sociological Description for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology makes reference to such a machine but it is not clear whether a physical machine was intended—card-driven, mainframe computers were in the early stages of development – or, whether Sacks was using the analogy of his “turn-taking machine,” or mechanism, which was to be the basis for the development of Conversation Analysis (See Rose 1963a; Sacks 1963; Garfinkel 1967: ixf.).
In Garfinkel and Sacks (1970), footnote 6, pages 340–341, gives an extensive list of these and similar studies that “constructive analysis has missed entirely”.
The reference to “the scientific attitude” is intentional and expresses my belief that Garfinkel made a clear choice to follow Schütz's Multiple Realities which led to differences with Bittner and, later, Peter Berger who held on to a fundamental belief in “one reality” which underpins any “scientific” epistemology and methodology (Garfinkel-Wiley Interview 1980: 15ff.).
There are several versions of this incident. Schegloff offers one in his introduction to the Lectures on Conversation. Saul Mendlovitz, in the Goffman archive (Shalin, 2008) offers a view more critical of Goffman, then defers to the Schegloff version. Goffman, who had a reputation for being a difficult supervisor, refusing to read drafts and to discuss problems, apparently refused to sign off Sacks’ dissertation. Cicourel intervened, took over the dissertation panel and approved Sacks’ doctorate.
Goffman’s hands off approach to his students’ dissertation advice and supervision was generally known so the Sacks’ event was not unusual. Compare this, for example, with the experiences of Eviatar Zeruvabel reported in his interview for the Shalin archive (Shalin 2008). Equally strange in relation to this is that in 1981 Goffman produced his own version of Conversation Analysis in his book, Forms of Talk (Goffman 1981) clearly locating the Simmelian ‘forms’ with the ‘frames’ (Goffman 1974).
In 1956, while participating in the “counselling” of Agnes, Garfinkel published his “degradation ceremonies” paper. Here he credits Goffman for criticisms and editorial suggestions (Garfinkel 1956: 420).
Note the similarity in usage to Glaser and Strauss in their research on illness and dying (1965: 235 ff.).
These quotations from Garfinkel and the pages of the Studies, pages 1–24, were the subject of discussions of a group that gathered every Wednesday afternoon 2 til 4 p.m. in the Senior Common Room at the University of Manchester over the Winter of 1996–1997. The sessions, unannounced and not formally recognized, had a fluid membership akin to Garfinkel’s list on page viii of the Studies Preface. Professor Wes Sharrock took the focal chair but his interlocutors variously included J.R.E. Lee, Rod Watson, and Dave Martin (Manchester). Mike Lynch dropped in from Brunel, he is now at Cornell. David Sudnow appeared at one session and dominated the afternoon. Alex Dennis, John Rooke, Phillipe Rouchy, Nosomi Ikea, Kieran Kamal, Lynn Sbaih and Jenny, Roger Slack, Rupert Read, Will and Jackie and me. The brief we set ourselves was to achieve some kind of common grasp of every word and detail of those 24 pages. And every word and detail was pored over by the Group in ways that began to resemble psychotherapy-for-sociologists-and-philosophers. This paper returns to those sessions and tries to pull out, from my memory, the clarifications of some particulars, “indexicality” and “indexical expression,” that were achieved and agreed by “members-doing-sociology”. Apart from odd references to “But when we visited Harold, he said …..” or “Harvey laid it out like this ….” or “Eddy Rose wrote in his Notebooks,” the outcome was a collective view of the answer to the question posed by Garfinkel in those early pages – “What is ethnomethodology?”.
Macbeth (2012:194) notes that Garfinkel’s concerns about “formal analysis,” e.g., Parsons’ Structural-Functionalism, have continued over 40 years.
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Kelly, R. “It’s Over There. Sit Down.” Indexicality, The Mundane, The Ordinary and The Everyday, and Much, Much More. Hum Stud 42, 199–219 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09511-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09511-9