FOOTNOTES

1
The corpus available for analysis consists of video records of several pre-natal visits this woman made, her labor and delivery of the child as well as the first introduction of the new infant to his siblings.

2
If there were claims to whatever statuses in relation to this labor, they must have been performed before the beginning of the play and were then pushed far down so that they are never explicitly indexed. The possibly least obvious unvoiced statuses of consequence are probably those related to economic class: the hospital is clearly recognizable as one that is spending resources to make the delivery look pleasant and well appointed

3
For a full report on this research see Labor negotiations (Cotter 1996)

4
This continues my work on topic reinterpreted as ... in my earlier work (Varenne 1992).

5
If this is the case, then we may be on the way to identifying for medicine what Mehan () identified for schooling: the fundamental interactional structure marking an event as relevant to the institution as culturally constructed.

6
This, obviously, is a pseudonym. Our justification for using a first name lies in the fact that this is the way the woman/wife/mother is addressed and referred to by all participants. The anesthesiologist, once at least, does start a greeting pattern with a "Mr. and Mrs. McDowell." We must note, in the spirit of Geertz's famous essay on naming in Bali (1973), that my no referring to woman/wife/mother as Mrs. McDowell, we directly participate in the erasure of one of her main statuses (that she is married and that part of her total social self is constructed by her association with Mr. McDowell). By not naming him (following the lead of the participants again, who rarely if ever directly address or refer to him by his name) we perform the same kind of erase on him whose professional status, for example, is never marked.

7
Given the tendency of recent discussions of hegemony to assume acceptance of the hegemonic patterns by those who are subjected to them, we prefer to talk of the "authority" of major institutions both in the usual sense and in the sense that, should interactional scenes be said to have "authors," they should be found among those who control hospitals and justify its requirements.

8
In fact, during all showings so far, if any in the audience picked up on the special status of the laboring woman, they never spoke up to argue with the identifications made by others in the audience.

9
The reference to gestalt here is both a cross-reference to some of the theoretical roots of this research, and to one aspect of gestalt analysis that remains directly relevant here. It is well-established that human perception proceeds in terms of constructed wholes and in the process of the identification of such wholes, discard much information that does not fit within the whole. Indeed one suspects that the essence of "construction" in this case consists precisely in selectively discarding everything that would not fit. In other words, while "we" as researchers relying on video tapes and other technologies can claim that something happened, this claim does not allow to say whether it happened "for the participants" if there is no evidence that they acted on the basis of this "happening."

10
We capitalize marked scenes.

11
I am using the word "canonical" to mean "according to an observationally derived ethnomethodological rule." Methodologically, this is "what might happen if nothing else happened" and is derived from observing what participants notice as in need of repair. The canonical is what is indexed in what are marked by the participants as breaches. This is a usage derived from computer science. It is closely related to the concept of "positioning" in the work of Scheflen (1973) and McDermott (1978).

This is less obviously related to what Lévi-Strauss talked about as "structural models" (1962 [1952]: 279-80). It is less directly related to Weberian "ideal types" though some of the properties of these ideal types are obviously similar. A canonical form is not produced by the analyst to deal with the phenomenon but, rather, is the result of the attempt by the analyst to capture a property of that which the participants, together, have "facted" (constructed, constituted) for each other, their consociates and descendants.

12
This of course is an instance of the classical Durkheimian analysis of "crime" as the product of social structuration: medicalized labor produces a particular kind of uncertainty on the future of the labor that must necessarily become the locus of specific negotiations

13
Some research suggests (MIMI: references) that the muscular aspect of the contractions are in fact partially constructed by interactional patterns that can slow them or accelerate them, etc.

14
In one occasion at least, the anesthesiologist is the one who initiates the negotiation by joking about how knowledgeable people can fool him into giving them larger doses.

15
This narrative is in fact performed jointly by all parrticipants, essentially in the manner described for such narratives by Goodwin ().

16
In this context one may wonder whether the anesthesiologist's joke about Lonnie having a "good back for 37" is taken by all as allowable because it may have helped him earlier when he administered the epidural.

17
And we would suspect of all complex interaction in highly institutionalized settings ...

18
See Cotter (1996: -) for details about the practical difficulties of obtaining such tapes/

19
The most common role for the researcher was that of secondary "hand holder" during contractions and general commentator on the progression of the labor. In that capacity, Cotter's authority to interpret pain appeared similar to that of the husband, that is somewhat above that of Lonnie herself

20
This statement might be deemed a "counterfactual" in the spirit of Dore and McDermott's discussion of linguistic inderteminacy (1982).

21
This statement might be deemed a "counterfactual" in the spirit of Dore and McDermott's discussion of linguistic inderteminacy (1982).

22
One of the most obvious of these may be the fact that this a hospital birth which is only marked by the architecture of the room, and passing comments about "the woman in the room next door," etc.

23
REFERENCE to research on medical visits and procedures

24
For example, at one point Lonnie and her husband negotiate calling Lonnie's mother to check on the children. He does so. During the phone call, Lonnie goes into contraction but does not insist on his usual full focus [check transcript].

25
By contrast to might can happen in academia where a statement such as this paper and the whole literature on childbirth demonstrates that these matters can be, and are, discussed if not "negotiated."