Category Archives: ethnomethodology

on Garfinkel, Latour, etc.

ethnomethodology, on anthropological theorizing, on language and expression

The message “this is therapy,” with a horse

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Our regretted colleague, George Bond, insisted that our doctoral students start their apprenticeship with us by struggling with Durkheim’s Rules, and particularly with the argument that, when individual human beings come together, what they do is other than what they could do by themselves, and that special tools are needed to study collective action and its productions, that is “social facts.”  Last week, Jennifer Van Tiem brilliantly defended a path-making dissertation that appears to fit within contemporary research on “human-animal communication,” but is actually about what can happens when two or three humans and one horse do something together, for example “therapy,” that neither humans nor horse would do by themselves.

The same week, I read something in Discover Magazine (my quick source for news from the hard sciences and what seeps of the social sciences into such a popular magazine) that should make all Durkheimians feel vindicated.  In an interview with Bonnie Bassler (June 2014 issue), the Princeton biologist explains how she established (think Latour) that bacteria, these most simple of life forms, tell each other that “I am here” (as well as “who are you?”) .  When the bacteria find out that they have something the biologists now call (metaphorically) a “quorum,” then they change state and produce something that will be experienced, by an outsider, as different from what this outsider might have experienced before (together, some bacteria become luminescent, others produce a film in an animal’s lung that might create life threatening problems, etc.).

The bacterial communication phenomenon that we study is called quorum sensing, which is a process that allows bacteria to communicate using secreted chemical signaling molecules called autoinducers. This process enables a population of bacteria to collectively regulate gene expression and, therefore, behavior. In quorum sensing, bacteria assess their population density by detecting the concentration of a particular autoinducer, which is correlated with cell density. This “census-taking” enables the group to express specific genes only at particular population densities. Quorum sensing is widespread; it occurs in numerous Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. In general, processes controlled by quorum sensing are ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual bacterium but become effective when undertaken by the group. For example, quorum sensing controls bioluminescence, secretion of virulence factors, sporulation, and conjugation. Thus, quorum sensing is a mechanism that allows bacteria to function as multi-cellular organisms. (my emphasis . Bassler, retrieved on May 19, 2014)

Note that the bacteria themselves do not change as far as what we might now call the “affordances” of their biology.  It is this biology itself that allows from a transformation that, yet, cannot happen apart from the quorum.

My readers will recognize here a perennial theme in my work.  So I will not develop this further, except to react to one of Van Tiem’s critique of much of the work of the conversational analysts which, I do teach, revolutionized not only linguistics but also all the social sciences.  They did reveal how human beings coordinate their activities, particularly when they do it through natural languages and in direct interaction.  The focus on adjacency pairs, indexicality, ongoing assessment (feedback), etc., was a major breakthrough.  But, as Van Tiem argues, much of this research is based on propositional language and thus not very helpful when the interlocutor is a … horse (or the human cannot speak Goodwin 2002, 2004).  Humans, of course, do not only speak.  They also point and qualify with fingers, eyes, heads, etc..  Horses do not have fingers they can use, but they also have ears as well as tails that can serve to point, qualify, and otherwise make something that responds to an earlier movement as well as possibly triggers further movements.

But the issue is not the affordances of peculiar biological bodies and how they can be used to maintain sequentiality within a conversation and thereby the conversation itself.  The issue concerns the organization of the particular conversation itself as this kind of conversation, rather than another one. (With thanks to Juliette de Wolfe (2013) who insisted on separating the peculiarities of the autistic body from the particularities of the institutionalization of autism)

The issue concerns what can happen when bodies, given their affordances, find themselves in a “quorum.”  This, I would say is the issue about which Durkheim started us wondering when he pondered stabilities and variations in suicide rates (1897).  In the process he gave us all a problem a version of which is implied in Bateson’s concern with the message “this is play.”  Ethnographically, the issue may be best exemplified in a related message Sacks investigated “this is a joke.”  The issue is that “this is a play” (or “a joke,” “a classroom,” etc.) frames a long (“length” is, of course, another problem) sequence within which everything must (be made to) fit the ‘play’ frame.  Every statement or move must (be made to) “make sense” (McDermott 1976), “be suitable” as Boas would say.  Every statement must fit but it does not have to index, in its own performative organization, the frame.  Indeed whether a statement fits (or not) is controlled by the quorum (a.k.a cohort, staff, congregation, set of consociates, endogenous population, plenum, etc.), rather than by the individual speaker.  The quorum can overrule the individual  about the consequence of the statement.  Van Tiem quoted Garfinkel’s wonderful experiment with the message “this is therapy” (1967: 79ff).  The experiment was so set up as to lead people to act as if random answers made sense thereby actually making the answers sensible and the whole event “therapy” (actually, in this case, “research into therapy”).

Van Tiem is exploring the message (“this is therapy”) when one of those who staff the therapy is horse.  A horse is anything but random in its responses.  But there is no strict way to access its motivations (though human participants routinely discuss them and thereby make statements-about-the-horse’s-motivations one aspect of this therapy).  This, for our purposes is good since the trick here is precisely not to speculate about individual motivations but to figure out how the quorum is maintaining its particular frame—whatever any individual’s motivations, or lack thereof.

Much research has hinted how this might be done.  Bacteria do it through various molecules.  How do human beings do it with horses? Van Tiem brings back to relevance Paul Byers work on biological rhythms.  Goodwin has written about gaze,  Garfinkel about ongoing instruction.  But maybe we can also learn from bacteria, or least take heart that we have been onto something worth pursuing.

ethnomethodology, on anthropological theorizing

Anthropology IS an experimental science

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One of my favorite quote from Geertz on anthropology as an experimental science:

The “natural laboratory” notion has been equally pernicious … because the analogy is false. … The great natural variation of cultural forms is, of course, not only anthropology’s great (and wasting) resource, but the ground of its deepest theoretical dilemma: how is such variation to be squared with the biological unity of the human species? But it is not, even metaphorically, experimental variation. (1973: 22) [more…]

By “favorite,” of course, I mean a statement so self-assured of its own common sensicality that it begs to be challenged.  So I thought about it again when, while preparing a class on ethnomethodology as “methodology” (in a methods class), I went back to Garfinkel’s recently published dissertation proposal (from 1949).  There he proposes to conduct experiments through which the construction of a social order might be observed.  The general model for these experiments is stated as:

Assuming Iσ, let there be meant a dyadic group made up of Aγ(x) c Bγ(x). When A is regarded by B (x)-wise, A’s treatment of B will be interpreted in such a way (x) by B as to encompass a change (x) in an element or elements (x) of B’s cognitive style, the change being of such a character (x) as to limit B’s alternatives of action (x) … [more …]

The technique to observe what B will do is simple:

To help us in “slowing up the process” of B’s interpretive activity, we shall use the device of cutting B off by facing him with incongruous material. (My emphasis. 2006: 206-7)

For the rest of his careers, Garfinkel kept imagining versions of the experiment he modeled in this passage.  The most famous (at least for teaching purposes—which is what I imagine I do in this blog) may be the following one:

Students were asked to spend from fifteen minutes to an hour in their homes imagining that they were boarders and acting out this assumption. They were instructed to conduct themselves in a circumspect and polite fashion….

In nine of forty-nine cases students either refused to do the assignment (five cases) or the try was “unsuccessful” (four cases). (1967 [1964]: 47)  [more …]

The less obviously experimental of these observations range from following Agnes through her sex change operation (1967 Chapter 5) to the research on a blind woman organizing her kitchen so that she can cook by herself—only possible if no sighted person helps her (2002: 212ff).  The best set of such observations is the ensemble of research in conversational analysis.  Audio-taping and videotaping does exactly what Garfinkel called for: a slowing down of social interaction so that one can observe the actual building of a social order.

A half century of work in that experimental mode has produced an ensemble of findings about sociability that should be presented more succinctly, and, I dare say, celebrationally.  These findings (laws?) range from the generality of indexicality as the mechanism through which communication is anchored in the here and now, the principles of “trust” (a generalization of the generality of “passing” as another fundamental principle), the “etc.” principle (communication does not proceed through full knowledge of the situation—thereby disproving all forms of cognitivism), and so on and so forth.

One thing that work has not produced is a formalization of the conditions under which a particular social order (this one) comes about and transforms itself.  In other words ethnomethodology and conversational analysis are, fundamentally, a sociology of social ordering.  But there has never been an equivalent anthropology of historical culturing.

Which brings us back to ethnography as, arguably and contra-Geertz, an experiment in “slowing down processes” (or perhaps, in fact, “accelerating” the passing of time).  Boas and others (including Geertz in the above quote) intuited (and hypothesized) that human variability is a fundamental principle.  How would one demonstrate that?  For Boas et al, the answer was simple: by examining social orders in human groups widely separated and, perhaps even more powerfully, by examining social orders in neighboring groups.  Eventually, the more fine grained the analysis, the more one could demonstrate that the same tasks of survival can be performed in all sorts of ways.  For example, middle aged women in graduate school can prepare for an examination just as well siting on the floor in veils (or in blue jeans, sitting on chairs).

Iranian women studying

I tried to formalize this in an earlier blog entry.

But we still need to figure out how specific social orders arbitrary to the “needs” they may appear to fulfill actually do appear in history.  And so, we need to devise experiments that might it possible for us to witness the process.

Culturings, ethnomethodology, on 'culture', on anthropological theorizing

Islanding assemblages of haecceities

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I am finishing a draft of a paper with Juliette de Wolfe on conceits and autism.  It ends with my current favorite Garfinkelian conceit: driving down the highway of life with an immortal cohort.  In the paper where he talks about immortality and highways, he writes that “immortal is a metaphor for … an “assemblage of haecceities” (2002: 92).  Ray McDermott to whom I had sent an earlier draft underlined the last word and wrote “explain?”.   It made me acknowledge to myself that I could not quite explain the word though I knew it had to do with the latin for ‘this’ and was related to everything Garfinkel has written about indexicality.  So I searched Wikipedia (no shame!).  The first indexes in the entry are to Duns Scotus and Peirce.  Then comes the references to Garfinkel with a quote from Rawls “Haecceities is one of the many words that Garfinkel has adopted over the years to indicate the importance of the infinite contingencies in both situations and practices” (2003).  So, simply (?) put, changing the clothes of a tantruming child in a public park is, always and necessarily, a unique act that has never occurred and will never recur.  There will never be another time when this child will be changed by this mother in this park in front of these onlookers.  There will never be another time when this Rosa will say “I could read it!” in this reading group (McDermott passim).  There will never be another time when some Mexican migrants develop this glossary (Kalmar 2001).

So what is the point of reporting this?  As Kalmar reminded us when he lectured at Teachers College in the Spring 2012, the Camden glossaries are unique, but they are also an instance of what many other people (missionaries, linguists, etc.) did when faced with another language they had to learn as they attempted to survive in that moment.

So, this is another musing about ethnographic methodology and its usefulness in, precisely, this political moment in the history of anthropology and its relationship to the State.

But, as I half day dreamed about the quote (which I may initially have chosen because it included the work ‘metaphor’ which was then the key word in the evolving paper), I noticed that Garfinkel wrote about “assemblage” and wondered whether this is the recently famous word.  Did he get it from Latour? from Rawls (who would have gotten it from Deleuze)?  Anyway, it fits.  This event is made up of these matters (people, things, etc.) immortalized into “??????.”

What exactly is the word to be used?  (Suspense!)

I was working on the paper when, last week, I taught one of my favorite pieces from one of our disciplinary grandmothers: Ruth Benedict’s “Configurations of culture in North America” (1932).  Note that ‘configuration’ is pluralized, not ‘culture’ (Benedict is a Boasian, not a Geertzian).  What struck me this time is her use of the unusual gerund “islanding” to evoke the historical reality that differentiation (say in death rituals–her main examples) is not based on geographical isolation (see also Louis Dumont on the ideological differentiations between France and Germany in the 19th century (1994 [1991])).   Burying a close relative among the Zuñi requires different displays than it requires among the Cheyenne.  We were taught in graduate school to ridicule Benedict from tagging the first set of displays as “Apollonian” while the others would be “Dionysian” and to suggest that these ??? somehow “explained” the displays as if they were psychological causes.  I now read these labels as temporary heuristics that may have helped at the time establish the unique this-ness of a historical moment in the plains and high plateaus of a continent when human beings lived side by side, pushed and pulled each other, faced new conditions (e.g. the horse), and assembled themselves and their practices into some immortal thing (configuration, culture, pattern, epoch, system, [your word for a historically produced, powerfully enforced, differentiated and differentiating unique thing]).

Now, I have complained elsewhere that Garfinkel does not have an explicit theory of culture, unless, as I suggest, facing immortal assembling of haecceities is precisely such a theory–which is my point.

Thus, our scientific task is more akin to physicists disputing “gravity” (islanding, culture) than to medical researchers looking for the cause of autism, or the better therapy (technology, development).

[See also an earlier post on the Boasian revolt against classifications by function and causes]

ethnomethodology, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system, production of culture

On studying “dynamic changes”

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A quote for the day, from Boas:

In short, the method which we try to develop is based on a study of the dynamic changes in society that may be observed at the present time.  We refrain from the attempt to solve the fundamental problem of the general development of civilization until we have been able to unravel the process that are going on under our eyes.  (1940 [1920]: 285)

The genealogy of ethnomethodology in ethnography has sometimes been told to me as passing through Hymes and Labov to Malinowski.  I have been wondering about Boas, and found this quote.

I am reading this analogically to the work we have been conducting within “societies” (e.g. the United States).   I am arguing for transforming what might be called the units of critique from civilization/society to society (in the sense of hegemonic pattern of institutions) /family (in the sense of any local polity of practice).

So, in the spirit of Lave and McDermott (2002), here is a draft rewrite of Boas’s quote:

In short, the method we try to develop is based on a study of the dynamic changes in a family (community, local polity) that may be observed at the time of the observation.  We refrain from the attempts to solve fundamental problems of the general correlations between social structure and individual behavior until we have been able to unravel the process that are going on under our eyes.

Boas challenged the “grand theorists” of humanity when they tried, for example, to correlate “economic life and family organization” (1963 [1911]: 168).  We must now challenge the waves of theorists, particularly in sociology and economics, when they relate generalize plausible correlations between type of condition (poverty, disability) and type of local organization.  Like Boas, we must ask for research demonstrating the actual linkages and, given our experience that these linkages will not be found, then provide the systematic ethnographic evidence that families (etc.) are not (any more) predictable in their local arrangements (than the “societies,” e.g. Kwakiutl, etc., that were used as units of analysis in late 19th century anthropology).

So, let’s read this quote analogically again:

A constant relation between loosely connected [aggregated for statistical analysis] or entirely disconnected aspects of culture is improbable when the differences between the activities are great and different groups of individuals participate in the activities involved.   (1963 [1911]: 167)

This may allow us to rephrase the critique of the “culture of poverty” (more on that soon).

[The initial quote also echoes the rationale for philology in the 19th century when some linguists decided to eschew grand theories of language and its origin in order to actually understand human languages as they were observable and changed.  This movement towards history did lead to Saussure and his relatively successful search for synchronic processes.  Similar movements by Boas’s students may have been premature. Hymes and his students generally think that Saussure was similarly premature.]

ethnomethodology, social facting

On the archaeology of action networks

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This morning, Gus Andrews sent me the following link: http://wrttn.in/04af1a.

There, in anonymous fashion, someone who signs “An engineer” gives a brief history of a case when “institutional archaeology” was needed because of the loss of “institutional memory” in a large corporation that required “reverse smuggling” of forgotten secrets by a person who knew the secrets but could not have the secrets told him.  Specifically, the corporation and its engineers had become ignorant of how one of their factories worked—even though it did work, and actually worked so well that they wanted to expand it!  But expansion required a knowledge that had been lost through several generations of reorganizations, partial digitization, retirements, etc.  So the corporation brought out of retirement one of the engineers who had designed parts of the machines.  The author of this brief case study has a good sense of all the ironies involved as the business, legal, and engineering parts of the corporations worked together, though in ways they could not mutually acknowledge, to keep the whole working (which it never ceased doing).  As Sacks would say “everyone has to lie” (1975).

This case is another nice demonstration that:
1) “things have agency” (Latour 2005);
2) writing instruction manuals is impossible because, as Garfinkel pointed out one cannot imagine all the settings within which the manual will be read (2002).  One has to add a temporal dimension to this: one cannot imagine which is the part of the manual that will become inaccessible as the manual, as object, disintegrates;
3) Terminator-like, the machines keep working, industry hums along, the humans scratch their head (that this is mostly the case is what Durkheim tried to capture that Latour and other critics cannot quite explain unless they join him in accepting that complex systems have a life of their own, that is they have “agency as things” and there must be mechanisms through which the machines “tell” or “instruct” the humans about what the machines need in order to keep functioning);
4) as the live humans scratch their heads to develop a meta-knowledge about the machines (above the everyday knowledge they may gain by interacting with the machine), they find ways (à la Rancière) to develop a new kind of situated knowledge (since the new version of how the plant currently works is not the same as the earlier version of how the plant would work).  For example, they hire retired engineers as consultants who themselves figure out where they put in their garage partial blue-prints they were not supposed to have taken out of the factory, and how to smuggle them back into the factory …);
5) those who read Lévi-Strauss (1966 [1962] ) must be told again that the distinction bricolage/engineering is a critique of rationalism: real engineers are always bricoleurs.

Latour, Bruno Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005

Sacks, Harvey “Everyone has to lie.” in Sociocultural dimensions of language use. Edited by M. Sanches and B. Blount, 57-79 . New York: Academic Press 1975