20 Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

Dr. Vijeta Dr. Vijeta

The text is divided as follows-

Introduction
Phenomenology
Ethnomethodology
Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology
Conclusion
Summary

Objectives: Through this module, one will be able to know about the phenomenology and the ethnomethodology. Along with it, the text written in the module gives an insight on origin and anthropologist’s view about phenomenology and ethnomethodology. Also, it tells about how phenomenology is different from ethnomethodology.

Introduction

Phenomenological approaches have become increasingly important in anthropology throughout the past 25 years. Phenomenologist have contributed greatly to how anthropologists think of lived experience, illness and healing, suffering, violence, morality, bodiliness, sensory perception, communicative practices, mind and consciousness, creativity and aesthetic efforts, and subjectivity and intersubjectivity, among other themes and topics. More generally, they have helped anthropologists to reconfigure what it means to be human, to have a body, to suffer and to heal, and to live among others (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011).

Ethnomethodology is the descriptive study of the reporting and accounting practices (‘methods’) through which socially embedded actors come to attribute meaning and rationality to their own and others’ behavior. Ethno methodologists study interactive, ad hoc sense making at the sites where social structures are produced and reproduced through talk and coordinated action. The central claim of ethnomethodology is that phenomena of order are identical with the procedures for their local endogenous production and accountability’ (Garfinkel, 2002). (https://sun.iwu.edu).

Ethnomethodology is the term coined by Garfinkel and his students as: “the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life. They were concerned with the practical, everyday activities of men in society as they make accountable, to themselves and others, their everyday affairs, and with the methods they use for producing and managing those same affairs. He sees similarity in the activities of producing and making accountable. His apprehension with the everyday, routine and commonplace activities as phenomena in their own right, deserving of detailed study, is certainly consistent with the views of phenomenology (Psathas, 1968).

Phenomenology

Phenomenological approaches to language have been taken up. Also, within phenomenological Anthropology, there have also been a number of attempts to take discourse, narrative practice, and semiotics seriously productively by linguistic anthropologists. Phenomenological anthropologists have often explicitly relied on the concept of experience as a way to orient their research generatively to the complexly temporal, at times ambiguous, and deeply ambivalent realities of human existence. On the other hand, when used in an unreflexive way, the category itself at times presumes and promotes unexamined cultural assumptions concerning articulations of self, subjectivity, and social action that may blind us to other possible forms of life and ways of being. Accordingly, one of the main aims of anthropologists drawing from phenomenological methods has been to bracket the assumptions that come from their own cultural and theoretical heritages in trying to understand more accurately and more fully a diverse number of cultural and experiential phenomena, be they questions of illness and madness These efforts have led to more fine-tuned depictions of the modalities of engagement, consciousness, and sensory perception in particular arrangements known to people. As Throop has argued, however, bracketing in the context of the anthropological encounter is most often a thoroughly inter subjective affair, with the misunderstandings that arise from such encounters at times evoking generative forms of self-estrangement in which ethnographers confront otherwise unrecognized aspects of their own assumptive worlds (Throop 2010). For this reason, Throop (2010) has suggested, following Bidney (1973), that we term this form of bracketing an ethnographic (rather than strictly phenomenological) epoche. From a phenomenological perspective, then, distinctions between subjective and objective aspects of reality, between what is of the mind and of the world, are shaped by the attitude that a social actor takes up toward the world, as well as by the historical and cultural conditions that inform the values, assumptions, ideals, and norms embedded within it. There is no strict line demarcating the subjective and objective because both are necessarily articulated by attitudes toward experience that may render certain aspects of experience as thoughts, images, feelings, sentiments, moods, sensations, perceptions, judgments, and forms of appreciation, on the one hand, and properties of physical objects, bodies, persons, animals, celestial phenomena, spirits, natural occurrences, etc., on the other (Throop 2009). Much work in phenomenology in the twentieth century had been geared toward rectifying this conception, with anthropologists contributing important perspectives and findings. One of the first thinkers to apply such phenomenological insights anthropologically was Clifford Geertz (1973), who used a Schutz-inspired discussion of various culturally constituted perspectives to distinguish among commonsensical, scientific, aesthetic, and religious orientations to reality. More recently, Jackson (1998, 2005, & 2009) has taken this work further in exploring the ways in which a number of intersubjective engagements, from play and fetishes to violence and religiosity, involve complex imbrications of subject and object, self and other (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011).

What is at stake for Phenomenologically inclined anthropologists are precisely the limits of approaches that seek to disarticulate unrecognized historical, political, economic, and cultural influences from the concrete engagements, concerns, and experiences of particular social actors acting in particular places and spaces in particular times. It is not unrecognized biases that phenomenological anthropologists are critical of, however. It is, rather, tendencies toward abstraction, ossification, and totalization that are held to be problematic, unless, of course, such processes are examined in concrete moments of interaction and engagement. As Good (1994) contends, one of the main questions facing the development of phenomenological approaches in anthropology (in this case, he is particularly interested in critical phenomenology) concerns how one can “recognize the presence of the social and historical within human consciousness, recognize forms of self-deception and distortion, without devaluing local claims to knowledge?” Such concerns evidence some of the main points of tension between phenomenological and sociopolitical approaches (and also discursive/semiotic/linguistic and psychodynamic approaches) in anthropology (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011).

Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel was a student of Talcott Parsons and he took Parsons voluntaristic theory of action as a basic frame of reference, but he was also deeply influenced by the phenomenological writings of Alfred Schultz and the teachings of Aaron Gurwitsch. (Sometime later, the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein would become another source of inspiration).The phenomenological enterprise directed Garfinkel’s attention to certain fundamental pretheoretical problems posed by Parsons’ theory of action, problems which were not adequately addressed within the Parsonian framework. What would later come to be known as ‘ethnomethodology’ is in large part the result of Garfinkel’s sustained effort to confront these problems by empirical means (Parsons, Talcott (1902–79). Parsons had sought to develop a theory of social action that would solve the Hobbesian problem of order while retaining purposive human agency within its framework. At the same time, he wished to avoid the limitations and pitfalls of strictly utilitarian thinking, which cannot account for the ends toward which action is oriented, and which treats intrinsic rationality as the sole standard governing the selection of means. Parsons’ solution centered on the role of moral values in social action—he proposed that, through socialization, such values become internalized and incorporated into the actor’s personality, where they guide both the selection of ends of action and the normative means by which they are sought in so far. As such values are also institutionalized within a society and are shared by societal members, patterned activity and social cohesion will be the natural result. Parsons’ theory places primary emphasis on the motivational wellsprings of action, and in so doing it has relatively little to say about how concrete actions are managed and coordinated in real time. Garfinkel’s findings amount to a major reconceptualization of the fundamental locus of social order. Most social science theories view social life as organized by structural entities (e.g., social institutions, cultural symbol systems, structures of race, class, and gender, etc.) that stand outside of the flow of events in everyday life and exert a more or less determining influence on the course of those events. Such theories embody what might be thought of as a top-down conception of social order (Welz, 2001).

Garfinkel, in contrast, offers a thoroughly bottom-up conception, and this theoretical inversion is a natural consequence of his decision to treat social order as a cognitive rather than a Hobbesian problem—not a problem of how conflict is avoided and solidarity maintained, but a problem of how the social world, whatever its character, becomes intelligible and accountable to its members. From this vantage point, every orderly feature of social life is an ongoing contingent accomplishment, the result of members’ concerted effort to make those features recognizable to one another and the basis for subsequent action. This theoretical inversion has further implications for the theory of action and in particular for the role of social norms (as well as rules, conventions, etc.) in the conduct of action (Heritage 1984, 1987, Wilson 1971). In the traditional Parsonian view, norms regulate action by specifying what courses of action are appropriate under given circumstances. This view presupposes that situations, norms, and actions are independent entities, with each situation standing outside of the actions contained within it, and predefined norms constraining those actions to unfold along situationally appropriate lines. However, Garfinkel’s findings about the nature of practical reasoning suggest that this viewpoint is fundamentally misguided. Far from being independent entities, situations, actions, and norms stand in a co-constitutive or reflexive relationship to one another. Correspondingly, actors are knowledgeable agents at the very center of this process, with the capacity to alter or transform the ‘definition of the situation’ through their actions and to decide upon the sense and applicability of the norms deemed relevant to that situation. Thus, the experiential reality of social norms, like every other organized feature of social life, rests upon a foundation of practical reasoning whereby action is produced and rendered intelligible in normative terms. This does not mean that norms are inconsequential for social organization, but their primary significance is constitutive rather than regulative—norms play a crucial role as a resource for imputing meaning and motivation to situated behavior (Welz, 2001).

Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

Phenomenology and ethnomethodology differ in their disciplinary orientations, research questions, and levels of analysis; they share a common problematic in the constitution of objectivities. The term ‘constitution’ refers to the precipitation of a unified meaning from a cascading series of overlapping and synchronous perceptual, apperceptual, and categorical processes, whose redundancy confirms the objectivity of the identity thus produced. What serial constitution ultimately produces is not the furniture of the universe, but the known structures and processes upon which human beings premise and account for their actions. When dealing with affirmed bodies of knowledge—whether in science, the professionals, or everyday life. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology seek to show how such knowledge is possible: They strive to retrace the steps through which articulated descriptions, definitions, axioms, concepts, or formal methods have been constituted by human subjects (The risk of not doing so, they argue, is reification, misdirection, and endless controversy). Phenomenology tackles constitutional problems epistemologically, through phenomenological psychology. Ethnomethodology tackles through the ethnographic description of actors’ reporting and accounting practices. Neither school makes the constitution of economic knowledge (either by economists or the laity) a distinct priority (https://sun.iwu.edu.).

Phenomenology and ethnomethodology study how elementary processes of sense making cumulate into intricate systems of knowledge. Both trace the constitutive processes of theoretical science to their ultimate origins in the life world. But how does one begin to describe a world given ‘prepredicatively’? The quest for a ‘Lebenswelt economics’ must either limit itself to a clarification of the constitutive processes of formal theorizing (a la Schutz) or replace crisp theoretical idealizations with transcriptions of actors’ circuitous talk (a la Anderson, Hughes, and Sharrock). Both endeavors piggyback on existing theoretical developments. Phenomenologists and ethnomethodologist consider theory a wondrous achievement of transcendental intersubjectivity; yet decline to contribute to it themselves (Beckert & Zafirovski, 2013; https://sun.iwu.edu).

Conclusion

Phenomenologically inclined inquiries in anthropology have offered a wealth of informed and compelling accounts of particular lived realities. Combined, they add significantly to our understanding of what constitutes the human. Phenomenological approaches, broadly conceived, can get at the richness of people’s lives, concerns, and engagements in direct and incisive terms. John Dewey (1958) once proposed that “a first-rate test” of the value of any philosophy is does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?” Phenomenological inclined efforts in anthropology have clearly passed this test. What is most called for are careful, sophisticated phenomenological approaches in anthropology, realized through ethnographic field research methods, that attend at once to the tangible realities of people’s lives and to the often interrelated social, biological, corporeal, sensorial, discursive, cultural, political, economic, psychological, and environmental dimensions of those realities. This phenomenology would rebut conventional ideas of self, society, consciousness, memory, and the human more generally. This anthropology would be attuned to both particular situations and the common threads of existence that weave through all our lives (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011).

The ethnomethodologist seeks to discover the “methods” that persons use in their everyday life in society in constructing social reality and also to discover the nature of the realities they have constructed. In studying, for example, the way that jurors recognize the “correctness” of a verdict, he would focus on how the jurors make their activities “normal,” on how the moral order of their world is created. They are seen as creating, through their activities, familiar scenes and procedures which are recognizable to them as the world they know in common and take for granted, by which and within which “correctness” of a verdict is determined. Only by examining their procedures and discovering what they consist of, can one fully understand what they mean by correctness, as correctness is decided by those who construct it. Further, as Garfinkel shows, some understanding decision-making in daily life, i.e., in situations other than the jury-room, is also achieved. Ethnomethodology may come closer to escaping the bounds of the particular culture that is studied because of the phenomenological sophistication which aids it. However, the grounding of ethnomethodology in phenomenology implies that research problems will be defined and approached in such a way as to result in the discovery of the essential features of the social phenomena being studied. This may appear to be a contradiction. In one sense it is, but at another level it may not be. For example, if one looks at the problem of jurors making decisions as a study of the general phenomenon of decision-making, an analysis of their procedures has implications for the understanding of the essence of the process of decision making, of how groups, in contrast to individuals, make decisions, and of the rules of decision-making in everyday life (Psathas, 1968).

Summary

Phenomenology is a methodology of social research initiated in 1900 by mathematician Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). The core of phenomenological method consists in the disciplined use of the reflective techniques of ‘bracketing’ and ‘reduction’ to disclose the essential feature of intentional objects (objects perceivable or imaginable by conscious human beings). Ethnomethodology is the descriptive study of the reporting and accounting practices (‘methods’) through which socially embedded actors come to attribute meaning and rationality to their own and others’ behavior. Ethno methodologists study interactive, ad hoc sense making at the sites where social structures are produced and reproduced through talk and coordinated action. The central claim of ethnomethodology is that phenomena of order are identical with the procedures for their local endogenous production and accountability’ (Garfinkel, 2002). Garfinkel was a student of Talcott Parsons and he took Parsons voluntaristic theory of action as a basic frame of reference, but he was also deeply influenced by the phenomenological writings of Alfred Schultz and the teachings of Aaron Gurwitsch. (Sometime later, the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein would become another source of inspiration).The phenomenological enterprise directed Garfinkel’s attention to certain fundamental pretheoretical problems posed by Parsons’ theory of action, problems which were not adequately addressed within the Parsonian framework. What would later come to be known as ‘ethnomethodology’ is in large part the result of Garfinkel’s sustained effort to confront these problems by empirical means (Parsons, Talcott (1902–79). Garfinkel’s findings amount to a major reconceptualization of the fundamental locus of social order. Most social science theories view social life as organized by structural entities (e.g., social institutions, cultural symbol systems, structures of race, class, and gender, etc.) that stand outside of the flow of events in everyday life and exert a more or less determining influence on the course of those events. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology differ in their disciplinary orientations, research questions, and levels of analysis; they share a common problematic in the constitution of objectivities. The term ‘constitution’ refers to the precipitation of a unified meaning from a cascading series of overlapping and synchronous perceptual, apperceptual, and categorical processes, whose redundancy confirms the objectivity of the identity thus produced. What serial constitution ultimately produces is not the furniture of the universe, but the known structures and processes upon which human beings premise and account for their actions. Phenomenology tackles constitutional problems epistemologically, through phenomenological psychology. Ethnomethodology tackles through the ethnographic description of actors’ reporting and accounting practices. Neither school makes the constitution of economic knowledge (either by economists or the laity) a distinct priority. Phenomenologically inclined inquiries in anthropology have offered a wealth of informed and compelling accounts of particular lived realities. Combined, they add significantly to our understanding of what constitutes the human. The ethnomethodologist seeks to discover the “methods” that persons use in their everyday life in society in constructing social reality and also to discover the nature of the realities they have constructed.

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References/Suggested Readings

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Throop C.J., 2010a. In the midst of action. See Murphy & Throop 2010a, pp. 28–49
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