engaging ordinary activities

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are invitations to study ordinary and seemingly unremarkable activities up-close. We pay ‘to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extra-ordinary events’ (Garfinkel 1967, p.1). This doesn't mean EM/CA researchers can't look at dramatic events, and matters of life and death. There are lots of studies of operating theatres, police interrogations, cross-examination in trials, evacuations of public spaces and so on. But these studies themselves proceed in a particular way, drawing attention to the step by step development of the activities that comprise these dramatic events, how surgical tools are passed, how objects are touched, how alarms are raised, how questions are formulated in ways that constrain recipients, and so on.

So, why would you want to do this? Why engage ordinary activities so closely? To start thinking about this, consider the aesthetic argument, and two scenes from well known films. The first is a much discussed scene from the film American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes. In the film...

…a young man is filming a plastic bag being blown around against an ugly red brick wall. It is grey and overcast. He is utterly intent and concentrated on the object as it flits about. As it continues, the movements seem less and less random; you imagine some invisible force might be purposefully moving it around. It moves up and down without hitting the floor and then it hovers almost still before spinning like a kite, it seems to have a mind of its own….

This scene caused some debate and drew quite a lot of criticism, even though the film did go on to win 5 Oscars. The director was saying there is beauty in this mundane and unremarkable happening. Critics said it was variously clichéd, ‘arty’ and ‘post-modern’ (criticisms in this context). Mendes was saying something about what we look at and what we don't. He was questioning whether we might find beauty in the mundane things that surround us, but are so familiar to us, that we don't tend to pay them much attention.

There is a similar scene in a film (by Eric Rohmer) of the novel ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ (by Tracy Chevalier). The film is about how the artist Vermeer comes to produce a famous painting of a girl with a pearl earring. At one point the subject of the painting, ‘the girl’, is standing with Vermeer by an open window. He asks her to describe the colour of the clouds in the sky. It's a kind of test. Without really thinking she says ‘white’. He frowns. Then she says ‘grey’. He frowns again. Then she starts to actually really look and she sees that clouds, especially on overcast days, are rarely white or grey. They take on a whole range of colours.

These points chime somewhat with what Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks were doing. They were calling us to really look at social activity. They were also proposing a deal with you. They promise that if you do look, you'll find something interesting and unexpected, even in settings you are very familiar with. Garfinkel has a nice phrase, that a great many things are 'seen but unnoticed', and ethnomethodology tries to 'notice' them.

Take a quick and accessible example. You meet someone and they say 'how are you'. You treat this as a greeting, and say 'fine, how are you'. The fact you have done this, i.e., noticed a greeting, hardly registers with you. The greeting is seen - you responded to it after all - but unnoticed. You didn't have to think, 'hmm, what do they mean 'how are you''. You simply saw it and responded.

The next step is to question whether there is something systematic here. We ask, what resources do we use to produce and see mundane activities like 'greetings', are these widely shared, and are they methodically used?

As a kind of test, try saying 'how are you' first as a greeting that you might give to someone you have just met, then as a genuine inquiry said to someone you are worried about, that gives them the opportunity to tell their troubles, should they have any. I'll bet you two things. First, that your greetings sounded different to your inquiries in a number of systematic ways, even though you used the same words. They differed in terms of pitch, intonation and pace. Second, I bet if we asked others to do this, these same will apply to them as well. The greetings will sound more-or-less alike, as will the inquiries.

Harvey Sacks' promise was that where ever you look, you will find this kind of thing, what he termed 'order at all points'. In other words, all social actions have these systematic and methodic features. In a way they have to, because they have to work as those actions. He said he wished to give students an 'aesthetic for everyday life'. The ability to appreciate the artful but also systematic ways in which everyday activities are assembled. Through their work, which differs but has overlaps, Garfinkel and Sacks supply resources that can be used to bring these 'seen but unnoticed' happenings into view. 

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