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Notes
“Garfinkel’s writings are […] the reference texts, but at the same time their resistance to hasty or schematic reading make them ideal material for discussion […] on reading Garfinkel, the Nietzsche of Ecce Homo comes to mind: ‘Whoever knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of heights, a strong air. One must be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger of being chilled by it’.” (Fele 2012: 153–54).
The last two chapters are the most dense ones, reading benefits from some familiarity with ethnomethodology. The fourth chapter, instead, is perhaps the less enlightening for EM scholars.
“Only by objectivating their thinking and redrawing it into formal, public structures can [Tibetan philosophers] proceed with their philosophical work.” (p. 192).
Garfinkel’s favorite author, apparently (Liberman 2012: 274).
“Maps suggest to people what to look for, and what they find permits them to arrange the orderliness of the map, which then is capable of providing them further assistance in how to scrutinize the landscape.” (p. 57) “We freely employ our capacity to tweak the particulars we have in hand into an interpretation that can be made to seem reasonable.” (p. 75).
“‘Let’s just play and see.’ See what? See what the rule mean, in the only place they can have meaning—in the context of game play. […R]ules are used as a fabric for collecting procedures of orderly play; and the procedures they collect become just what the rules mean.” (p. 85).
See also Garfinkel (2006: 123) on the “temporal mode of apprehension”.
And indeed “the first rule of a conversation is survival.” (p. 178; see also: pp. 144, 158, 284 note 6; Liberman 1980, 2012b: 273) In Goffmanian (e.g., 1967) fashion, Liberman underlines that social “obligations can, and usually do, overshadows the semantic issues.” (p. 174; see also p. 129) Since sometimes this may prove quite problematic for the activity at hand (as also Liberman notices, see pp. 157, 177), I deem interaction self-preserving tendency a crucial notion, worth further inquiry (see also Bassetti et al. 2013).
This could also be a good way to “reconcile” phenomenology and cognitive theory, as Ralph Ellis (2013) wishes for.
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Bassetti, C. Kenneth Liberman: More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Hum Stud 37, 597–602 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9313-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9313-5