Abstract
This paper analyzes four instances in talk of generalization about people, that is, of using statements about one or more people as the basis of stating something about a category. Generalization can be seen as a categorization practice which involves a reflexive relationship between the generalized-from person or people and the generalized-to category. One thing that is accomplished through generalization is instruction in how to understand the identity of the generalized-from person or people, so in addition to being understood as a practice of categorization, generalization can also be understood as a practice of identification. Somewhat incidentally, this paper also illustrates the importance of certain methodological issues related to membership categorization analysis and contributes to the growing body of work that connects membership categorization analysis with sequential conversation analysis.
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Notes
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, involving a supposed attack by North Vietnamese naval vessels on US naval vessels, is a historical event which probably never actually happened, but which served as partial justification, several months later, for the US invasion of Vietnam (Neale 2001).
Language that is quoted from a transcript is marked with quotation marks. Category labels are marked with square brackets. When both quotation marks and square brackets are used, the brackets are outside the quotation marks.
These authors discuss the occasioned nature of categorization collections or devices, rather than occasioned categories. It should be noted that in this paper I am concerned with categories, which may be ad hoc categories, rather than collections of categories or the relations among members of a particular membership categorization device (see, e.g., Sacks 1992).
These three civil rights workers were "James Chaney, a young black Mississipian, and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner," who "were arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi, released from jail late at night, then seized, beaten with chains, and shot to death" (Zinn 1999: 456). These three men were part of close to one thousand, mostly white, volunteers sent to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by organizations involved in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. They "taught freedom schools, registered voters, operated recreational centers, [and] became politically radicalized" (Harding 1980, p. 174). One purpose of sending these volunteers was to re-energize the civil rights movement, in which there was a growing dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reform directed by the federal US government (Harding 1980). Examined in isolation, the actions of the federal government and the FBI in this incident appear fairly positive, as it was through the investigative efforts of the FBI that the murderers were sentenced to prison. However, in the larger context, this incident occurred after several years of increasing violence about which the federal government and the FBI did little or nothing (Zinn 1999).
A slightly different way of understanding the generalization is that Hoover generalizes from Johnson’s “this group” to the category [“these people”]. He then replaces the category label [“these people”] with the category label [“these families”]. This way of understanding the generalization does not substantially change the analysis.
This percentage is higher if other types of post-secondary education, such as two-year junior colleges, are included.
The student body at this university is skewed in the opposite direction than that at the university of the participants in the third instance, though not as extremely. It is approximately 80% female. The two universities are comparable in other respects. They are both relatively small and specialized national universities. They are also similar in terms of name recognition and prestige.
In later work, Garfinkel has not found this concept useful. Watson (2009), on the other hand, argues for the continued usefulness of the concept of the documentary method of interpretation.
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Hauser, E. Generalization: A Practice of Situated Categorization in Talk. Hum Stud 34, 183–198 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9184-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9184-y