Garfinkel’s studies in ethnomethodology:
exploring the moral foundations of modern public life
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-699220183302008Keywords:
Contemporary sociological theory, Studies of etnomethodology, Garfinkel, Constitutive social facts, Social justice as a sociological questionAbstract
Editora Vozes has published a Portuguese translation of the new second edition of Studies in ethnomethodology. To celebrate that achievement I will talk about the importance of that book and of Garfinkel’s work more generally; in theoretical, methodological and political terms. I will argue that Garfinkel took up Durkheim’s project to make Sociology uniquely suited to the study of modernity and that this explains much of the misunderstanding of his work. I also want to announce the existence of Garfinkel’s Archive of which I am the Director and Intellectual Executor. There are materials in the Archive that should become the focus of important graduate theses and books. Work on the archive is being supported by the German government through a center at Siegen University in Germany called Media of Cooperation.
Garfinkel’s argument - like Durkheim’s - changes the epistemological terrain of social science, and hence the theoretical terrain of social argumentation. It shifts the domain of objects from natural to social objects - and the relevant social practices from norms, traditional rules and consensus - to constitutive practices. Because of the enormity of this shift, Ethnomethodology can only be understood by those with a theoretical grasp of what is involved. Otherwise, contradictions follow: as they have. The consequence of Garfinkel’s argument for understanding modern democratic politics is that any inequalities or exclusions that prevent people from being able to fulfill reciprocity conditions in interaction (his famous “Trust Conditions”) are a threat to coherence, meaning, and identity in modern democratic public life.
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