[Air-l] Ethnography vs. Ethnomethodology

[Christian Nelson]

On Mar 31, 2005, at 10:18 AM, cordelia at iinet.net.au wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Ethnography primarily concerns itself with the prolonged study of a 
> group of people. This generally involves immersion and  participation 
> in their day to day lives in an attempt to discover who they think 
> they are, what they think they are doing and to what end they think 
> they are doing it. Ethnography may involve many methodologies to 
> accomplish this. Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, studies 
> activities of group members to discover how they make sense of their 
> surroundings.  It specifically studies how individuals give sense to 
> and accomplish their daily activities. It is not so much concerned 
> with what they are doing but rather how they make sense of it.
>
> Cheers Sally

EMists definitely describe their subject as the "sense-making 
practices" of members. But they don't draw a sharp distinction between 
sense making practices and daily activities;indeed, they usually argue 
that they are one and the same thing. E.g., Garfinkel talks a lot about 
how sense making is embodied by or "incarnate" in members'  practices. 
This goes along with EMists rejection of (talk of) psychological 
phenomena and processes, though some early EMists seemed to have had a 
more psychological angle on sense making. (In particular, Weider took a 
phenomenological approach to sense making, but he's taken shots for 
that from other EMists.) In line with all this, at least some CAists 
view their studies of conversational practices as studies of 
moment-by-moment member sense making.
Cheers,
Christian

Christian Nelson, Ph.D.
Scholar  in Residence
Dept. of Marketing and Health Communication
120 Boylston St.
Emerson College
Boston, MA 02116-4624