[Air-l] Ethnography vs. Ethnomethodology
Christian Nelson
xianknelson at mac.com
Thu Mar 31 07:40:22 PST 2005
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
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