Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Rediscovering Garfinkel's “Experiments,” Renewing Ethnomethodological Inquiry
- Part I Exegesis
- Part II ‘Experiments’
- Part III Implications
- Postface: “Experiments”—What are we Talking About? A Plea for Conceptual Investigations
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Chapter Ten - Experimenting with the archive? Performing Purdue in Paris, an Instructive Reprise
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Rediscovering Garfinkel's “Experiments,” Renewing Ethnomethodological Inquiry
- Part I Exegesis
- Part II ‘Experiments’
- Part III Implications
- Postface: “Experiments”—What are we Talking About? A Plea for Conceptual Investigations
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Summary
Introduction
By way of a reenactment, and with the help of its proceedings, this chapter returns to the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Held in Spring 1967 as a two-day conference at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the symposium brought together a group of 17 selected American sociologists, both “quantitative” and “qualitative,” to discuss the program and prospects of emerging ethnomethodology with its founding figure, Harold Garfinkel, and leading practitioners at the time, including Harvey Sacks and David Sudnow. The conveners of the symposium, Richard J. Hill and Kathleen S. Crittenden, explain its purpose in the preface to the transcribed proceedings:
A body of work which has been labeled “ethnomethodology” is the focus of considerable controversy within contemporary sociology. Even the description of the nature and status of this work is subject to debate. Does ethnomethodology constitute a new approach to “doing sociology,” or is it an extension of an established tradition? Are ethnomethodologists a group of scholars with a mutual sense of the problematic, or do they constitute a strange social movement within sociology? To what degree does ethnomethodology constitute a serious methodological critique of traditional sociological practice? Is ethnomethodology a “disaster,” or is it something “to get excited about”?
The Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology was organized to provide an opportunity for ethnomethodologists and non-ethnomethodologists to confront such issues. These Proceedings are an attempt to make the exchange that occurred available to others who are interested in ethnomethodology—regardless of the basis for that interest.
(Hill and Crittenden 1968, iii)More than fifty years later, ethnomethodology—the praxeological study of “people's methods”—has become an internationally established, diversly staffed and diversified research field. Why return to the Purdue Symposium then, an early conversation on ethnomethodology's “basics”? And why do so with the help of their edited proceedings, an arguably edulcorated transcript (more of which below)? Interestingly, Garfinkel himself reflected on this kind of question, when resuming the 1967 symposium on day two: “Suppose we are making a tape recording of our conversation. In what sense would the recording that we are making be available to us for our later analysis?” (Garfinkel, in Hill and Crittenden 1968, 172). This chapter returns to Garfinkel's question*, yet in an unusual way perhaps, as the chapter reports and reflects upon the symposium's reenactment.
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- The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel , pp. 183 - 202Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2023