The Ethnomethodological Lineage of Conversation Analysis

Abstract

AbstractConversation analysis is undoubtedly the most visible and conventionally successful of Garfinkel’s legacies. Yet the lineage is complex. This chapter traces it, first, by discussing Garfinkel’s initial interest, as revealed in an early (1948) dissertation proposal, in the domain of human interaction. He specifically addressed analytical problems related to the concision of speech (that it conveys much more than what is said), and the associated context-dependency of meaning, whereby linguistic expressions—later termed indexical expressions—gain their meaning by way of their context. Interaction and speech, in Garfinkel’s early work, were explicated using phenomenological resources, including the study of background expectancies, presuppositions accessed through breaching experiments and other demonstrations, and analysis of the documentary method of interpretation. Harvey Sacks’s approach was more direct, less theoretical, and habilitated the direct study of interaction through a selective engagement with key Garfinkelian stances and ideas. Sacks also drew from Erving Goffman concerning the interaction order, and from a variety of other scholars and works. The result was a focus on specimens of actual speech, coupled with methodological innovations related to membership categories as an aspect of common-sense knowledge, the sequential organization of talk, and increasingly sophisticated ways of working with collections of phenomena to delineate interactional activities and practices. This creative synthesis, and the conversation analytic discipline that emerged from it, was conditioned by Sacks’s own abiding interest in advancing a highly rigorous but thoroughly emic science of the “witnessable order” of human interaction.