The Possibilities of Ethnomethodology in Modern Art Studies
191
Such an approach in ethnomethodology can become a basis for the
hermeneutic method of analysis in the study of the problem of
understanding.
The connection between hermeneutic and ethnomethodological
conceptions has a philosophical-methodological aspect. Hermeneutics puts
understanding, as a phenomenon of human beings, in the centre of its
philosophical problematics. Already in M. Heidegger’s main work Being and
Time,
14
the ideas of philosophical hermeneutics, as developed in
ethnomethodological studies, can be noted. Firstly, he points out the
connection between hermeneutics and language, asserting that to exist is to
be understood in language, where to be understood means to be
interpreted; secondly, he substantiates a hermeneutic circle as one of the
principles revealing specifics of the interrelation between understanding and
interpretation. In a further evolution of hermeneutic theory, H. G. Gadamer
in his work The Truth and a Method develops more detailed and complicated
methods of hermeneutic analysis in order to prove the connection between
hermeneutics and interpretation, the main concepts of which can be
incorporated into the ethnomethodological description of everyday norms,
rules of behaviour and meanings of language within everyday social
interaction.
The theoretical assumptions of ethnomethodology can be found in P.
Berger (b. 1929) and T. Luckmann’s (b. 1927) treatise, The Social Construction
of Reality.
15
The scholars, both of whom were pupils and followers of A.
Schyuts, put forward the thesis that knowledge, pre-prepared in society,
represents social order. In assessing their contribution to the field, we may
note that they implemented a complex approach to the analysis of the
everyday life on the basis of phenomenological sociology and philosophical
anthropology, and developed in detail the categorial apparatus for studying
how man constructs his social reality and how this constructed reality
shapes man. The researchers identified the phenomenon of the every-day
world as being self-generated concepts at the theoretical level, thus
determining the assumptions from which ethnomethodology originates as a
new direction in social-humanitarian knowledge.
In H. Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, ethnomethodology is
given the status of an independent category in which the motives behind
social actions in ethnic communities are categorised, based upon the
analysis of existing rules and the processes of their formation and
interpretation.
16
The aim of this new academic direction is to substantiate
14
Heidegger 1997.
15
Berger, Luckmann 1995.
16
Garfinkel 1967.
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L. I. Nekhvyadovich
192
the process of communication as a process of the exchange of meanings. In
the long term, this has caused a tendency towards the universalisation of
methods for the anthropological study of ethnic cultures. The key concepts
behind ethnomethodological studies have become the “background
expectations” - the ideas of people within a particular social world, and
“indexation” - a way to determine a sense of human behaviour. Garfinkle
writes:
“I use the term ‘ethnomethodology’ to designate the study of the rational
properties of the indexical expressions and other practical actions as
possible continuous achievements of the organised artificial practice of the
everyday life.”
17
The ethnomethodological approach assumes:
- conjugacy of interdependent social actions with the units of speech-
based communication;
- correlation of sociological studies with the interpretation of actions
and speech of another person;
- extraction of the levels of understanding and conversation in
interpretation;
- identification of the structure of informal speech with the syntax of
everyday speech.
18
H. Garfinkel determines the methods of sociological studies as the
fundamental ones in which
“practices of sociological studies and theorising, subjects for these practices,
discoveries received by means of these practices, circumstances of
application of these practices, suitability of these practices as methodology
of studies and all the rest are entirely methods of sociological studies and
theorising of members (and) are inevitable and irreparable.”
19
Sociology, in such an understanding, acquires the status of
ethnoknowledge.
The boundary of the 20
th
and 21
st
centuries marks the formative
period of such directions in ethnomethodology as methodology of the
analysis of the everyday life (D. Zimmerman, M.
Pollner),
ethnomethodological hermeneutics (A. Blum, P. McHugh), ethnolinguistics
(H. Sachs, G. Jefferson) and the ethnographic research of science (K.
Knorr-Cetina, B. Latour, S. Woolgar). These researchers emphasise the
importance of ethnomethodology as social-humanitarian knowledge in the
study of the structures of everyday reality and social interaction, and the use
of the concepts of understanding and interpretation in the context of
17
Garfinkel 2007, p. 20.
18
Ibid.
19
Garfinkel 1970, p. 345.
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