Terra sebv s acta mvsei sabesiensi s

The Possibilities of Ethnomethodology in Modern Art Studies 

 

189

Bachofen (1815-1857),

5

 L. H. Morgan (1818-1881),

6

 A. Bastian (1826-

1905),

7

 J. Lubbock (1834-1913)

8

 is the concept of a person and culture as a 

stable formation which holds ideas significant to that ethnic society 

regarding various aspects of social life. 

The researcher I. V. Davydova offers the opinion that ideas of an 

ethnomethodological character occur in the writings of philosophers who 

pursue a phenomenological direction of inquiry.

9

 The systematic description 

of the phenomenological method, including such components essential to 

ethnomethodology as contemplation, reflection, phenomenological 

reduction and intentional analysis, belongs to the founder of 

phenomenology, E. Husserl.

10

 

The general denominator of phenomenological and 

ethnomethodological concepts is their ontological and gnoseological 

character, that is, they give crucial importance to the problem of the 

interrelation between existence and essence. Phenomenology pays attention 

to a person’s experience, specifically first-hand experiences such as those 

the ethnomethodologist pursues - and on the search for methods by which 

to explain them. According to the theory of intentionality, which links the 

consciousness with the object of cognition, the process of thinking occurs 

only in the presence of the object of thought. Intentionality was recognised 

in ancient philosophy in the works of Parmenides (5

th

 century BC), who 

characterised intentionality as relational, and showed that in the case of 

non-existent objects an intentional attitude is impossible. The aim of the 

intentional analysis of consciousness is to identify and study those aspects 

of consciousness that are involved in the comprehension of reality. The 

object of cognition is constructed in the process of cognition and 

phenomena of the world exist not objectively but from the perspective of 

cognition. In Cartesian Meditations (1931) E. Husserl writes: “The term 

‘intentionality’ means nothing more than the general property of 

consciousness to be consciousness of something.”

11

 Intentionality in the 

phenomenologist’s interpretation is a value, a structure which is constructed 

in its entirety at the moment of individual and collective perception. This 

perception is characterised in phenomenology as something intersubjective, 

superpersonal and mental. Intersubjective in its essence, the world of 

mentalities, as described by E. Husserl, defines one of the actual problems 

                                                 

5

 Bachofen 1975. 

6

 Morgan 1983. 

7

 Bastian 1884. 

8

 Lubbock 1870. 

9

 Davydova 2002. 

10

 Ibid. 

11

 Husserl 2001, p. 13. 

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L. I. Nekhvyadovich 

 

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of ethnomethodology - the relation between mental acts and the actions of 

the people using language to express them. So, for example, in Husserl’s 

Ideas, the act of cognition is constructed on the basis of the relationship 

between “noemata” and “noeses.” The notion of noema plays a special role 

in phenomenology. The noema is the object of intentionality; while the 

noesis is a technique by which a subject directs itself to the intentional 

object; accordingly, noeses are means of constructing facts of reality relating 

to objects and their relationships. 

The theoretical assumptions of ethnomethodology are found in E. 

Husserl’s development of the category “life world” defined as a single 

universum possessing its own internal laws and characteristics. The life 

world, according to the philosopher’s opinion, is the set of fundamental 

assumptions upon which public institutions and cultural traditions are 

based. As such, this theoretical statement is of importance for the formation 

of ethnomethodology formulated by him in the work Philosophy as a Strict 

Science: 

“... people who have changed their attitudes continue to keep their natural 

interests … as the individual members of an universal life community (their 

nation); they cannot simply lose them, i.e. cease to be themselves, those who 

they are from the birth.”

12

 

We find the development of E. Husserl’s ideas in the 

phenomenological sociology of A. Schyuts. In his work Semantic Structure of 

Everyday World: Essays on Phenomenological Sociology, in defining the concept of 

life world the philosopher puts forward a statement which will become one 

of the bases of isolation of ethnomethodological problematics. The 

statement can be reduced to the following: the life world is formed around I 

as a centre in compliance with its systems of relevancies, thus everyday 

knowledge of the social world is inseparable from this contingency. The 

world of everyday life in A. Shyuts’s philosophy interfaces with the culture 

world,  

“because from the very beginning the everyday life appears to us as the 

semantic universum, the combination of meanings which we must interpret 

to find support in this world, to reach an agreement with it. However, this 

combination of meanings - and there is the difference of a kingdom of 

culture from a kingdom of nature in it - arose and continues to form in 

human acts: our own and other people’s, contemporaries and 

predecessors.”

13

  

                                                 

12

 Husserl 1994, p. 112. 

13

 Schyuts 1988, p. 130. 

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