Terra sebv s acta mvsei sabesiensi s

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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