scholarly journals Introduction to Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemens Eisenmann ◽  
Michael Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Harold Garfinkel ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Phenomenal Field ◽  
Aron Gurwitsch

AbstractThis article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order.

Tactile Vision and Enworlded Being

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Phenomenal Field ◽  
The Relationship

Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the ‘Mutoscope’. The three-dimensionality, tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. Finally, the relationship between the self and the other is considered, through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.

Reflections on the Status and Direction of Psychology: An External Historical Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amedeo Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Aron Gurwitsch

Abstract Whenever one reads internal histories of psychology what is covered is the establishment of a lab by Wundt in 1879 as the initiating act and then the breakaway movements of the 20th Century are discussed: Behaviorism, Gestalt Theory, Psychoanalysis, and most recently the Cognitive revival. However, Aron Gurwitsch described a perspective noted by Cassirer and first developed by Malebranche, which dates the founding of psychology at the same time as that of physics in the 17th Century. This external perspective shows the dependency of psychology upon the concepts, methods and procedures of physics and the natural sciences in general up until the present time. Gurwitsch argues that this approach has blocked the growth of psychology and has assured its status as a minor science. He argued that the everyday Lifeworld achievements of subjectivity are the true subject matter of psychology and that a phenomenological approach to subjectivity could give psychology the authenticity it has been forever seeking but never finding as a naturalistic science. Some clarifying thoughts concerning this phenomenologically grounded psychology are offered, especially the role of desire. The assumption of an external perspective toward the history of psychology fostered the insights about psychology’s scientific role.

scholarly journals Social Order and Practical Wisdom of Walking in a Crowd

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Andrei M. Korbut
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Phenomenal Field ◽  
Almost All

The article suggests returning to the “crowd” as an object of sociological analysis. Crowds have attracted early sociologists because crowds were visual embodiments of social forces that surpass individuals and also served as a symbol of the profound social transformations which were taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Analyzing crowds allowed for the first sociologists (G. Simmel, R. Park, M. Weber, E. Durkheim) to oppose the psychological interpretation of mass social phenomena with a purely sociological approach. However, in the second half of the 20th century sociologists had lost almost all interest in the crowd, as it did not meet the interests of researchers of “large” social structures, nor the interests of the proponents of interactionist approaches. This article shows that the crowd can again be made interesting for sociology if we were to consider it from the point of view of the everyday practices of the participants. In these everyday practices a specific form of phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom, technical skill coupled with moral judgment about which action is good and which is not, is implemented. It is shown here that the study of the practical wisdom of walking in a crowd requires special concepts and methods that can be found in phenomenology and ethnomethodology. The article suggests using three such concepts for the analysis of crowds: phenomenal field, oriented object, and figuration of details. With the help of these concepts, the methods of the crowd’s situated social order production are analyzed in relation to the management of speed and trajectories of movement, following one another, walkers’ stopping and slowing down, and joining the crowd. This analysis shows that the joint production of the crowd’s social order by its participants is a situated practice, i.e. it consists of making the local scenes of everyday life familiar and accountable, and of assessing the local adequacy of the actions performed.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Flirts, Mashers, Snoozers, and the Breaking of Etiquette's Code

Prospects ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 169-196
Author(s):  
Guy Szuberla
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Line Drawing ◽  
Eye Contact ◽  
City Life ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

Some time after the Civil War, writers of American etiquette books marked the rise of the city by introducing new sections on “etiquette in the street” and “conduct in a crowd.” No one should look to their texts and the accompanying illustrations for a faithfully detailed and documented history of 19th-century city life. The stiff, cutout figures that walk through city streets in these old line drawings represent a particular fantasy of social order, focused in the figure and type of the lady and gentleman. “Walk slowly, do not turn your head … and,” The Ladies' Book of Etiquette (1876) warned, “avoid any gesture or word that would attract attention.” That advice is illustrated, with punctilious care, in Gentleman Meeting a Lady, a line drawing in John Young's 1882 guide, Our Deportment (Figure 1). The gentleman and the lady make no apparent eye contact; they, in strict observance of propriety, look off and away from each other. Again, in Alice Emma Ives's Social Mirror (1886), the ladies who illustrate the way to give a gentleman “formal street recognition” grant it with averted eyes and unturned heads. Ives quite properly avoids the word “meet” (Figure 2).

scholarly journals Ethnomethodological Misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Garfinkel
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Sociology Department ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Extensive Coverage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Phenomenal Field ◽  
The University ◽  
Aron Gurwitsch ◽  
Academic Year

Editors’ AbstractDuring the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters.

An assessment of the theoretical presuppositions of ethnomethodology

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-118
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Semantic Code ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Social Scientific

This chapter assesses the key theoretical presuppositions of ethnomethodology: that social order – interpreted as the intelligibility of coordinated patterns of action - is the central focus of sociological (and perhaps even of all social scientific) inquiry; that Parsons’ ‘analytical realism’ is false because order is observable routinely in everyday situations; that the meanings of social actions are locally variable and context-dependent (‘indexical’ and ‘reflexive’), rather than being determined by a semantic code; and that they are intelligible because they are self-identifying – their meaning is displayed and recognised by actors via shared methods or practices, in other words they are ‘accountable’. Ethnomethodology also involves some important methodological commitments: that for inquiry to be rigorous it must avoid reliance upon unexplicated resources, appealing only to what is observable or intersubjectively available; and the aim of rigorous social analysis must be literal description, rather than explanation or the production of theory: the task should be to ‘make visible’ members’ methods for the production of social phenomena. The conclusion reached in examining these arguments is that, while they relate to significant issues for social science, they exaggerate the intractability of the problems they identify. Moreover, ethnomethodology itself does not escape them.

Rendez vous with Saturn's rings

1984 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 743-759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry T. Nock
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Electric Propulsion ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Propulsion System ◽  
Low Thrust ◽  
Ring Plane ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Total Impulse ◽  
Saturn's Rings

ABSTRACTA mission to rendezvous with the rings of Saturn is studied with regard to science rationale and instrumentation and engineering feasibility and design. Future detailedin situexploration of the rings of Saturn will require spacecraft systems with enormous propulsive capability. NASA is currently studying the critical technologies for just such a system, called Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP). Electric propulsion is the only technology which can effectively provide the required total impulse for this demanding mission. Furthermore, the power source must be nuclear because the solar energy reaching Saturn is only 1% of that at the Earth. An important aspect of this mission is the ability of the low thrust propulsion system to continuously boost the spacecraft above the ring plane as it spirals in toward Saturn, thus enabling scientific measurements of ring particles from only a few kilometers.

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