Rawls2022a
| Rawls2022a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Rawls2022a |
| Author(s) | Anne Warfield Rawls |
| Title | Harold Garfinkel’s Focus on Racism, Inequality, and Social Justice: The Early Years, 1939–1952 |
| Editor(s) | Douglas W. Maynard, John Heritage |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Garfinkel, Racism, Inequality, Social Justice |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year | 2022 |
| Language | English |
| City | New York, NY |
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| Pages | 90–113 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780190854409.003.0003 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects |
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Abstract
Harold Garfinkel began exposing the tacit interactional practices of racism as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in 1939, taking the position that the rules framing the interactional work of communicating and presenting Self are taken for granted and therefore invisible and unconscious. He argued that these processes are essential to understanding society, but were being ignored by sociology, and proposed that examining the interactional work of the marginal and disenfranchised could reveal not only the inequality they experience, but also the underlying the practices and requirements for successful interaction that everyone relies on. He documented a need for reciprocity and mutual commitment to what he called “trust conditions,” showing that those in asymmetrical social positions (whose category/label is assigned without their consent) have extra difficulty achieving mutual intelligibility with others in interaction. Garfinkel’s work on race, gender, and other forms of inequality continued to inform his research to the end of his career. Not generally recognized for his focus on inequality, or labeling, or his emphasis on the performative aspects of self, or frames (which influenced Goffman), the revolutionary theoretical and methodological implications of Garfinkel’s early work have nevertheless become important staples of contemporary sociological theory and research.
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