Dennis2025
| Dennis2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Dennis2025 |
| Author(s) | Alex Dennis |
| Title | The Documentary Method of Interpretation, Reflexivity, and Indexicality |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Indexicality, Documentary Method, Reflexivity |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 124–131 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-12 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 10 |
Abstract
The ways in which accounts and the things they are accounts of relate to one another is central to Garfinkel’s sociology. His analyses of these relationships went through a rapid development in the 1960s, starting with his respecification of Mannheim’s documentary method of interpretation and ending with his (and Sacks’) analysis of the complex interrelationships between glosses, formulations and indexical expressions. This chapter will address the three main phases of this development. First, the documentary method of interpretation will be outlined: “understanding” is achieved through a constant matching of appearances and a pattern underlying them. Appearances are given their sense by the pattern, which is itself modified by the appearances. This was superseded by the concept of reflexivity, which emphasised the situated nature of sense-making: actions take place in settings, which are known in common, taken for granted, and relied upon to make sense of those actions—and which are, themselves, constituted by the actions that take place “within” them. Finally, Garfinkel’s earlier observations about indexicality (that certain terms only make sense when understood in the context of their production) were extended and modified to emphasise the centrality of language use to the situated production and modification of meaning.
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