Ethnomethodology
What is Ethnomethodology?
Ethnomethodologyis a blend of the words Ethnography and methodology. It is a branch of Anthropology,
which studies people in their environment. Methodology simply refers to the way of doing things. The
major focus is the cultural behaviour of the people) and the methods involved in doing a particular
thing). The term Ethnomethodology is a sociological term, which describes a discipline that studies how
people make sense of their world. How they are able to understand one another to the extent that they
are able to exist in an orderly social context.
Ethnomethodological approach was developed by a sociologist named Harold Garfinkel. The approach
looks at the organization of practical actions and reasoning, the organization of talk-in-interaction.
Ethnomethodologists are concerned primarily with Ethnomethodology which is concerned with the how
(the methods) by which social order is produced, and shared. One thing that is of central concern to
ethnomethodologist is “context.” Their focus is always on the ways in which words are dependent for
their meaning on the context in which they are used.
Ethnomethodology is concerned basically with the following:
• The organization of practical actions and practical reasoning: This was the
concern of earliest ethnomethodologists
• The organization of talk-in-interaction: This is known in modern times as Converstional Analysis.
We shall be looking at this late in this unit.
• Talk-in-interaction within institutional or organizational settings: this is basically concerned with
interactional structures that are specific to particular settings.
• The study of work: The study bof any social activity within the setting in which it is performed
Language and the Social World
Language is an essential part of the human social structure. Everyday, we use it actively to create and
shape the world through social interaction. Every language operates in a social world. Speakers, as part
of a society, rely on a corpus of practical knowledge,
which they assumed is shared, at least partly with others. This is why a group of linguists, generally
referred to as Functionalists, see language as a social activity being performed in a social world. The
primary concern of such linguists, who belong to the schools of Sociolinguistics, Systemic Functional
Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Text Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and so forth is that language is
contextdependent and the general context is the world we live in, while the specific contexts are the
contexts of a particular usage. Context here includes the knowledge of the speaker of his/her world, the
culture, values, expectations and norms.
One way in which language is believed to influence our understanding of social reality goes back to the
ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis stresses that we view and
perceive our world in terms of our language. It also stresses that the social reality we experience is
unique to our language, since no two languages/cultures shares exactly the same social reality. This is
why oftentimes terms for specific phenomena in languages do not have precise counterparts in other
languages.
What we have discussed in this section is really an important guiding principle for our approach to the
analysis of discourse. We can only analyze any particular discourse effectively if we situate it within the
social context or domain of its use. And this will take into consideration a lot of factors such as, the
interlocutors, their role relationships in discourse, the mode of discourse. All these are used to create the
text that will fit appropriately into the social world of the language users.
