摘要：When Harold Garfinkel coined the wordethnomethodology, he drew an analogywith the ‘ethnosciences’ in socialanthropology (studies of native languageand practice that are likened to, andoften compared with, the disciplines ofbotany, mathematics, musicology, etc.).1However, unlike other ethnosciences,ethnomethodology is not focused on aspecific subject area, but on ways ofdoing things and conceptions of doingthose things in every imaginable walk oflife. In other words, ethnomethodologyis the study of practical actions andpractical reasoning, and thus far morecomprehensive in its scope than anystudy of ‘lay’ or ‘native’ variants andanalogs of modern disciplines. It aimsfor rigor and systematicity, but it doesnot use modern scientific (or otheracademic) understandings of the worldas a normative or comparative basis foridentifying distinctive properties ofuntutored, everyday practices andunderstandings. Whenethnomethodologists turn attention towork credited with scientific standing,they do not perform an underlaborer’stask, but instead aim to examine theroutine research practices conductedwith materials in real time settings ofconduct (Garfinkel, 2002, Ch. 9;Garfinkel et al. 1981; Lynch, 1993).
