Analysing Practical and Professional Texts: A Naturalistic Approach

Analysing Practical and
Professional Texts
A Naturalistic Approach
Rod Watson
Professional Texts
Directions in Ethnomethodology
and Conversation Analysis
Series Editors:
Stephen Hester, University of Wales, UK
David Francis, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis are cognate approaches to the

study of social action that together comprise a major perspective within the
contemporary human sciences. This perspective focuses upon naturally occurring
talk and interaction and analyses the methods by which social activities are
ordered and accomplished. From its origins within sociology, EM/CA has ramified
across a wide range of human science disciplines, including anthropology, social
psychology, linguistics, communication studies and social studies of technology.
Its influence is international, with large and active research communities in many
countries, including Japan, Australia, Canada, France, The Netherlands, Denmark
and Sweden as well as the UK and USA.
The International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis is
the major association of EM/CA researchers worldwide. It was set up in 1978 by
Prof. George Psathas to provide a forum for international collaboration between
scholars working in the field of studies of social action and to support their work
through conferences and publications. It published several books in EM/CA in
association with University Press of America. Now reconstituted under the
direction of Francis and Hester, supported by an international steering committee,
the IIEMCA holds regular conferences and symposia in various countries.
This major new book series will present current work in EM/CA, including
research monographs, edited collections and theoretical studies. It will be essential
reading for specialists in the field as well as those who wish to know more about
this major approach to human action.
Other titles in this series
Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes

How Young Children Resolve Conflict
Amelia Church
ISBN 978-0-7546-7441-2
Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground

Carly W. Butler
ISBN 978-0-7546-7416-0
Professional Texts
A Naturalistic Approach
Rod Watson
Institut Marcel Mauss, Paris, France
© Rod Watson 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Rod Watson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Watson, Rod.
Analysing practical and professional texts : a naturalistic
approach. -- (Directions in ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis)
1. Written communication--Social aspects.
2. Ethnomethodology.
I. Title II. Series
302.2’244-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Rod.
Analysing practical and professional texts : a naturalistic approach / by Rod Watson.
p. cm. -- (Directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7897-7 -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9768-8
(ebook) 1. Social sciences--Methodology. 2. Social structure. I. Title.
H61.W376 2009
306.44--dc22
2009016979
ISBN 978-0-7546-7897-7 (hbk)

IBSN.V)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 The Ethnomethodological Analysis of Texts and Reading 7
2 “Going for Brothers” in Black American Speech:

Making Textual Sense of Analytic Observations of
Black Ghetto Culture in the U.S.A. 37
3 The Textual Representation of Nacirema Culture 57
4 The Textual Incarnation of Sociological Analysis:

The Case of Erving Goffman’s Writings 101
Endnotes 121
Bibliography 129
Index 139
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
Many longstanding friends and colleagues have helped me in pursuing my analysis

of texts and other ethnomethodological concerns over what is now decades rather
than years.
Wes Sharrock and John R.E. Lee (University of Manchester) pioneered

ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in Britain and adapted it quite
radically to a British intellectual context. I learned a very great deal (though they
would say never enough) from them, not only in lectures, seminars and conferences
but also, blotto voce, in the hostelries of Manchester. Jeff Coulter (Boston
University) has, again as friend and colleague, been a constant encouragement
and inexhaustible source of intellectual advice.
I have gained much from former students, now of course friends, and Andrew
Carlin (St. Columba’s College) and Maria T. Wowk (Manchester Metropolitan
University) have been immensely helpful over several years, often explaining my
own work to me, and Roger S. Slack (University of Edinburgh) and Christian
Greiffenhagen (University of Manchester) again have enhanced my academic
work in many ways. I have greatly valued Eric Livingston’s (University of New
England, Australia) work, advice and encouragement concerning my textual and
other analyses, and James L. Heap (Ohio University) has added much to my
understanding both on reading and on ethnomethodology.
Many French or Francophone ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts

– again, valued friends as well as colleagues – have helped advance my work,
and Michel Barthélémy (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) has in
particular been most patient and assiduous in his input into my textual analyses
and other works but there have been immense contributions from Bernard Conein
(University of Nice), Michel de Fornel (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales), Louis Quéré (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Yves
Winkin (Ecole Normale Supèrieure, Lyon), and the late Jean Widmer (University
of Fribourg, Switzerland). I have also benefited greatly from the analytic insights
of Marc Relieu (Ecole Normale des Telecommunications de Paris at Nice-Sophia-
Antipolis) and Bruno Bonu (University of Montpellier). I trust that the intellectual
standards and integrity of Francophone ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis will come to be far better acknowledged within the confines of Anglo-
American scholarship in these spheres. In Manchester, the Manchester Ethnography
viii Analysing Practical and Professional Texts
Group and the Mind and Society Seminars have been a constant stimulus, as has
the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.
I have gained a great deal from discussions over many years with colleagues
such as Peter Eglin (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), Jef Verschueren
(University of Antwerp, Belgium), and Thomas S. Weinberg (Buffalo State
College), Édisón Gastaldo (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil)
has spurred me on with his knowledge and enthusiasm, as has Graham Watson
(formerly of University of Calgary, Canada).
I thank all these people for making this book possible and David Silverman and
Mike Emmison (University of Queensland, Australia) for making it necessary.
Some considerable portions of Chapter 1 of this monograph were first published

under the title “Ethnomethodology and Textual Analysis”, in D. Silverman, editor,
(1997): Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice: London: SAGE
publications, pp. 80–98. The passages have often undergone some modification
and the overall analysis has been greatly extended. The final chapter was originally
published in Greg Smith, editor, (1999): Goffman and Social Organization:
Studies in a Sociological Legacy: London: Routledge, pp. 138–55, under the title
“Reading Goffman on Interaction”: again, there have been many modifications
and a few extensions to the original text. I hold copyright on the other chapters
but wish to thank Analytic Sociology, and Manchester Occasional Papers in
Sociology for facilitating the reprint of the “Going for Brothers” and “Nacirema”
papers respectively. I thank these publishing houses for permitting me to reprint
these articles, and in particular I thank Greg Smith (University of Salford) for his
encouragement and suggestions.
In completing this book, I have constantly had some particular people in mind.
These are my late parents, Douglas and May Watson. My late father-in-law, Elio
F. Alzamoro always encouraged me in my work and my mother-in-law Kathryn
Alzamoro continues to do so. This book is an attestation to these particular people
and to my wife Anita.
To my wife Anita.
Introduction
A sketch of some ethnomethodological concerns and precedents for textual

analysis
This volume consists of a series of chapters that establish a family of “takes”

on texts and their analysis from an Ethnomethodological (EM) and Conversation
Analytic (CA) standpoint. Each “take” involves a shift in methodology, always
within the general EM and CA frames of reference. The “takes” are designed to
reveal differing facets of the “same” central concerns.
My central concerns are as follows. First, I wish to examine natural language

practices. The term “practices” is important, for EM and CA are praxiological
approaches. Language practices are seen as constitutive of social order: language
is seen as the core instrument of social life. Social order – that is, intelligible,
sensible, coherent social order – must perforce be a communicative order. This
is a fact that mainstream sociologies often overlook, although, ineluctably and
inadmissibly, they depend upon the fact. That the object is natural language is
important, too, for the intelligible, sensible nature of social order is something
that is fully available to lay society-members themselves. In literate societies,
writing and reading practices are central to that laic intelligibility, and this book
will focalise those practices.
When the professional sociologist describes social order, s/he describes an object
that has already been described, namely by lay society-members themselves. The
sociologist’s descriptions are of the second order, premised upon these primordial
ones and are moulded by them in a variety of ways that I shall attempt to begin to
untangle in this volume: indeed, the complex relations of professional descriptions
to their laic antecedents will be a recurring theme.
To be sure, language is a central resource for both kinds of description, and the
practices of description will be approached here. Thus, categorisation practices,
practices of serial ordering, glossing practices, etc. will be addressed here in
varying degrees of detail and directness. It will be clear from these examples that
language is indeed a central resource in rendering society intelligible and sensible.
Sacks attests to the “elegance” of ordinary language in its adequacy for the generic
and multifarious practices this involves – a lay sociological elegance.
Analysing Practical and Professional Texts
What I am referring to, then, is the lay (and professional) accountability of the
social world. Language, including language in its textual incarnations, is, clearly
a modal instrument in members’ and professionals’ accounting practices. One
way or another we make linguistic sense of the local settings we inhabit, and
this sense may be “simultaneous”, retrospective or prospective. We might say that
language practices in all forms are modally involved in the self-commentating,
self-describing, self-explicating features of social settings.
These features are central constituents of the activities Sacks renders in terms
what he calls a “representative metaphor”. The metaphor (or, better, simile) is that
of a “commentator machine” (Sacks, 1963, 1990). The image is that of a machine
exhibited in scientific and industrial congresses which, in laic terms, might be
conceived as having a “saying part” and a “doing part”, where the former part
simultaneously comments on what the latter is doing. A foreign engineer might
figure out what the saying part is saying by extrapolating from what the doing part
is doing. From a native layperson’s point of view, the doing part may be understood
from the saying part. A lay sceptic or lay theorist may question, critique or assess
what the doing part is doing from what the saying part is saying: or vice versa
– and so on.
Producing a rendition of society, or its local contexts, in terms of the trope

“commentator machine”, gives us a way of conceiving of the self-explicating, self-
describing, self-commentating features of society locally construed. Expanding on
Sacks’ “commentator machine” trope, we can also focalise the notion of society-
locally-conceived as not only self-commentating but also as self-organising, where
as an ongoing matter the “doing part” is accountably “organised” as a coherent
entity by the “saying part”. The notion of “self” in “self-organising” points to the
fact that all these descriptive and organising activities are done from within the
organisation, as an integral feature of the society (or the “machine”). It denotes
the intrinsically transparent nature of social organisation and practice, a built-in
availability to lay and professional parties alike.
All metaphors and similes can mislead, and Sacks’ “commentator machine” is
no exception. One might conceive of the “doing” and “saying” parts as mutually
exclusive, as though (for instance) “saying” were not “doing”. This though, is not
a sustainable interpretation of Sacks’ intention. He insists in many parts of his
writing that saying is doing and, therefore, that describing is itself “doing”. That
is, members may seek to describe a given activity, but the describing comprises
an activity in itself. In that sense, Sacks initiated an approach to language and
accounting that can be characterised as “praxiological without residue”. Indeed,
the textual analyses found in the present volume adopt a similar approach: the
focus is on textual practices, the activities that comprise writing and reading. Texts
themselves are treated as nothing other than complexes of interwoven practice
– “textual accounting practices”, as one might put it.
Introduction
However, Sacks’ construal of social organisation in terms of a “commentator

machine” helps us understand that the project of laic description, i.e. members’
production of sensible descriptions of (local) organisation, must and should be
conceived as being at the very heart of the sociological project – not least because
professional sociologists themselves describe that selfsame social organisation.
Often – perhaps typically – amongst conventional sociologists, that description is
an implicit one, tacitly built in to some “other” professional project espoused by
the sociologist – e.g. assigning function or dysfunction, analysing modernity or
postmodernity and the like. If professional sociological description is mentioned
by these sociologists, it is assigned purely preliminary, even superficial status.
Thus “description” stands as a poor relation of “analysis”, where the latter is
conceived as “deeper”, as the sociologist’s “real” or “central” task. By contrast,
Sacks points out that issues of professional, as well as laic, description have both
primacy and centrality. One such issue, of course, is that of the “relation” between
laic and professional sociological descriptions of a given local social organisation:
the implications of this and other issues concerning such descriptions furnish a
major theme of this book.
As an example of the applicability to textual analysis of the “commentator

machine” simile, we can consider an utterly mundane example, that of vacations.
It is an example that Wes Sharrock and I have considered before. The mundaneness
of the example is quite in line with the EM-based approach adopted in this book,
(see Chapter 1). EM emphasises the primacy and paramountcy of the attitude of
everyday life and of course this, in turn, primarily directs our attention to the
scenes, settings and objects of everyday life that are constituted in and through
this attitude. It is in this sense that holidays are a salient case of the “reflexive”, i.e.
self-commentating, properties of social settings and activities.1
Considering the textual features of this built-in, self-commentating aspect of

vacations, how they can be textually self-recording through participants’ activities?
People may render their vacations self-recording through the writing and sending
of postcards, the taking and labelling of photographs, perhaps the keeping of a
holiday journal, and the acquisition and use (including annotation) of souvenir
books and pamphlets concerning the places that have been visited. Other textual
self-commentating features of the vacation may involve “walkabout guides” which
formulate walking routes along with potted histories and other characterisations
of the landmarks, etc. encountered, occasioned maps sketched perhaps by locals
to inform tourists where a given landmark is to be found, (viz. Psathas, 1979,
203–26) commercial “flyers” advertising this or that feature.
In one of his earliest works, Sacks gives us an incipient case of what came
to be called “textual analysis” by some ethnomethodologists (Sacks, 1999). The
work was written in the early 1960s but published much later. In line with his
“commentator machine” analogy (which also derives from the early 60s), he
submits to praxiological examination Max Weber’s reading of the Old Testament

texts in the Bible. Sacks refers to the “commentator machine” as affording an
“interrogation procedure”, where an interrogator can question the “saying part”
of the machine. As Schegloff, (op. cit., pp. 20–1) in a masterly article, (to which
I direct readers for a far more extensive treatment), observes, Weber employs
the Old Testament to descriptively “reconstruct” Ancient Israel and the Jews as
a pariah people there. Weber is conceived by Sacks as “interrogating” the Old
Testament texts.
As Schegloff (1999: p. 21) expresses it with reference to the “commentator

machine”, those texts are seen by Sacks as:
… supplying answers to the questions which Weber puts to [them], answers

which constitute successful descriptions of Ancient Israel … (the Old Testament)
is cast as the “saying” part of the machine which responds when queried with a
description of what the “doing” part is then doing.
Through this textual “case study” of sorts, Sacks confronts the generic issue of
practical or natural theorising, which he construes as a set of methods formulated
as instructions, here with regard to the ancient writings. In particular, he confronts
the issue of how – the “how” is central – Weber transforms the Old Testament texts
into a recognisable reconstruction for sociology of Ancient Israel and, especially,
its pariah culture, and his “commentator machine”-type interrogation procedure
comprises the “how”. Sacks notes that the mastery of the natural language is
central at every stage of the descriptive process, as means and as object of study.
Some ethnomethodological things can be noted, here. Firstly, Sacks is

conducting a textual analysis of another (practical) textual analysis, that effectuated
by Weber. Secondly, Sacks conducts much of his analysis with reference to a single
case, a sample text, thus at least signalling at a very early point EM’s eschewal
of sweeping, unconstrained theorising and refusal to endorse what Wittgenstein
termed “the attitude of disdain for the particular case”. We thus get a hint of EM’s
concern for the detailed, local – in this case the “local-textual” – organisation of
phenomena. In these and his concern for natural reasoning and theorising, the
role of the mastery of ordinary language, the “how” and “instructability” of social
practices, Sacks’ article on Weber’s Ancient Judaism counts as early and genuine
EM and not as some kind of prolegomenon (viz. Schegloff, 1999: p. 21).
Other textual analyses have also been integral to the earliest development of
EM. In Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) one section is devoted to
a study of how medical records (“clinic career forms”) were used by personnel.
He, along with his co-researcher Egon Bittner, examined various issues, including
those related to how the records were produced in order that the doctor-patient
relationship could, if necessary, be depicted in the future as having been in
Introduction
accordance with the expectations and requirements pertaining both to practitioner

and to patient.2 We see in Garfinkel and Bittner’s work a concern with the
production of texts – something which very many textual analyses leave out.
In a related study, Garfinkel (1967) examined how researchers applied a coding

scheme to the medical records.3 He showed how coders regularly encountered an
“interpretative gap” as between the coding scheme and the particular record to
which it was intended to apply. This gap was “bridged” through the use of ad hoc
practices – “let it pass”, etc. These ad hoc practices were, in turn, deployed in
conjunction with the researchers’ prior background knowledge of the organised
practices of the clinic – that is, knowledge of the very phenomenon their research
project was designed to “discover”. Complaints that the records did not meet
sociological criteria of adequacy themselves revealed that the records had been
addressed to practical purposes – clinical and professional, not sociological ones,
and that each folder’s text “expressed” this fact. The texts thus had practical
adequacy to the specific purposes in terms of which they were cast. It is not difficult
to see some canonical EM themes in these textual analyses, nor is it difficult to see
these studies as precedents for future ones.
Following upon Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ early studies which set up so many
facets of subsequent EM approaches to texts-in-use, there have been a significant
number of studies of texts. Some of these employed, along with EM themes,
themes derived from Sacks’ later approaches in CA. Among these were John R.E.
Lee’s well-known application of “Membership Categorisation Analysis” (MCA)
to newspaper headlines and articles and Jim Schenkein’s (1979) study of the
serial development of a newspaper story. Each of these articles also focalises the
sequential organisation of a given article – an issue that again bears some affinity to
Sacks’ studies in the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction, (Sacks, 1992).
These studies look at familiar, ordinary texts in routine everyday use, “texts-in-
action”, one might say, – texts as practical matters. They discuss how texts are
“assembled objects”, how texts are read, how texts are inserted into courses of
action and the like.
As I said at the beginning of this Preface, a recurring theme is that of professional

sociological writing. Sociology itself can be conceived as an inscriptive pursuit,
conducted in one of a huge range of natural languages: indeed the discipline can be
said to be dependent upon inscriptive practice. Sociologists do describe the world,
but they do so largely by virtue of the inscriptive natural language conventions at
their disposal. Indeed, even the “technical vocabulary” – “role”, “association”,
etc. deployed in such inscriptive practice can be shown to be rooted in evolved
ordinary meanings of just those terms, as Edward Rose (1960) has so aptly shown.
Their incarnation in specific inscriptive practices has been little studied. Whilst
it has been the fashion to examine the inscriptive practice of social science,
these approaches have typically involved theory-driven formal abstractions,
idealisations and the like. As such, the locally-embedded, concretely identifiable

detail of specific inscriptive practices has been lost. I hope in this volume to have
begun their reinstatement and to have pointed to other studies that share that same
objective – examining textual orderliness in the concrete, not the abstract.
The import of this approach is that the organisation, character and content of
the professional sociologist’s descriptions is ineluctably shaped by the inscriptions
of ordinary language quite as much as – indeed more than – by the technical and
methodological instruments of the discipline. We must recall how Garfinkel’s
empirical studies have often shown the primacy and paramountcy of the attitude
of everyday life, of everyday practical reasoning and language practices (e.g.
glossing practices).
At the moment, we know little about how our professional descriptions and
analyses are fashioned by such inscriptive resources and practices, since these
concrete resources and practices have very seldom been turned into an explicit
topic for analytic attention for their own sake. Typically, the particular, situated
resources and practices are implicitly counted upon and employed by analysts:
they are the tacit resources of sociology. To once again intone Don H. Zimmerman
and Melvin Pollner’s famous phenomenological recommendation, we need to turn
these tacit resources into topics in their own right. We need to do this without
losing their “phenomenal field details”, as Garfinkel states it. To treat sociology
as, (in large part) a locally inscriptive phenomenon is one way of pursuing that
objective. Texts are, then, treated in this volume as objects on their own behalf, not
merely as standing on behalf of some “other” phenomenon.
Above all, we must not forget the primacy of ordinary, everyday, often “non-
professional” texts and documents and the inscriptive practices through which
they are produced and the reading practices through which they are used – and
incorporated into utterly unremarkable everyday uses. How do these ordinary
inscriptive practices shape the professional-sociological ones, and how does the
intersection of these practices figure in actual, specific characterisations of a given
society and its settings? I hope to cast some light, however prismatically, on these
matters but I hope too to cast light on ordinary texts and ordinary inscriptive
practices: these are where it begins.
The analyses in this monograph are intended to take forward these concerns.
They address texts-as-read, everyday and professional-sociological texts. They
bring in a range of EM concerns as well as the MCA and sequential concerns of
Sacks’ later CA. There is an attempt not to reify “textual analysis” as a topic, as,
perhaps, many orthodox sociologies might do, but instead to see texts as figuring
in myriad ways in an array of sense-making practices as incarnate in a range of
local complexes of practical action. Chapter 1 of this volume sets out these matters
much more fully as I can do in this Introduction.
Chapter 1
The Ethnomethodological Analysis
of Texts and Reading
Tattoos, autographs, text messages on mobile ‘phones, bus tickets, pay slips,
street signs, time indications on watch faces, chalked information on blackboards,
computer VDU displays, car dashboards, company logos, contracts, railway
timetables, television programme titles, teletexts, T-shirt epigrams, “on” / “off”
switches, £10 notes and other banknotes, passports and identity cards, cheques
and payslips, the Bible, receipts, newspapers and magazines, road markings,
parking tickets, computer keyboards, medical prescriptions, birthday cards,
billboard advertisements, maps, Hansard, graffiti on walls, music scores, church
liturgies, drivers’ licences, birth, marriage and death certificates, voting slips,
degree certificates, book-keepers’ accounts, stock inventories, cricket scoreboards,
credit cards – these and countless other items that involve written language
and diagrammatic forms indicate the immensely pervasive, widespread and
institutionalised place of texts in our society.
This list also indicates the extraordinary diversity in the work done by texts
– contractual commitment, ratifying work, facilitating work, record-keeping,
persuasive work, identity-establishing work, and so on. In fact, one might suggest
that virtually every recognisable activity in our society has its textual aspects,
involving and incorporating people’s monitoring of written or other textual “signs”
– texts that, in a wide variety of ways, help us to orientate ourselves to that activity,
occasion or setting and to make sense of it.
As analysts interested in language, we can examine a text as simply marks

on a page, or conceive of those marks in alphabetical terms, or in terms, say, of a
signary or syllabary, but none of these will in themselves allow us to analyse what
a text does – particularly if we are interested in what just this text specifically does,
here and now. In this sense we consider texts as effecting social actions, actions of
a local, situated kind.
About a century ago, Max Weber – whose work has some, if indirect, influence
on Ethnomethodology – noted that the massive expansion in legal-rational
bureaucracies was itself visible in terms of the major increase in texts. These
texts included documents such as files, reports and, not least, numerical records
such as accounts. Expanding bureaucratisation also ushered in or proliferated new
textual practices such as accounting techniques. However, there has been a relative
neglect by sociologists of Weber’s important observation, not only in relation to

bureaucracy but more widely in our everyday lives. Considering the huge number
of professional sociologists, few have focused upon the ways in which texts
operate as utterly mundane, routine features of contemporary everyday life, or of
the great extent to which textual work is built into “other” everyday activities such
as watching the speedometer, reading road signs, checking the odometer, glancing
at the radio display, all whilst driving one’s car. Ethnomethodology focalises such
features of everyday life as society-members themselves understand and recognise
them.
However, the virtually inconceivable variety of texts and the thoroughly

ordinary, mundane and practical nature of a very large proportion of these, has
received comparatively little attention from sociologists. A great many textual
analyses concern themselves with the textual phenomena of “high culture”
– novels, academic texts, exegeses of biblical or Talmudic texts or the texts of
classical antiquity. These by and large exegetical studies have taken a variety of
academic forms or positions – textual interpretations, etymological work, and so
on. Whilst certainly valuable in themselves, these analyses tended to address texts
that were, at best, of narrowly restricted relevance to everyday, ordinary life as
opposed to the habitus of a literary or intellectual elite. They tended to divert
attention from the myriad mundane textual phenomena in our society and, indeed,
to selectively focus on the exotic rather than on the ordinary, the esoteric rather
than the commonplace, the remote rather than the familiar.
However, even these textual exegeses sometimes constituted an advance over

the conventional approach in the humanities and social sciences to the written or
printed word. This approach is to treat language as a kind of transparent “window
on the world”, as a conduit, a direct channel to some “real thing” in the social
world. Thus, the anthropologically inclined historian Alan Macfarlane (1978)
used the Rev. Ralph Josselin’s journal as providing a “window” on the family
and individualism in sixteenth-century England.1 Anthropologists treat their field
notes as providing and preserving access to (say) the kinship structure of a tribal
society.2 Survey analysts in social science treat their statistical tables and charts
as providing access to (say) the income distribution in society, and so on. Often,
indeed, the text seems to be treated as unproblematically standing on behalf of
some object(s) in the objective domain, as simply “adhering” to those objects-
in-the world, as effectively indistinguishable from them. They seldom if ever
pay serious or sustained attention to how the written records used themselves
predispose our “access” to, and conception of, these historical phenomena. The
texts are relatively seldom considered as objects for attention in their own right.
The language, numerical constellations, diagrams and other features of these

texts are, by and large, thus regarded by these analysts as unproblematic, as
mere channels to the phenomenon of their analytic interest, be it family, income,
The Ethnomethodological Analysis of Texts and Reading
individualism or whatever. From the standpoint of these scholars the text operates
as a more or less unnoticed and unremarkable means to an end. Texts are placed
in service of the examination of “other”, separately conceived phenomena. From
this standpoint, the text purportedly comprises a resource for accessing these
phenomena – phenomena existing “beyond” the text, as it were, where the text
operates as an essentially unexamined conduit, a kind of neutral “window” or
“channel” to them. Texts are taken as “conveying” us to those phenomena.
This contrasts in a major way with the work of scholars such as Edward Rose
(1960). In his important work, Rose does not treat “words” and “(things in) the
world” as two separate phenomena. Instead, the world itself is seen as “worded
entity” and ordinary words are seen as inextricable parts of the worldly phenomena
they define. There is, from this perspective, no “thing in itself” separate from the
word that identifies it. Instead, we common-sensically experience those things in
terms of the words for them – be those words oral or textual. Think of how a sign
(i.e. text) saying “Parking” serves to define for competent society members what
a particular space “is”.
The above is an important point for sociology, particularly because professional

sociologists possess their own vocabulary for defining and identifying the (social)
world, whether this vocabulary be orally or textually delivered. Typically, these
technical words are, as Rose shows, derived from ordinary, common-sense ones.
Terms such as “status”, “role” or “society” may now be seen as part of the technical
vocabulary of society but they were originally part of ordinary, common-sense
usage: this usage evolved through time and its evolved forms have worked to
shape their current professional / analytic determinations.
Rose claims that this stock of ordinary words itself comprises a “natural
sociology”, a set of shared common-sense conceptual understandings of society.
A major corollary of this is that the professional sociologists’ use of a given term,
such as “role” or “status”, is shaped by the common-sense cultural meanings of
that term – often, meanings that have evolved since the seventeenth century or
earlier. Virtually all the technical expressions used by professional sociologists
have their basis in evolved ordinary usage, and that basis sets the terms for the
conventional meanings that professional sociologists impute in those expressions.
That professional sociologists are, at best, often dimly aware of this does not change
the fact that their discipline, for all its technical vocabulary, is premised upon a
natural sociological vocabulary. Rose’s argument is that sociology is a natural
language pursuit and that sociological analysis is linguistically constructed. This
argument gives us our position on sociological texts, whether these be research
reports or instructional textbooks. These texts themselves manifest the fact that
professional sociology is not only a discipline whose technical vocabulary has a
lay or common-sense origin but is ipso facto also a discipline that is conducted,
whether orally or textually, in some natural language or other – Japanese, English,
10 Analysing Practical and Professional Texts
French, and so on – and depends utterly upon the descriptive and other resources
of that particular language. Sociologists can and do provide analytic descriptions
of social order but they are only able to do so because their own ordinary, natural
language furnishes the general resources for them to do so. The form, character and
development of their academic analyses are, consequently, shaped or fashioned by
the conventional properties of the natural language that they necessarily employ
quite as much as by the methodological constraints of their discipline.
Certainly, sociologists and other academics cannot exempt their own work
from textual analysis. It would, for instance, be interesting to analyse the ways
in which Alan Macfarlane’s (1978) historical claims are shaped by the texts he
uses as data sources and by his own textual practices in making sense of those
texts and in writing them up into a report. For an ethnomethodological example of
how textual resources shape academic disciplines – even to the point of actually
helping to produce the segmentation of those disciplines – see G. Watson’s (1984)
paper on the textual construction of the boundaries between social and cultural
anthropology. Another such example is furnished by A.P. Carlin (2007). He shows
how the textual practices involved in assembling a bibliography within a discipline
such a sociology – or a sub-branch of it – serves to socially delineate that discipline.
In turn, these practices, reflexively, also serve to establish the legitimate place of
each book or article as “belonging to” or “representative of” that discipline, as
having “corpus status” within it.
So far as sociology texts are concerned, we might observe that not only do these
texts unavoidably partake of the general properties of the natural language that is
used, but they will also necessarily be shaped by the ordinary textual conventions
employed by that language. These textual conventions vary, of course: in some
cultures one does not read from left to right and progressively downward line by
line.
An example of this textual structuring of an analysis is to be found in the

transcription procedures of some conversation analysts in sociology. Conversation
analysts have a highly crafted technical system for “entextualisation”, that
is, the transcription of actual oral discourse into a written-textual format. This
involves the inscribing of very many of the minute social-interaction details of
these oral-aural interactions. A considerable number of these procedures derive
from ordinary, commonsense textual practice – not only the “left to right”,
progressively downward nature, but also their identificatory characterisation
of utterances and utterance sequences. On other words, verbal or non-verbal
actions are characterised in terms of “the” (or a) category or other identity of the
speaker. In this sense, the conversation analyst’s transcription formats are derived
from broader sources – sources that are familiar in our culture, originating, for
instance, in the formatting of the scripts of plays, from courtroom transcripts as
presented in court and newspaper reports, and so on. Indeed, conversation analysts
The Ethnomethodological Analysis of Texts and Reading 11
have actually employed court or tribunal reports as their “raw data” on speech
exchange between “Legal Counsel” and “Witness”. Note that “Legal Counsel”
and “Witness” are social categories for the identification of persons, and these
categorial identifications are a built-in feature of such reports, (see P. Drew, 1978,
and J.M. Atkinson and P. Drew, 1979). Many conversation analysts have actually
appropriated this categorisation technique, using it as an unexamined, taken-for-
granted resource for the conducting of their analysis. For instance, they may use
it to render courtroom discourse in institutions such as courts of law analytically
treatable as “institutional talk”, where, e.g., questions are systematically “pre-
allocated” to the person categorised relative to the court as an institution – e.g. “legal
counsel” and answers to the person institutionally categorised as “witness”.
We can give an example – though from a different context – of how this works.
This is a linguistic interchange between two persons. The original transcript
identified the interlocutors in the left-hand column not by any social category but
by their names, here pseudonymised as “Riley” and “Corcoran”. I have adapted
the original transcript for ease of reading.
Riley: See… I stole it from the house. Cause I, my mother she’s kinda
off, too, y’know. She used to tell me how she’s gonna get rid of
me, y’know.
Corcoran: Mm hm
Riley: She used to threaten me too, yihknow, I ain’t threatened her, she
used tuh threaten me all the time.
Corcoran: What d’you mean, she wuz gonna off you?
Riley: Yeah, she always usetuh threaten me. One time I almos’ hurt
her before, like, when she was, in the bathroom: she kept on
about how she gonna kill me, I told her to quit saying that stuff
y’know, cause I say I might hurt her.
Now, this excerpt of transcript might be commonsensically defined in a variety

of ways. It might, for instance, be seen as a piece of ordinary, informal, vernacular
conversation between (say) two friends, intimates or, perhaps, relatives. Or it
might be seen as an exchange in an institutional setting between, say, a social
worker or a probation officer… officer and client? Alternatively, even though
the excerpt contains vernacular elements, it may be seen as an exchange in
another institutional setting between a police officer and suspect (or witness) in
an interrogation or interview. Or it might be seen as an “institutional” exchange
between a therapist, e.g. an examining psychiatrist, or counsellor. Note the way in
which we use social categories to identify the particular possible discourse types,
“friends”, “intimates”, “relatives”, “social worker”, “police officer”, “therapist”,
etc. Or, sensibly, we might treat the data sequence as equivocal. Of course, we
could, again sensibly, use additional techniques to make sense of the transcript, e.g.
reading more of it to see what was said (particularly, perhaps, by Corcoran) before
choosing between and applying those categories. In so doing we categorise those

persons rather than just treating them as persons with their own proper names.
If we choose to attribute the categories “therapist” and “patient” rather than, say,
a conversation between intimates, we thus place the discourse in the “institutional
talk” category rather than ordinary, informal conversation in a non-institutional
setting. This has huge consequences for how we analyse the sequence, e.g. the
utterance by Corcoran “What d’you mean, she wuz gonna off you?” might now be
analysed as a therapist’s utterance, or the type of utterance that therapists produce
as a “pre-allocated” activity. If, instead, we choose to treat it as a different type or
class of institutional discourse, e.g. a police officer’s interrogation of a suspect or
witness, then Corcoran’s utterance might be analysed as an interrogating move,
as the kind of utterance tied or pre-allocated to the institutional category “police
officer”.
Thus, what categories we put in the left-hand column of the transcript does
“instruct” us to read the accompanying utterance in a certain way, in the first
moment,
Police officer: What d’you mean, she wuz gonna off you?
Suspect: Yeah, she always usetuh threaten me… I told her to quite
saying that stuff y’know, cause I say I might hurt ‘er.
– such that the utterance, in the second moment, can be taken as “reflecting back”
on the categorisation, as a “police officer’s utterance”.
These categories, “police officer” and “suspect” are particularly influential

given that they are in the left-hand column and that we read from left to right: thus,
we read the category before the utterance. Of course, the reading of the specific
utterance, as e.g. a police officer’s utterance may then be read as “reflecting back
upon” or “reinforcing” the imputed category, or even as helping us to impute the
category in the first place. Thus, there is a “reflexive”, back-and-forth, relation
between category and utterance.
In fact, this was a police interrogation of a murder suspect: those, then, seem to
be the salient identification categories. Even here, though, placing these categories
in the left-hand column may be unduly stipulative, for as E.A. Schegloff (1991)
has aptly observed, in (say) telephone calls made by members of the public to the
police, there is no guarantee that, for a given utterance or sequence of utterances or
overall conversation, the category “police officer” or “member of the public” is the
one that is salient for the interlocutors. Instead, the category “friend” may be the
relevant one for that particular utterance, sequence or conversation. Thus we see
how seemingly simple and innocuous textual practice of putting an identification
category in the left-hand column of a transcript can be highly (and sometimes
unduly) consequential in how we make sense of, and analyse, an instance of

discourse.
Indeed, conversation analysts tend to be a good deal more scrupulous and

judicious than other sociologists in attributing identification categories to discourse
and in warranting such attributions.3 Many ethnographers, for example, are quite
cavalier, even unselfconscious, about stipulating what category is relevant to a
particular respondent’s statement (see, e.g., Atkinson, 1982). We might say that the
transcription or entextualisation procedures themselves incline us as researchers
towards one characterisation rather than another and thus what analysis we end
up with. In a strong sense, our ethnography (for instance) is done before the
transcribed data are analysed: once the categories are provided, a predisposing
interpretation is activated and it is “all over bar the shouting”. This reminds us that
all writing, e.g. entextualisation, is a practice, an activity with conventions.
This extended illustration is simply to show how the textual practices of

professional sociologists shape both their data and their analysis, and how many
of these practices are rooted in lay textual reasoning. Unsurprisingly, professional
sociologists unavoidably rely upon these ordinary “commonsensical” cultural
procedures of reading and of making ordinary “textual sense” of what we read. We
have already outlined one such procedure, “left to right”, and how it can be used as
a resource. Clearly, finding out about these resources is important, particularly as
much remains unknown about them (and, consequently, we do not fully know how
these procedures shape the discipline of sociology). Even those procedures that are
known about tend to be disattended by sociologists: consequently, our discipline
of sociology is shaped in more or less unknown or unacknowledged ways by
ordinary linguistic (including textual) resources and procedures that are, currently,
at best dimly known by its practitioners. Thus sociological textual practices rely
heavily in tacit ways on ordinary, “common-sensical” textual practices. We may
now turn to an examination of the place of texts in ordinary, everyday cultural
reasoning and conduct.
Texts as active social phenomena
As I have indicated earlier, texts of all kinds have typically been employed by
conventional sociologists as “information on something else”, as Dorothy E.
Smith (1982, 1984) has put it in a series of influential papers. That is, texts have
been used to “convey” the reader to some “other” phenomenon such as family
life four hundred years ago, a train accident, and so on, or something else existing
“beyond” the text. As Smith puts it, we are, quite simply, used to finding out what
texts say, what we have learned from them as a resource. Texts have, therefore,
often been regarded by sociologists as transparent, as “windows” giving onto
this or that “other” phenomenon. In this sense, most sociologists have oriented
themselves towards texts in the same way as have ordinary society-members: that
is, they have been treated as “conduits” to a reality beyond the text. Texts have
seldom been treated as analytically significant phenomena in their own right, as
comprising self-contained data in themselves, to be taken as objects of attention
on their own behalf.
Linked with this tendency amongst sociologists to treat texts as mere conduits
to a separately conceived reality is an assumption of what Dorothy E. Smith terms
the “inertia of the text”. That is, the text is very often taken as mere marks on a
page, docile, inoperative and inert. However, Smith attempts to replace this notion
of the text as a passively transparent “channel” with a conception of an active text,
a text that has its own structuring effect, that actively potentiates the sense of some
phenomenon, for example how one newspaper report may, in its profile of a train
accident, lay the blame on one party and a second newspaper report on another.4
To use Smith’s simile (it is no more than that, and even then has its dangers), the
text is akin to “a crystal which bends the light as it passes through”.
An example: in the journal Women’s Studies International Forum, John Lee

(1984) analyses an actual newspaper headline: GIRL GUIDE AGED 14 RAPED
AT HELL’S ANGELS CONVENTION. Lee makes the point that newspaper
headlines work actively (a) to attract readers’ attention to particular stories; (b)
to persuade them to read those stories; and (c) to predispose them towards a
particular way of reading the following story, a particular way of making sense of
and understanding the contents of the story.
The headline, then, has impetus. Not only does it actively capture readers’
attention but, also, it furnishes them with an “instructed reading” of the story:
newspaper headlines may be seen as incorporating “interpretive practices and
schemata” to use Smith’s phrase, which itself is not without problematic elements.
These “practices and schemata” often take the form of instructions for reading
what follows. Part of the “attention-getting” work done by this headline is its
puzzle format: what was an incumbent of the category “Girl Guide” (let alone one
categorised as “aged 14”) doing at a get-together of incumbents of the category
“Hell’s Angels”? The membership categories do not seem, conventionally, to
“go naturally together”, as, for instance, might the categories “Hell’s Angel” and
“sidekick”. (For the procedural rules in terms of which membership categories
are sensibly co-selected, see H. Sacks, 1972.) The headline directs us towards the
story in order to find a solution to the puzzle: after all, we might even find the Girl
Guide to have been complicit to some degree, looking for “cheap thrills”, and so
on. However, the story presents another solution to the puzzle generated by the
co-selection of these categories, namely that the Girl Guide had been abducted by
the Hell’s Angels and that her prior movements were such that it was simply ill-
fortune that she was in a certain place when the Hell’s Angels arrived.
Puzzle-solution formats abound in newspaper headlines: note another “puzzle”

analysed by Jim Schenkein (1979), from a copy of the Guardian: POLICE
INQUIRY INTO WHY THEY MISSED THE RADIO RAIDERS. Schenkein
reports his initial bafflement on reading the headline: to what did it refer? To whom
did it refer? Hence his characterisation of the headline as a referential puzzle (and,
indeed, we can see that Lee’s headline is a similar kind of puzzle). His bafflement
induced him to read the story to find a solution. Perhaps the reader of this article
has been “hooked” by the puzzle: I am not going to provide the solution here (but
the issue of The Guardian was published in autumn 1971). Schenkein’s article
does, in a way, echo Smith’s simile of the text as being like a “crystal which bends
the light as it passes through”. He refers to the way in which the headline begins
the task of transforming “events in the world” into “stories in the news”: again, we
have the notion of an active text, a text with impact, with impetus.
Part of the active, operational, predisposing character of the text is the so-
called “slant” imparted to the story. As Lee records, he once observed a news
editor on a local radio station reading a report of a record football pools win in
another area of the country. The story was put out under the heading: LOCAL
MAN LOSES RECORD OF LARGEST POOLS WIN. The headline, and the text
that followed, gained its impact by presenting the story with a “slant” derived from
the geographically local frame of reference. The text actively effects a particular
transformation of the story. Texts are, therefore, practical matters.
As an exercise in analysing what texts do, you might like to examine this actual
– and again pseudonymised – U.S. police report of an alleged murder: indeed, it
comes from the same case as the transcribed interrogation above. Amongst many
other things, this report is an entextualisation of a considerable array of police
investigative activities and their outcomes. The text itself actively brings about
many related consequences, but one of them is what we might call an “activity of
implication”. By “activity of implication” I intend the way in which the suspect,
Stuart Riley, is, through this text, which is a bland, unremarkable police report,
potentially implicated in one murder but not (so far as this document is concerned)
in another:
FACTORY CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

INTRA-DEPARTMENTAL CORRESPONDENCE
TO: Lieut. Donald O. Corcoran FROM: Alan J. Rimsky – Detective
Homicide Bureau – Commanding Michael D. Holt – Detective
Evidence Unit Ident. Bur.
DATE: 8.9.83 SUBJECT:
Re: Latent print comparison
against inked impressions of
Stuart Riley.
Sir,
On September 3, 1983, and at the direction of Lt. David O. Corcoran, Commander of the
Homicide Bureau, a latent print comparison of all the latent prints developed from the following
two scenes were compared against the inked impressions of Stuart Riley, Factory City Police Mug
no. 96713:
1. 431 Ash St. – Homicide Victim – Herb Morris – 23.8.83
2. 826 Sycamore Ave. – Assault Victim – Hank Stebbins – 31.8.83
From the latent prints of 431 Ash Street a latent print developed from the top of a stereo player
was identical in ridge characteristic to the left thumb of the inked impression of Stuart Riley No.
96713.
From the latent prints of 826 Sycamore Ave., no identification was effected
Comparison effected by Detectives Michael D. Holt and Alan J. Rimsky of the Evidence Unit.
Lt. Corcoran Homicide
File
Respectfully
Alan J. Rimsky – Detective
Evidence Unit
Files no 1216 and no 1217 (Stamp Received)
Sept. 9 1983
Homicide Bureau
Factory City Police Department
(signed) Donald O. Corcoran
Note that this document is a very small, utterly routine, practical part of an
overall investigation, but that nonetheless the statement of evidence – that Riley’s
fingerprint matched in one respect a print found in the murder victim Morris’s
home but that there was no such match established in victim Hank Stebbins’
home – renders inferentially available a putative guilt-implication for Riley in
one case rather than in the other. Of course, the rest of the investigation may even,
eventually, implicate Riley in the second case and exonerate him in the first, but
here we are concerned simply with what this text actively brings about here and
now, however provisionally and inferentially.
Some concerns that you may (or may not!) wish to bear in mind in considering
how the implication is actively brought about by and through the report as a text
are: (a) the invocation of a method, of systematic police procedure; (b) the various
and diverse provisions of persons’, including the investigators’, identities; (c) the
formal, “official” style of the text and the stamps, signatures and ratifications it
includes; and (d) the precision of the formulation of the statements in the text
(the precise nature, and, by implication, the limits of the comparison effected).
These and other textual methods actively bring about an “implicative placing”
of Riley in one scene rather than another, where this “placing” is also textually
authorised as an account. Note that no direct statement of guilt is made: instead,
such a judgement is actively potentiated by the text. It is through such undramatic,
practical, seemingly straightforward texts that “guilt-implicativeness” may be
actively implied or pointed up: such routine texts are active indeed.
A similar guilt-implicative text – again without any explicit accusation or

other guilt-attribution – may be found in the following newspaper headline: WIFE
FOUND MURDERED AT HOME – where, given the conventional category-
pair “wife” – “husband” and the setting (“home”) being a conventional location
for such a pair, the husband may (rightly or wrongly) be deemed by readers the
favourite candidate for the additional category “culprit”. Again, the categorial
organisation of texts takes us far.
When considering the resources that comprise the “active” and “practical”
nature of texts, we much acknowledge that texts themselves are often a concerted
accomplishment, are often not the work of a single author but of a number of
persons who may well have differing relevances. For instance, David Omissi
(1999) has written a book presenting a large number of letters from Indian soldiers
in France during World War I: many of these letters were, of course, written to
their families back in India and are clearly designed for familial recipients. They
were written in Hindi, Urdu, Gurmukhi, Pashtu, etc. However, as Omissi points
out in his “Introduction” to this compilation, the text of these letters can not
necessarily be construed in terms of single or unitary authorship: Omissi is not an
ethnomethodologist, but his observations can readily be re-specified in terms of
ethnomethodological precepts.
The letters were sometimes written by the soldiers themselves, but were
frequently written through scribes – scribes who, for instance, could recommend
turns of phrase, etc. (as well as often reading letters received by the soldiers).
The inscription of the letter was, therefore, a “semi-public” matter, as Omissi
puts it, rather than an entirely private or intimate one. Then the letters had to go
through the army’s system of censorship, to ensure, e.g., that military information
or place names, etc., had not been inadvertently conveyed. There were two levels
of censorship – the British officers within the regiment and the Indian Base Post
Office, whose job it was to excise “seditious” material from incoming and outgoing
letters.
The situation was even more complex than that: some soldiers wrote their
own letters; scribes might also be censors; sometimes censorship was more lax or
perfunctory than at other times; British censors often relied upon Indian scribes
to translate the letters into English, etc. Consequently, the letters themselves
are not “stabilised” in the sense that they were not the product of a consistent
set of “stages” or what Omissi terms “filters”. Instead, they were the outcome
of a variable “mix” of there-and-then local, situated evolving practices. Even
the notion of “filter” is a simplistic reduction, since in some cases the persons
dictating and / or writing the letters might well have been prospectively aware
that their censoring officers, etc., would be checking the contents, and they
might well take this into account in composing the letters in the first place. In
this sense, the letters might well have been knowingly fashioned for multiple
recipients, for some or all of a series of readers. The resources or information
the letters furnish for us are, therefore, variable rather than constant. This might
well provide a problem for a conventional sociologist or historian treating the
letters as a stabilised data-set. However, the ethnomethodological approach treats
phenomena such as their variable design for multiple recipients as itself a rich
phenomenon for analysis. This approach has, then, to begin with the text of a
letter as received (if it was) by a soldier’s family in India as a complex, composite
and multiplex product or evolved outcome. Ethnomethodology would then seek
to examine the variable situational contingencies and relevances in the temporal
course of any cohort letter’s production. The very presence or absence, or the
mix, of resources or information in the letter is successively re-constituted. It is
clear that we can speak of a “production cohort” rather than a single authorship
or single “recipient”, of each particular letter, and each letter as a situated, local,
diachronic accomplishment. Of course, the “production” and “reception” cohort
may be coterminous; after all the reading of a text is part of the course of its
production. To be sure, its procedures may well not be the last, or intended, readers
of the text. If not, this will in all probability be built in by the producers as a design
or particularisation feature of the text. In this sense, text-producers may build a
“cohort independence” into the text, i.e. that the text will be used by parties other
than, or in addition to, the production cohort and thus transcends the interests,
uses, relevances, etc. of that production cohort. This cohort independence is itself
a local achievement of the production cohort.
This concern with the production of texts leads us to issues concerning writing,
which for reasons of limited space we can not consider here. Suffice it to say
that writing is conceived by ethnomethodologists not as a solitary, freestanding,
psychological production of the individual but as one which occurs in a very
specific social setting and comprises the author’s (or authors’) situated activity,
capitalising on all kinds of “scenic” resources in that setting – the availability of
particular writing materials, the orientation to the co-author (which may be one of
contestation) or others in the situation, and so on, (J. Heap, 2000). In this sense,
writing is a “setting-permeable” activity, genuinely social. Moreover, another local
social dimension is how a given writing shows a particular “recipient design”,

i.e. how it is tailored for the person receiving or reading that item, in just those
circumstances.
To return to the issues of reading, one way in which we can see the significance
of reading is to be found in a classic book on card-playing written by the expert
John Scarne (Scarne, 1965). Putatively, the book is about how to win at cards
and how to spot cheats. In the chapter (Ch. 27) on cheating at poker, he refers to
such card sharpers’ moves as “stacking the deck”, “crimping”, “shifting”, “false
cuts”, “bottom dealing”, “sandbagging” and “signalling”. Scarne writes this
about “signalling” to a confederate (p. 289): “If the (first) upturned card almost
covers the hole card but permits a quarter of an inch of the hole card to be seen, it
represents an ace, etc.”
A first observation is that the phraseology in terms of which the statement is

made itself casts a conception of the intended recipient of the text – card players
who already have some technical savvy. Secondly, the text can be read, and
particularly by such readers, in two – though not unrelated – ways. First, it can be
read as a way of helping the reader, as an honest poker-player, to detect two cheats
colluding in a game. However, it can also be read as a set of instructions to the
reader concerning how s/he, too, could cheat at poker. There is, then, what we might
term “interpretive leeway” in the reading of a given text: which interpretation the
reader draws from the text depends on his or her practical relevances, interests, etc.
– though this is not to say that such leeway is infinitely extensible: on the contrary,
in some cases it may well be quite minutely circumscribed, e.g. alternatives may
overlap considerably. Still, written items may be “open-textured” to a greater or
lesser degree, – particularly from the perspective(s) of specific readers: texts do
not “straightjacket” readers, and in Scarne’s book we can see that readers may
“localise” or “particularise” texts in at least two ways.
Of course, the reader of the text plays a crucial role in all this, not simply
passively receiving that text but also actively “interpreting” it, as we might
provisionally put it, (including, sometimes, generating different or divergent
versions of a textual account). It is to the act of reading that we now turn.
The studies by Omissi and Scarne – neither of them, of course,

ethnomethodological – both attest to the ethnomethods in a text’s production. These
ethnomethods are laic, not professional, and they afford a necessary supplement
to Smith’s notion of the “active text” by focalising the production procedures for
the text. We might see these processes as very complex indeed – highly sensitive
to anticipated recipients and, perhaps, as evolving through various stages of
production – what we might call a “production career”. The active text is thus a
locally evolved text.
Reading as activity
Texts, then, in the resources they mobilise and in their fashioning and formatting,
are anything but passive, anything but mere inert marks on a page or screen. Texts
have their own active structuring effect. However, this effect has to be activated or
animated by the reader(s): when referring to the active text we are always referring
to the text-as-read.
In an influential book, the ethnomethodologist Eric Livingston has conceived of

the inextricable intertwining of the text and its reading on specific occasions in
terms of a “text-reading” pair. The text and its reading can be conceived as “two
sides of the same coin”. The twinned parts of the pair are i) a given printed text
and ii) the “lived work” or experiential practices of reading of just that particular
text, in just these circumstances, here and now. In this respect, reading is not just
a general or diffuse activity: it is one that is specifically addressed to just this text
now, in these particular circumstances. Consequently, texts-as-read comprise a
single unit, a single object of our analytic attention. To analytically focus on one
half rather than the other would be to wrest that half out of the context that gives it
its specific sense “there and then”. Thus, a given text is invariably fused with the
situated, lived work through which it is read. This is why the present article aims
always to construe textual analysis as the analysis of texts-as-read, as the analysis
of readers’ arrival at a specific textual sense in this particular case, on this specific
occasion. The characteristics of texts are, in fact, the characteristics of the text-as-
read: these characteristics of the text are construed within, and by virtue of, how
it is read on and for a given occasion. Reading, too, is an embodied practice (see
e.g., André Kertész’s photographs of ordinary readers).
As we have seen, this does not mean that readers can idiosyncratically
or arbitrarily impute just any characteristics to a given text: texts themselves
afford resources to readers, but readers activate those resources and it does
not, therefore, make sense to consider the inscriptive characteristics of texts as
freestanding. By consequence, it means that the ethnomethodologist qua analyst
should never stipulate a freestanding meaning to the text, should never pronounce
as an “academic authority” upon what a text “really” (or “ultimately”) means,
irrespective of how ordinary readers construe the meaning in real, local, everyday
circumstances and for their own practical purposes. The analyst, after all, is
ultimately just another reader and – if s/he be an ethnomethodologist – can claim
no privileged position in stipulating the “ultimate” or “real” meaning of a given
text. This position is, however, claimed by many other types of textual analyst who
will, e.g., seek to impress on you what this or that passage in the Bible, or in the
dramas of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, etc., “really means” and how all other
interpretations are just plain wrong. The ethnomethodologist should avoid such
analytic absolutism. Livingston’s notion of the “text/reading” pair helps her/him
to do so, though we shall return to this issue with some caveats later.
Again, reading has often been presented as a passive reception on the part of
the reader, a simple, one-way inflow of the “message” of the text into the reader’s
head of the message of the text. In fact, reading a text is an extraordinarily complex
sense-making activity employing the wide-ranging, sophisticated sense-making
procedures as furnished within the respective culture involved. Thus, as Alexander
W. McHoul’s (1982) study points out, we may talk about the readers(s) producing
a “culturally competent course of reading”.
McHoul’s formulation is quite apt, since it at least begins to move us away from
a cognitivistic analysis of reading. Many non-ethnomethodological analysts of
reading reduce it to purely psychological terms, so that an item of text is conceived
by the analyst in terms of the individual reader’s cognitive-psychological response,
e.g. in her/his intake of the text’s message or other information. Here, the reception
model of reading is one of (textual) information receipt, information processing,
storage, retrieval, and output. By contrast, Ethnomethodology as a sociological
approach is uncompromisingly anti-cognitivistic and refuses any reduction of
reading to individual-psychological processes. Instead, it treats reading activities
as culturally-based and socially-organised and above all as local: that is, these
activities are conducted on the basis of the cultural knowledge shared by members
of a given group or society, where such knowledge is frequently employed
conjointly by people, e.g. the writer(s) and recipient(s) of a letter. Consider, for
example, school pupils discussing a mathematical formula written by the teacher
on a blackboard and explained by the teacher. The pupils and teacher are “making
textual sense” together. Making textual sense is, however, a social matter even if
we are dealing with an individual reader, since solitary readers are still employing
socially shared resources and sense-making practices in situ. Here, of course, we are
treating readers as active, knowledgeable sense-makers, not passive recipients.
A culturally-competent course of reading might well involve readers’ active

ability to use identities or categories of society membership (termed “membership
categories”) such as “Girl Guide” and “Hell’s Angel”, their ability to understand
the serial or sequential aspects of the text (the beginning, middle and end and
as, e.g., a series of event-descriptions, etc.) and the able deployment of other
culturally based sense-making procedures that s/he brings to the text as part of
his/her “background knowledge”.
McHoul (1982: Chap.2) made up a “poem” from randomly selected first lines
from other actual poems and then recorded readers’ attempts to make sense of it:
he considered that their efforts in trying to understand this “strange” poem would
make explicit techniques of reading that are usually implicit. He found that readers
made sense of these randomly collected lines as lines of a single, meaningful poem,
that they relied heavily on following through its temporal sequences in order to
gain an understanding of it. Readers also treated each line as an evidence of a
single emerging pattern of meaning, a continuing course, but they were also ready
to revise their interpretations line by line. They treated the lines as, by and large,
fitted to each other and a second line came to be seen as having been projected
by a prior line – even if some succeeding line were apparently disjunctive, it was
often seen as “metaphorically related” to the prior one or to the overall pattern
evidenced by the prior one.
Some or all of these cultural methods for competent reading can be found in our
everyday reading of all documents, for example receipts which record each item
purchased and the sequence of purchasing at the till. Of course, some texts such as
“No Parking” may be designed for “at-a-glance” reading, so there is, for instance,
no serially ordered lineage. However, a “No Parking” sign placed halfway up a
wall still requires the readers’ active interpretation: for instance, readers will know
that the sign does not simply prohibit parking halfway up a wall, but refers to a
space in front of the wall, and they will have to try to figure out how far that space
extends, and so on.5 Obvious as this may seem, active interpretive or sense-making
work is, clearly, unavoidably involved on the part of the reader of that sign.
It is in this sense that the reader “activates” the text. Whatever active potential
a text possesses, this potential has to be activated through its being read. This,
surely, is what Lee has in mind when he says: “Headlines must be so constructed
as to allow readers to employ a variety of methods and techniques of sense-
assembly which enable them to decode the headings so as to discover the message
and instructions which they impart” (1984: 69). Readers’ active employment of
these sense-assembly methods and techniques are, quite evidently, central to the
activation of the properties of the text.
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of activating a text is when lecturers

“read aloud” a set of notes they have written. Erving Goffman (1981) writes at
length about the varied practices involved in what he terms “animating” such a
text: among these is what he terms “text-parenthetical remarks”, where a lecturer
departs from “strict adherence” to her/his prepared text per se to introduce asides
or parenthetical remarks, qualifications, elaborations, clarifications, editorialising,
and so on (1981: 176–7). These “extra” commentaries are often addressed to
making oral sense of a written or printed text, drawing out its significance, and so
on. In the case of the lecture, the text’s author is also its principal (i.e. its advocate)
and animator (presenter and interpreter to an audience). The “animation” of a
lecture-text involves its transformation into a “spoken-aloud” form designed for
a particular social occasion or face-to-face encounter. Whilst Goffman himself
was not an ethnomethodologist, his argument here closely parallels some
ethnomethodological “takes” on the “animation” of texts.
Reading a text, then, has two aspects which are only analytically distinguishable.
When one is reading a text, as a practical and situated matter, one is, in all
likelihood, unaware of the distinction. The first aspect is the way in which the
text is organised so as to potentially predispose readers towards a given set of

relevances, and the second is the way that the actual practices of reading the text
actualise those relevances.
Indeed, texts are often designed to engage with a specific set of presumed
relevances amongst readers – hence we get texts slanted towards particular
categories of person – Woman’s Own, Men Only, Motorsport News, The Dalesman,
The Jewish Chronical, The British Journal of Sociology, and so on. These texts
are slanted or designed so as to address the putative relevances of what has been
called the “implied (or intended) reader”. Many texts are designed for readers from
groups characterised by special distributions of knowledge – lawyers, doctors,
clergy, engineers, and so on. Each of these groups has been termed “interpretive
communities” since their members bring special (or specialist) interpretive
resources to their particular class of text – legal, medical, religious and engineering
texts, respectively. Note that the specific presumed relevances may, therefore, be
glossed by membership categorisations – women, men, motorsport fans, Jewish
people, sociologists, and so on.
Readers, then, actively “interpret” texts but cannot interpret them in just any
way they wish. The texts-as-read contain “instructions” which may yield strongly
preferred readings. There is a dialectical, back-and-forth process in operation.
The text makes available various interpretive schemata and the reader activates
these schemata in particular instances by bringing his/her sense-making work
into alignment. As Lee’s (1984) article suggests, readers must be able to employ
congruent sense-making schemata in order to identify the message and instructions
projected by the text. Again, we can see the social (“alignment”) aspects of
reading even if the person is reading the text on her/his own. One might say that
in effecting this alignment the act of reading establishes a presumed reciprocity
of perspectives – that potentiated by the text and that deployed by the reader.
This does not necessarily mean that readers always agree with the “message” of
what they read, only that they can, initially, understand the message. The matter
of agreement, disagreement or neutrality is a further, and often crucial, aspect of
the act of reading. One thing seems sure: we cannot have anything approaching an
adequate textual analysis without including an intricately interwoven consideration
both of textual organisation and of reading as an activity. In its focalising of the
social practices of text production, and reading, ethnomethodology’s character as
a praxiological approach is evident.
Textually mediated social action: Professional and everyday
Let us return to the opening paragraph of this chapter, to the list of examples of
textual items. Most of these examples derive from the situations and settings of
everyday life, the scenes of daily activity. However, this is also a branch of textual
analysis which focuses upon social scientific (and particularly anthropological)

practices. This tendency in textual analysis addresses issues concerning so-called
“high culture” – novels, drama scripts, poetry, religious or academic texts, and the
like. Textual analysis was, as I have indicated above, devised as a way of analysing
these “high-status” textual artefacts – perhaps for the purposes of biblical or
Talmudic exegesis, the literary criticism of novels or drama scripts, and so on. As
such, there was an “in-group” or elitist element to this exercise: it was, typically,
one segment of a literary, cultural or academic elite commenting on the work of
another segment of that elite, as part of a debate with that segment – or, even more
pleasurable, one segment of that elite talking about itself.
The most pervasive level of social practice is, though, that of everyday life and
of society-members’ culturally based sense-making and reasoning. Newspaper
articles, text messages, road signs, shopping lists, and so on, are all, clearly, of the
“everyday” rather than the scholarly or professional kind of text. Their everyday
or commonsense status does not mean they are of any less significance: quite the
contrary. This is the most generic level of “textual work” and it is the scholarly
/ professional one which is in many respects derivative, as was again indicated
earlier in our discussion of Rose’s work.
As indicated in the “Introduction” to this volume in relation to Sacks’

“representative metaphor” of the “commentator machine”, ethnomethodologically-
relevant analysis of how commonsense and academic resources combine in a
sociological author’s production of a professional text is to be found in Sacks’s
(1999) examination of Max Weber’s study Ancient Judaism. Sacks examines
Weber’s study as itself comprising a textual analysis – the analysis of texts from the
Old Testament of the Bible. Sacks considers Weber’s approach as what I shall term
a textual transformation – a transformation of a Biblical text into a sociological one,
and Sacks analyses Weber’s own text from this point of view. In a sense, Sacks’s
study involves a textual analysis of Weber’s textually-based investigations, and
Sacks uses actually passages from the Bible as part of his study. Sacks sees Weber
as “reconstructing” the features of Ancient Israel from Biblical into recognisably
sociological terms. Sacks indicates that Weber uses what I shall here call a “textual
interrogation” method in order to bring about this transformative reconstruction.
The resources of natural language are central to this task: our natural language is,
says Sacks, “sociologically elegant” and entirely adequate to such tasks, be they
laic or professional.
Texts may be seen as “mediating” in a variety of ways, for example an

anthropology or sociology text may be regarded as mediating between its author
(including, indeed focalising, that author’s definition of the circumstances of his/
her reports) and the reader. However, there is perhaps a more directly apparent
mediating effect, and this becomes most evident when we move away from
professional / academic texts and turn towards ordinary, everyday textual items.
Consider some initial, basic observations for further analysis that John Lee and
I made of some video recordings (with soundtrack) as part of a broader range of
analytic projects of a research team investigating the social organisation of public
space in urban areas. Lee and I collected and examined (inter alia) some data on
bus stops and shelters in an inner suburb of Paris.6
People formed a cluster in and around the shelter. The cluster was not
haphazardly organised but, as we increasingly learned, had a dynamic, evolving
internal order. A bus came with the sign “16” on its side. On the front was another
“16” plus the name of the destination. Some people in the cluster self-selected for
the bus and formed a queue in order to board it. Others “disqualified” themselves
for this bus, often visibly pulling back to let past those visibly wishing to board.
The bus route (and destination) sign-as-read served to “partial out” or partition
those passengers wishing to board that particular bus and those wanting a bus for
another destination. In addition, there were some young people “hanging around”
the outside of the shelter for a considerable time with no apparent intention of
boarding any bus, and it is arguable too that the sign on the bus helped to “partial
out” “waiting passengers” as opposed to “non-passengers”.
In other words, the reading of the bus sign(s) worked to activate a variety of
practical relevances and courses of action amongst parties to the shelter: the self-
inclusion and subsequent queuing of passengers for this bus, the self-exclusion
of passengers waiting for other buses on different routes but who still manifested
“waiting behaviour”, and those whose activities were those of a non-travelling
spectatorship, including the researchers. This list is still not exhaustive of those with
an interest in the bus stop or shelter; for instance I have indicated elsewhere how bus
stops or stations might be constituted by pickpockets and other criminals as prime
locations for the transaction of their practical relevances. These courses of action
resulted in the re-formatting of the configuration of persons in and around the bus
shelter in somewhat the same way as a kaleidoscope re-formats patterns – something
like a change of gestalt in interactional patterning. This example also shows us
that “interests” in a particular setting (e.g. the bus stop) are, in fact, glosses for a
contexture of relevances which may include various individuals’ particular projects
vis-à-vis the setting. A “local” setting, then, integrally includes the contexture of
relevances through which participants render it sensible. Texts may figure centrally
or peripherally in such contextures. For example, the bus shelter showed numbers
indexing a variety of routes, of which no. 16 was only one.
Here, we can observe that the common-sensical “textual work” of the sign(s)
comprises a “duplex action”. The first “moment” of this is parties’ monitoring of the
sign(s), and the second “moment” is the incorporation of the sign into a “further”
action, for example self-inclusion, self-exclusion, meeting someone alighting from
bus no. 16, and those “simply” watching such scenes, – not so simply, in fact, as one
may watch for “criminal”, “idle” or “research” purposes. The monitoring of the no.
16 sign is an integral feature of such ordinary sorting or triage activities, so the two
“moments” are, in a certain sense, only strongly distinguishable for the purposes of
analysis. It is in the practical, everyday world, however, that the careful observer
can, perhaps, discern the operation of this duplex action most clearly.
The course of action of (say) boarding the no. 16 bus is what many
ethnomethodologists term a textually mediated one: that is what imparts to it its
specifically duplex character. This example also shows how the textually-mediated
conduct of people at the bus stop can only be understood as conjoint activity: self-
selection means selecting oneself in relation to other co-present readers of the
“16” text exhibited by the bus. The text is highly consequential in how people
act, there and then. If this example seems trivial and all too obvious, let us also
note that, as we observed, the self-selection activities were far from “automatic”.
The bus number or destination notice still left an “interpretive” problem for some
passengers: “Does the bus go to that destination where I want to get off?”, “What
is the precise route of this bus?”, and so on. Thus, the text had to be interactionally
disambiguated through questions put to the driver, to other passengers getting onto
the bus, and so on, or, perhaps, through the consultation of another text, the route
description-cum-timetable. Thus, the incorporation of the reading of the bus sign
into an overall project of action (e.g. “going to the Latin Quarter” in Paris) was by
no means always so simple as it appears at face value.
Actions and interactions produce (more or less) organised social settings and
what we have in this example is not just a set of textually mediated actions but also
a textually mediated social organisation7 – a locally-embedded system of action
(both oriented towards and administered by the parties to the shelter themselves)
which we might gloss as a system of triage: a textually mediated, self-administered
sorting system. That is, the evolving, local reconfiguration of the people at the
shelter, for example the formation of some of them into a queue upon the arrival
of the bus, where before there had “simply” been a cluster of waiting persons,
was their collaborative, textually mediated accomplishment. Thus, we may speak
of “textually mediated social actions and social organisations”, such organisation
being a product of situated actions.
Furthermore, textually mediated action clearly plays a focal part in studies of

what has, perhaps misleadingly, come to be termed “Human-Computer Interaction”
(HCI). It is evident that on-screen operating and processing instructions, textually
formatted data retrieval, the textual potential of CD-ROMs, and so on, are all very
highly relevant to the concerns outlined in this chapter. It must be said, however,
that such studies vary greatly in the degree to which they see the concerns of textual
analysis as figuring in HCI analysis as such. Some HCI studies treat the displayed
texts as having the same unproblematic “transparency” as did the orthodox studies
that I described at the beginning of this chapter. Consequently, by no means all
HCI analyses can be described as “ethnomethodological” in character.
I must confess some unease at the term “textual mediation” since it is

all to easily interpreted as though the text, somehow or to some extent, stood
apart from the course of action into which it is incorporated. I suspect that a
more ethnomethodological view might eventually supplant the notion “textual
mediation”, perhaps through the employment of one of its core concepts, namely
“reflexivity”. We shall, analytically respecify the notion of “textual mediation” in
the next section.
The ethnomethodological version of this concept is that descriptions or

definitions are constituent features of the very specific circumstances they describe.
Descriptions or definitions elaborate those circumstances and are elaborated by
them: they are integral to, and non-extractable from, those circumstances (see
Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). Since texts furnish descriptive resources, they may
be said to fall squarely within the ambit of this definition. However, the notion of
“textually mediated” social action and organisation has performed an important
service in “bringing texts in from the cold” and showing their relevance within
everyday social life. To pirate some of Wittgenstein’s imagery, the term “textually
mediated” social action / organisation has served, and continues to serve, as a
ladder to get us to a higher level, after which we shall be able to throw the ladder
away.
Perhaps one of the most perspicuous examples of the reflexive or constitutive

conception of texts in relation to courses of action is George Psathas’s (1979)
analysis of “occasioned” direction maps. These are maps drawn by people to help
others specifically for the purpose of finding a particular place – sketch maps are
perhaps the most prevalent example, but such things as the linear route maps for
racing cyclists and orienteers, or rally drivers’ pace notes give us more formal
counterparts.
Psathas bids us consider how remarkable it is that people can interpret a number
of lines on paper as being about a world they have in common. He observes that
such readings do not occur “automatically” but are methodically accomplished
through readers’ active situated deployment of sense-making practices (although
in all likelihood they are not engaged in a self-reflection on how they make
such textual sense). This accomplishment renders the direction maps readable /
interpretable to others (to users), as displays of a world known in common – it
displays the world in an accountable, readable, comprehensible way as being an
understandable phenomenon. Part of this jointly known world is the “how” of it,
that is, the methods of cultural reasoning for making, reading and using the map.
Psathas shows how direction maps are read as an eminently practical solution
to a practical problem, that of finding the desired destination. They contain a set
of sequentially organised instructions, arranged as being before, after, next to, and
so on, some intermediate point, such that actually travelling the route covered
by the map presents itself as a “discovery” of the features designated in the map.
Thus, we all know streets “go” from A to B, that points or places are arranged
along (say) streets, at cross-roads, and so on, that destinations may be reached by
following a designated series of those points of places, that some of these points
may be critical, may be important landmarks for the route, and so on: occasioned
maps count on all that common-sense cultural knowledge, and more. Reading
the direction map, using it to find a destination, may require all kinds of “extra”,
informal sense-making work in order to “operate” the map – maybe, for instance,
asking someone en route if a place actually is the one designated on the map,
enquiring about distances, and so on. Often, the person drawing the map will
attempt to provide in advance for this interpretive problem by amplifying the
drawn instructions through oral elaboration. Again, we see reading and writing /
drawing as activities. Elaborating on Psathas’s analysis, we can see that the use of
a direction map is very much a constituent feature of the actual project of finding a
given destination. It is part of the selfsame project that it describes. This very well
exemplifies the reflexive properties of the map-specific course-of-action project
“finding one’s way”.
The map describes a project of action that is realised through its, the map’s,
actual practical use. The descriptive resources of the map will serve to define or
to “foreground” points along the route, and as these points are found, they will,
reciprocally, impart sense to the map as “descriptively adequate” (at least in that
particular respect). Finding the features symbolised in the map gives sense to it as
recognisable, readable and practically usable for the next phase of finding a given
destination.
Thus, whilst the direction map describes the points on the route, the order
in which they will be found, and so on, the route-finder’s sense of the map is
itself specified, amplified, revised, respecified, and so on, in view of how, when
(and if) those points are found. Particularly where some descriptive ambiguity is
found on the map, actually locating a point may serve to disambiguate it. Thus the
map-as-used may be said to exhibit reflexive properties in that it describes (e.g.
“foregrounds”) various points en route to a destination but is, in turn, re-described
(specified, revised, etc.) by those points as they are found.
Given Psathas’s article on “occasioned maps”, the data on police records, bus
stops, card playing manuals, letters, etc., I hope to have indicated that there can be
no overall theory about what texts “in general” are or what reading “in general” is.
The nature of and work done by texts and reading are far too diverse for that. Not
only this, but texts and reading are socially situated, locally-relevanced phenomena
– inextricably so. The specificities of such situations are myriad and can not be
captured or formulated by the analyst imposing a standard, – and certainly not
an “external” standard or pattern, derived from outside the context of the text as
oriented to by participants. Instead, we need to study how ordinary participants in
particular situations themselves make sense of texts, themselves find a pattern or

order in the texts which suffices, for all practical purposes, for there and then. The
approach, then, is to take a given text-as-read, treat it as embedded in the particular
situation of practical action of which it is a part and as parties to the situation
themselves recognise and use it.
We have, perhaps, spoken about “texts” and their “reading” as though members
invariably treated them as distinguishable or, better, as relevantly distinct, as a
“pair” that is salient across all local circumstances. However, we may well find
that the distinction is not invariably relevant to their local – practical circumstances
(including their confluences of interests, “in-order-to” motives, orientation to
evolving local contingencies, etc). We may instead find that the text-reading
distinction is only treated as a salient one in certain circumscribed circumstances.
Our next section moves, admittedly tentatively, towards a respecification of the
“text-reading pair” distinction that might occlude the problems attendant on the
ordinary logical grammar of the term “pair” without sacrificing the undeniable
gains made through the devising of that term.
In the above sections I have, I hope, transacted three moves. The first is to
raise to visibility the ordinary, taken-for-granted texts in everyday life and to
have at least illustrated how these texts are features of local, situated contexts
and courses of action. The text, then, ceases to be treated by analysts (following
lay members) as either a) a transparent, unproblematic conduit to the world of
objectively-given objects beyond that text or b) as coterminous with that world
of objectively-given objects, as simply “adhering” to those objects. The initial
move, then, is to bring ordinary texts out of the dark and shed some light on
them. Given the levels of taken-for-grantedness and routinisation of these
texts, their “seen-but-specifically-unnoticed” character, even this is far easier
said than done, and even some ethnomethodological and conversation analytic
approaches have been less than fully successful in turning texts into explicit
topics for analysis rather than simply relied-upon tacit resources in analysing
conversational interaction or some other socially-organised conversational
interaction or socially-organised phenomenon, e.g. following a map in order to
find a way to a desired destination.
A second move way to treat the text as an evolved production, a production

with its own “natural history” of production practices and which possesses what
we might, as a placeholder term, call its own “active” properties. These properties
actively figure in social activities and social settings, such that we might, as another
placeholder term, speak of “textually-mediated interactions / settings”: again, the
ordinary sketching and use of occasioned maps in the activity of finding one’s way
is a good illustration.
The third move refers to the “activation” or “animation” of the text through the
practices of reading in particular “local” settings. Each “aspect” of the activated
text thus tends routinely to be buried within the taken-for-granted and must be
exhumed. The term “(the) text-as-read” was devised in order to provisionally raise
each aspect of texts into visibility, to render it available for analytic inspection. As
I have observed, one perspicuous device for such a rendering is Livingston’s, that
of the “text-reading pair”.
These moves, I believe, effectuate a real advance over some other analytic
formulations which, in effect, reduce one “half” of the text-reading pair to the
other whilst at the same time tacitly relying upon the disattended “half” in order
to conduct the analysis of the other. Livingston’s explicative notion occludes the
possibility of what we might call “parasitic reduction”.
A leitmotif in the making of all the above moves is that of local organisation,
of situated productions and readings of these texts, where, e.g., a localising aspect
both of productions and readings may be diachronic, i.e. occurring over time as
moments in a series. Texts may be seen as constituents of a local weave of practical
relevances and practical activities – a gestalt contexture.
The question is: after having made these moves, is that all there is? Or, perhaps,
can we use the moves as (to again paraphrase – and bowdlerise – Wittgenstein) a
ladder to a different level, where, having reached that level, we can throw away
the ladder? What might that different level look like? A good first step might be to
focalise the ladder itself, and Livingston’s “text-reading pair” is a good focal point.
Livingston (1995) presents reading a text as a laic activity, one that evolves or
develops as it runs its course and which can be analytically conceived as “paired”.
As Livingston subtly expresses it (p.86): “One part of the pair – conventionally
spoken of as the ‘text’ – is an account of how the laic skills need to be organised;
the other part of the pair is the ongoing lived work of reading that finds the
descriptions of the reading account (‘the text’) for organising that work. This is
written as a text-reading pair.”
This analytic conception conveys us decisively towards an analytic appreciation

of reading a given text, one that is deployed in a local (i.e. specifically textually
incarnate) way, where such reading practices exhibit a highly detailed organisation.
The “accountability” or “descriptiveness” of the text – i.e. its particular confluence
of descriptive resources, instruments, formats, etc. – is construed through the
situated deployment of those skills, skills which are not conceived as “private”
psychological matters but as constituted through communally–held and ratified
standards: in this sense, Livingston’s argument resonates with Wittgenstein,
Winch, Ryle and others on the public nature of purportedly private phenomena.
Reading has often been (mis-)conceived as just such a private process.
Just as importantly, Livingston’s notion of the “text-reading pair” turns each of

these aspects of reading a text into an explicit object or topic in its own right, as a
topic for explicitation, for explication: neither aspect of the text-reading pair can
be left buried from view. Livingston’s notion also helps us consistently conceive of
the reading of a particular text as a phenomenon of lived experience. Livingston’s
insistence on the inextricable intertwining of “(the) text” and of reading helps
us avoid the oft–found debates that are, to a greater or lesser degree, based on a
conception of “the text” as opposed to reading, or vice versa.
Nonetheless, I feel that Livingston’s notion “text / reading pair” risks at least
some potential pitfalls. Most of the risks derive from the use of the term “pair”.
The term may engender as many problems as it resolves. As has been indicated
above, with reference to Edward Rose’s work, sociological accounts are natural
language accounts, immensely dependent upon ordinary language. As Rose shows,
even sociologists’ technical re-definitions of concepts are inevitably shaped by
their laic, untechnical usage. This, of course, applies to inscriptions of the natural
language just as much as to its oral / aural form. It thus applies to the term “pair”.
The term “pair” might ordinarily be conceived of consisting of two parts –

related, twinned, interdependent, perhaps but still distinguishable or separable. So
far as the use of the term “text-reading pair” is concerned such a distinction may
be unwilled, even denied by analysts in the sense that the parts are intended to be
seen as forming a single, seamless whole. However, one must ask whether the
term “pair” is “fit for purpose”, here, i.e. whether it is the best, most efficacious,
way of rendering that seamlessness? It is at least possible that it can not, and that
we might at least, tentatively, seek options for the rendition of the phenomenal
unity in members’ apprehension of texts, an apprehension that, routinely at least,
synthesises the text “and” its reading.
We might move along by suggesting some placeholder terms and provisional

characterisations that will assist us in sidestepping at least some of the possible
pitfalls attendant upon the analytic use of the notion “pair”. As ever, Livingston
greatly assists us when he refers to issues of “accountability” – the text as a reading
account. One way of moving forward is to take the concept “accountability” in
relation to the notion of the “text-as-read”. We might see the text in this sense in
terms of a local scheme of relevances through which members conduct what is
for them in this case an adequate order of reading, (where, of course, practical
adequacy is what counts).
Such allusions can be aggregated so as to furnish incremental access to the

issue of the phenomenal unity of the text-as-read. By “phenomenal unity” I intend,
again, that members themselves do not routinely, let alone invariably, distinguish
between a text and its reading – we just conceive of a road sign as telling us to keep
left, or that there is no right turn, etc. The text and its reading are coterminous,
not paired. This is certainly not to say that members never, or can not, make a
text–reading distinction, only that they do so strictly in occasioned ways – where
there is some issue such as multiple readings / interpretations, where there is
some competence question or learning issue concerning reading, etc. The (or one)
question is, then, to ask how can the ethnomethodologist render the members’
routine, taken-for-granted apperception of what a given text means, – or, better,
what it is, since issues of “meaning” are only raised by members in similar
contexts to those of interpretation, where in some local circumstance, there are
competing versions or definitions of some sort. Otherwise, a text and its reading
are phenomenally unified.
A placeholder phrase such as “the text-as-read”, (perhaps the most adequate

one) or phrases such as “reading in the text”, the “text in the reading”, etc. might
initiate a shift towards the dissolution of the idea of a necessarily “paired” relation
with “text” and “reading” as pair parts, instead treating them as coterminous within
and integral to a single, unified contexture, a single, situated text-as-read. This
phenomenon is what Livingston himself, in a non-text-based example (Livingston,
2003) aptly terms the “gestalt coherence” of a phenomenon and what D.L. Wieder,
applying and adapting Aron Gurwitsch’s concept, calls a “gestalt contexture”
(Wieder, 1974). These conceptions help us get over what is often seen as a duplex
phenomenon, “text” and “reading”, where there is “only” a unitary one, in this
respect at least. To see the “text-reading” pair as a duplex phenomenon certainly
constitutes a misreading of Livingston’s intentions but, as I have observed, the
term “pair” all too easily predisposes one toward such a misreading.
Notions such as “gestalt coherence”, “gestalt contexture”, “contexture of

relevance” also facilitates the making of a further analytic move, one which brings
us back to the typewritten police record given above. We might treat the text-
as-read as an integral feature of a “broader” local contexture, that is, as a phase
or moment, however minor, in the conducting of a police investigation – the
identification of relevant personages, the official reporting of fingerprint evidence,
etc. all being made relevant to the inscribed cases. Particularly where the text-as-
read constitutes a focal point in the more “inclusive” contexture, we might refer
to the “curtilage of the text-as-read”. In so doing, we may also be making a move
toward the abolition of textual analysis per se, or at least guarding against the
undue reification of textual analysis as a separate topic to be added to the congeries
of reified topics that largely comprises conventional / formal-analytic sociologies,
at least in their empirical modes.8
Such an approach to curtilages or surrounds of texts may also work to respecify

terms current in some ethnomethodology, – terms such as “textually-mediated”
social relations – social organisation, etc.
What resources and approaches are furnished through the analytic mentality
of ethnomethodology to analyse the curtilage of a given text, the local context of
relevances within which a given text figures as a constitutive element? Of course,
we must recall that ethnomethodology does not license any “drive-thru” method,
any generally serviceable abstract / formal method or resource that can be driven
through any local context irrespective of its specifically contingent nature, etc.
In this respect, the main thing to bear in mind is that the analytic mentality of
ethnomethodology involves finding order in the concrete, not in the abstract.
It involves apprehending the distinctively-identifying, produced phenomenal
detail of local orders rather than, e.g., forcing a set of a priori analyst-imposed
theoretical terms through no matter what setting, no matter what the participants’
local orientations within that setting.
The approaches of formal analysis and ethnomethodological analysis are

asymmetrical and incommensurate; that is, the formal analytic rendering of social
order is not the mirror image of that of ethnomethodology. The ethnomethodological
rendition is not one “half” of a depiction of order that fills out the other, formal–
analytic half in a kind of plenum, as though they were complementary counterparts
of a kind. The only way in which this can appear to be the case is by the “relaxing”
or even abandonment of some or all of the key features of ethnomethodology,
– by what philosophers term “a loose way of talking” and what T.P. Wilson has
termed a “soft ethnomethodology” (Wilson, 2003). Whilst there is no shortage of
social scientists, linguists and communication studies specialists prepared to take
on such a Faustian contract, the exercise can only end up as a massive, incoherent
fudge of the issues.
This overview is not the place to undertake an extensive description of the

curtilage(s) of police records, though an article by A.J. Meehan (1997) on just
this issue is, of course, entirely salient: indeed, it deserves to be acknowledged as
a classic of its kind. Meehan explicates the in situ retrospective and prospective
orientations that “go into” a produced record as routinely read and used, both by
internal and external agents in a whole range of local contexts, many of them
serially-organised. Such orientations are typically provisional and open-textured,
in that (for instance) in any specific case actual uses can not be entirely specified
in advance.
Meehan’s paper paves the way to an even more locally-sensitive approach to

(in this case) police records, one that analyses a single instance in great detail.
Whilst the analysis of such an instance may well, putatively, emerge along the
lines indicated in Meehan’s article, a caveat is that each case should involve the
analyst in starting again without any presumption. Even if Meehan’s considerations
do apply what is the particular “mix” of these considerations in this case? In
this, ethnomethodologists let the data in its local incarnation set the terms of the
analysis, and textual analysis, ethnomethodologically conceived, can certainly
be no exception. Perhaps uniquely in social science, the analytic mentality of

ethnomethodology can utterly counter what Ludwig Wittgenstein (speaking of
philosophy) termed “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”.
The notion of the text-as-read as integral to an enveloping sensible “contexture”

or “curtilage”, (including a local assemblage of motives, practical purposes,
specifically available resources and personnel, etc.) brings to bear a family of
concepts that we might gather together under the aegis of the collecting term
“reflexivity”, one I have already introduced earlier in this chapter. This orientation
is in the spirit of ethnomethodology though the approach has best been expressed
by Erving Goffman: it is a quotation I am particularly fond of using, and I feel
Wittgenstein and Ryle might have approved of it, too: “I think that at present, if
sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back
to where it best applies, followed from there to wherever it seems to lead, and
pressed to disclose the rest of its family”. (Goffman, 1971: pp. xiii–xiv).
The concept of reflexivity, when applied to texts-as-read, might “construe the

text as part of the circumstances it describes and, in turn, as described by those
selfsame circumstances. Each sensibly elaborates the other”, each reflexively
constitutes the other. The family of concepts that render such gestalt contextures
will bear an elective affinity with each other but, particularly perspicuously, with
that of “reflexivity” – one of the classic concepts of ethnomethodology.
We may now move on to a very brief conclusion.
Concluding comments
In this chapter I have tried to make a connected series of points which textual
analyses might take into account. First, I noted that texts pervade our everyday
life to such an extent that they are often difficult to notice. Then I pointed out that
texts of all kinds greatly depend upon the generic, commonsense properties of
the natural language in which the text is written. This point was exemplified by
reference to sociology texts, where it was argued that sociological analysis is itself
profoundly shaped by the generic properties of ordinary language and also by the
properties of ordinary textual organisation in that culture.
I then turned to these properties, arguing that texts are active and practical
rather than docile or inert in that they predispose readers to a given interpretation
of a text.9 Reading, too, was seen as an active, practical sense-making process
rather than one of passive reception. Readers were conceived as “activating”
or “animating” the properties of the text. This led to the notion of “textually
mediated” social action – situated or “local” social action whose character and
course involves the incorporation of some text. Finally, I tried to indicate ways
in which we might hope to move beyond the notions of the “textual mediation”
of action and “text–reading pairs” by bringing into play the conceptions that bear
an elective affinity with the ethnomethodological concept of “reflexivity”. These
conceptions referred to the way texts-as-read figure as constitutive elements of
their environing contextures.
It is, surely, about time that texts became a central topic for sociology, rather
than being tacitly accepted in the unreflective process of use by very many social
scientists as being unproblematic and unworthy of notice.
Chapter 2
“Going for Brothers” in Black American
Speech: Making Textual Sense of
Analytic Observations of Black Ghetto
Culture in the U.S.A.
Taking an ethnographic text as data
The aim of this chapter is to explicate the “commonsense cultural procedures”

through which two professional social scientists have textually produced analytic
accounts of commonly-occurring activities – in this case, in a Black American
“ghetto”. Our major concern will be to examine Elliot Liebow’s participant
observation-based ethnographic text (Liebow, 1967) on the Black ghetto dwellers’
culturally-located activities of “going for brothers (or sisters, or cousins)”.1
Liebow’s text has become, if not a classic, then certainly a highly-accredited study.
My primary concerns are the examination of the rendition by an ethnographic text
(or text-as-read) of membership categorisation and re-categorisation procedures:
however, some allusions will also be made to the ethnographic text’s “own”
deployment of categories. These issues are, anyway, notoriously embedded, not to
say confused, in ethnographic texts.
According to Liebow, friendships may be rooted in “real kinship” as Liebow

puts it, i.e. in kinship relations which may be treated as “actual blood or marriage
ties” between the parties involved. However, he also claims that there also exists
in Black “ghetto” culture the phenomenon of “pseudo-kinship” or fictive kinship,
whereby friends or acquaintances “manufacture” kinship ties, such as in the case
where two men
… agree to present themselves as brothers to the outside world and to deal with
one another on the same basis. Going for brothers appears as a special case of
friendship in which the usual claims, obligations, expectations and loyalties of
the friend relationship are publicly declared to be at their maximum.2
Liebow claims that in this case kinship is used as a model for the friend
relationship. Moreover, as Liebow’s observations and analyses clearly indicate,
“going for brothers (or sisters, or cousins)” involves an upgrading of the friend
relationship as ordinarily conceived among ghetto residents whereby the
relationship is presented as a “special case of friendship”, so to speak, where all

the commitments of friendship are highlighted, and may be invoked in claims,
justifications, excuses, complaints, aggravations, etc., based on the relationship.
Liebow gives the example of Sea Cat and Arthur, who “went for brothers”.
“Going for brothers” meant that they shared responsibility for each other’s debts
and shared in each other’s good fortune. They usually went with women who
themselves were friends, even dating sisters for a time.
Another example of the interactional “power” of such “pseudo-kinship”

categorisations may be found in a ethnographic text, by Elijah Anderson, again
a highly-accredited study of Black streetcorner men:3 like Liebow’s study,
Anderson’s has stood the test of time. As a participant observer, Anderson gained
entrée into the streetcorner world when Herman, one of the streetcorner men,
began to introduce him to the other men as “my cousin who’s getting his Ph.D.”
As Anderson observes, this “going for cousins” served to publicly present him as
being “close friends” with Herman, and allowed Herman to sponsor Anderson’s
unchallenged entrée into the group. Co-membership of a racial group was,
then, not a sufficient factor in gaining such an entrée (though, arguably, it was a
necessary one); the conferring of the public identification of “cousin” of a known
figure in the streetcorner world was the sufficient factor in providing an entrée.
Moreover, it was not only Anderson who gained from this “going for cousins”,
since Herman could then present himself as having a “cousin” who, since he was
a Ph.D. candidate, was a member of “decent society”.
Let us now begin to turn these ethnographic texts into data in their own right. It
should be noted that we are providing for, or explicating, (our reading of) texts that
are avowedly based on these two analysts’ interpretation or reports of their data,
their “data” being what they observed on the street corner.
Analysing texts of these observations, we shall of course be working at least

at one remove from the phenomenon of ghetto dwellers’ communicative activities
per se. Entextualisation adds another move to the analyst’s initial observations,
and, indeed, a succession of entextualisations may well be involved – field notes,
write-ups, drafts of papers, etc., most or all of which may involve the introduction
of analytic concepts, so that what we get are various degrees of technicised
description of lay practices. However, we can, albeit guardedly, expect that our
explication of these ethnographers’ understandings might also take us at least some
of the way towards (our reading of) the streetcorner men’s own communicative
and interpretive work. After all, considering participant observation, it would be
hard to deny that there frequently exists, at least in skeletal terms, a basic two-way
initial intelligibility of communication between observer and subject even in the
face of arrays of stylistic and dialectal differences rooted in so-called “minority”
“Going for Brothers” in Black American Speech 39
locations within the same society. This reciprocity may well be increased as the
observer learns more of the culture s/he is studying.
Moreover, even though stylistic and dialectal differences may, of course,

provide rich particularistic interpretive resources for a member of the subculture,
such differences in communicative conventions can, in principle and in practice,
be learned by lay and professional observers alike4 – and, consequently, can
be reported upon – through, e.g., prolonged participation such as that typically
undertaken by ethnographers.5 Similarly, it would be just as difficult to treat the
present writer’s readings of the ethnographers’ entextualised interpretations as
radically disjunctive with the ethnographers’ intentions as it would be to treat
them as totally conjunctive. Such indeterminacy is part and parcel of ethnographic
reporting and may or may not be “resolved” by the reader.
We might refer to an ethnographic report of a given practice or “family”

of practices as the “textual installation” of “events-in-the world”. The term
“entextualisation” is a mere gloss of this phenomenon. How does an event or
collection of such events come to be built into a given textual format – not in
general or abstract terms, but in each instance where it occurs? How does such an
event come to be subjected to the enablements and constraints of a given textual
format (e.g., an ethnographic report, to be published) and what enablements and
constraints does the event afford its textual embedding? Crucially, what is the
locally-specific occasioning context for such an installation?
I wish to explicate the procedural apparatus through which these two

ethnographers have generated their interpretations (as we read them) and installed
“events-in-the-world” into their texts. In claiming this, we should note that we are
performing an analysis which is not explicitly performed by the ethnographers
themselves. Whilst we are more interested in turning our own readings of their
textually-incarnate interpretations into topics in their own right, Liebow and
Anderson are more concerned with a more or less technicised fitting of their specific
interpretations of “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)” into an overall substantive
characterisation of some rather broad features of reported life in the Black ghetto.
Liebow (upon whose work we shall largely concentrate), is concerned, for instance,
to describe and document the unstable and shifting relationships among many
ghetto dwellers, and to show to rapid changes or fluctuations in the intensity of
many relationships, particularly, perhaps, sexual ones.
Whilst the two ethnographers are concerned to produce such broad substantive
characterisations and to render them credible – and, in my opinion, they seem to
perform both these tasks in an insightful way – our concerns differ quite basically.
I shall attempt to examine the interpretations, as I read them, that are part and
parcel of their broad characterisations. For instance, through what communicative
apparatus can Liebow textually describe kinship as working as a “model” for
friendship in the “going for brothers (sisters, cousin)” phenomenon?6 Further,

how can we provide analytically for Liebow’s intimation that “going for brothers”
can be seen as an upgrading of an “ordinary” friend relationship, as it were; in
the sense that all moral attributes of such a relationship are publicly presented as
having been maximised, emphasised, highlighted? As Zimmerman and Pollner
(1970) aptly put it in a classic ethnomethodological article:
… (Ethnographers) are also well known for their reliance on informants’ reports
… When ethnographers assemble their descriptions of settings, by reference
to informants’ formulations, the member’s description and the ethnographer’s
description have an identical status in relation to events reported on. The
member’s formulation, like that of the ethnographer, is a possible reconstruction
of the setting, that is, a version of the setting’s reigning norms and resident
attitudes, and it is often the case that the ethnographer must rely on the member’s
formulation as the definitive characterisation of that setting.7
We are here, of course, necessarily concerned with the ethnographic author’s

textual descriptions of these matters – something Zimmerman and Pollner do not
really address: the casting of sociological descriptions within a weave of textual
conventions and practices remains largely an assumed rather than addressed matter
in their article.
Zimmerman and Pollner also invoke the ethnomethodological approach to

such reconstructions, (i.e. the approach to which the present study is oriented)
when they direct analysts’ attentions to such communicative and sense-making
issues as:
The methods through which the production of recognizably reasonable talk is

achieved, the methods through which responses are provided and appreciated
as answers to the intended sense of questions, the methods through which
understanding is displayed and detected as the occasion it is intended to be, the
methods through which the occasion will later be demonstrated to have met the
ideals of scientific investigation and description …8
Again, to this we might add the methods through which recognisable texts
are produced. We shall, in the present study, only examine certain features of
analysts’ (and, we may speculate, their corroborating subjects’) reconstructions,
namely, their conventional uses of a variety of commonsense categories that
describe persons. Our starting-point for this exercise will be Sacks’ concept of
“membership categorisations”.9 As a prolegomenon, though, we should observe
that these concerns are textually cast, as we have noted above with reference to
Liebow’s work, in terms of a double context, a contrastive one which opposes
the literal (“real brothers”) with the fictive (“not real brothers”), with the latter
typically furnishing the identifying context for the rendition of this categorising
work. The “real” – “fictive” distinction – and, often, alternation – is, then, the first
“textual method” we note, a method that helps localise and particularise what the
ethnographic author is doing with categorisations on this specific occasion. The
distinction may, moreover, be in some respects a technicised one, leaving open
the question of whether the “real” – “fictive” distinction is always, sometimes or
never relevant in terms of particular, practical relevances of the streetcorner men
and women themselves: in this respect, we might ask whether the distinction is
intersubjectively-problematic.
Commonsense categorisations of persons
In Chapter 1, I often made reference to persons’ identities as “identification

categories”, “social categories” or simply “categories” or “categorisations”. All
these, in fact, are ways of referring to “membership categories” (or “membership
categorisations”), as Sacks has described them. Indeed, even the term, “membership
categories” is something of a gloss, for membership categorisation comprises a set
of practices, or what we might term categorisation practices. At bottom, these
practices have “first-order” status, i.e. that of mundane reasoning. Categorisation
is a commonsense practice, and even when it is professional sociologists or
ethnographers doing the categorising for “second order” technical purposes,
the anchorages of their activities are, most decidedly, in mundane reasoning.
Indeed, membership categorisation comprises one methodic practice, or array of
practices, in mundane reasoning work. This applies to textually-sited membership
categorisations, also categorisations are part of textual practice, too.
Membership categories may be described as society-members’ commonsense,

linguistically-embedded equivalence classes for the making of social reference to
persons. These categorisations may be said to identify persons in a conventional,
socially-standardised – that is, publicly recognisable – way. Membership categories
may be said to describe certain features of persons (e.g. that the person is a child,
a girl and/or a Black, and/or an elementary school student and/or a delinquent)
whilst providing for a cut-off point in the description, given that any description
can, in theoretical principle, be indefinitely proliferated. For instance, it may be
relevant to the particular communicative event and to the occasion that the person
is a Black and not that the person is a child, elementary school student etc.; nor
may it be pragmatically required to provide further descriptions, specifications,
etc., of the purported “racial characteristics” of the person. Sacks’ formulation of
an “economy rule” in the use of membership categorisations is simply that only a
single category is required in order to adequately refer to a person, or to recognise
that the activity of referring to persons has been adequately performed.
Membership categorisations may be treated as conventionally organised into

“membership categorisation devices” (‘MCDs’), which comprise “naturally”
grouped and bounded collections of categories that “go together” in a conventional

way. MCDs, also include rules for the conventional use of the categories. The MCD
“soccer team” may be said to comprise inter alia the categories “goalkeeper”, “full
back”, etc., and the MCD “family” may be said to comprise “father”, “mother”,
“sister”, etc. Moreover, some MCDs such as “family”, are, conventionally,
routinely treatable as duplicatively-organised, that is, they organise the population
into members of team-like units. Of course, the issue of the existence of actual
incumbents for every category in a particular family unit is another matter.
The fact that there is a perceptible “natural relation” between some membership
categories should not lead one to the assumption that the relation therefore figures
“automatically” in members’ reasoning. The relational pairing between, e.g.,
“mother” and “daughter” is still a product of members’ work: rather, the relational
pairing is “achieved-as-accountably-natural”. After all, such pairings are part of the
practical reasoning that “goes into” the activity of co-selection of these categories
in the first place. Sacks’ arguments that such relations have a relative robustness
to them across settings (as opposed to more occasioned sets of categories such
as “parties to a given theft”) should not distract us from their achieved nature,
however routine that relation may be. Nor should it divert us from the need to
treat these relatively robust properties as nonetheless adjusted to their situated
instantiations. Sacks was certainly never diverged from this fact in his Lectures in
Conversation.10 He pays ceaseless attention to the oriented – to contexts (including
textual ones) in which categorical co-selections are produced as “natural”. We
might consider the property of “naturalness” to (pro tem) provide a form of
“insulation” from certain kinds of challenge or appeal, counting so heavily as it
does on “what everyone knows and accepts”.
In addition, Sacks introduces the notion of “category-bound activities”,

whereby a given activity may be taken as conventionally bound to a given
membership category for example, the activity “crying” may be taken as bound
to the category “baby”, in that crying may be taken as particularly characteristic
of “babies”. Sacks often notes the robustness and the massive frequency and
reproducibility of such predications. However, it is an important point that, as
Sacks observes, many activities may be taken as conventionally bound to not one
but several membership categories, although we shall see that this may only be a
defensible observation when the notion of “category-bound activities” is treated
analytically in a certain way.
For the moment, however, we can take the obverse of Sacks’ bland observation
and note that a category-bound activity may be taken as “gathering together” a
“set” of categories – the set comprising those categories to which a given activity
is conventionally bound. It can also be shown, I believe, that the limited set of
categories to which a given activity is treatable as conventionally bound may be
taken as a set in an even more robust way than in the minimal sense sometimes
suggested by Sacks; indeed, we can use other of Sacks’ own analyses to show that
such a set of categories can not only be delimited but can also be taken as internally
organised, though always in ways that – as Sacks himself also insists upon – are
sensitive to particular contexts, e.g. the declaration of suicidal intent.11 In this sense,
an assemblage of categories is not a once-and-for-all supra-contextual phenomenon
but is instead a contextually-assembled configuration. In the orientation to such
occasioned categorial configurations, including hierarchies, category co-selections
and category boundedness, Sacks’ work prefigures the later formulation that he
and his colleagues termed, somewhat infelicitously, a simultaneous “context
freedom” and “context sensitivity” or, we might add, a dialectic between the two.
In a prefatory sense this formulation appears in Sacks’ categorial analysis before
his and his colleagues’ sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction (Sacks, Schegloff
and Jefferson, 1974). The “further” particularisation of the occasioned corpus is
found when considering the personal situation / identification of the person, e.g.
male or female, younger or older, married or single, etc.
Sacks shows that persons who perceive and declare themselves to be suicidal
and searching for help may properly look to the incumbent of a first-position
membership category that constitutes a “counterpart” to a category of which the
avowedly suicidal person him / herself is an incumbent. For instance, a married
person may properly turn to her / his spouse, or an unmarried person may look to
a parent. Specifically which category of persons a suicidal person properly turns
to for help depends, of course, largely upon that person’s own incumbencies, e.g.
whether she / he is married, etc.; in addition, there is an issue as to the existence or
availability of an incumbent of a given first-position category.
Sacks’ work, then, indicates that, given an activity such as a search for help
concerning “personal troubles”, there is a set of categories to whose incumbents
one may conventionally, accountably and properly turn for what we may gloss as
“help”, and that, of course, a very great many categories fall outside this set, e.g.
“stranger”, “foreigner”, “businessman”, “pickpocket” etc.12 Secondly, within the
set of category-incumbents to whom it is proper to turn for help, there exists in
principle for every person seeking that help some category to whose incumbent(s)
it is proper to turn. To be sure, if the avowedly suicidal person does not turn first
to the incumbent(s) of this first-place category but turns to an incumbent of some
lower-placed category, a first-place category-incumbent has grounds for complaint
as to why s/he was not consulted before anyone else.
It is this achieved “internal organisation” to the set of categories to whom it

is proper to turn for help that gives avowedly suicidal persons’ search for help its
temporal organisation, i.e. its methodic, intelligible nature as a course of action.
Indeed, one might in a sense treat the sensible, serially-organised character of
a search for help as itself given by category-bound properties addressed to the
entitlement to be informed of some specified other person’s troubles and to be “the
first to offer help”. One would, for example, regard the incumbents of the category
“parent” or “spouse” as occupying, by virtue of this category-bound moral
prioritisation, an advanced priority in a given person’s disclosure of, and search
for, help. Similarly, we might regard such categories as “foreigner”, “stranger”,
or “mugger” as in principle having a low, zero or negative priority concerning the
eliciation and offering of help – that is, these categorisations fall outside the set of
category-incumbents that may properly be turned to for help of any given kind.
We are now in a position, again starting from Sacks’ work, to formulate the
relationship between what we have glossed as the specified (avowedly suicidal)
person, and the incumbent(s) of some category such as “parent” or “spouse”. We
can treat this issue in terms, again, of category-boundedness. The person seeking
help and the category-incumbent to whom s/he should properly turn for help,
can be paired into the “tied” pairs of membership categories that Sacks terms
“standardised relational pairs” so that pairs such as “husband”–“wife”, “parent”–
“child” (and determinations of this pair such as “father”–“daughter”), “friend”–
“friend”, “neighbour”–“neighbour”, may be generated. These relational pairs of
categorisations may be said to involve category-boundedness in two senses:
a. a given category-bound attribute may, as might be expected from what we

have observed above, gather together and define the boundaries of a set
of relationally-paired categories. Again, this means that what constitutes a
“set” of relational pairs is an “occasioned” matter, in that it is an activity
(which itself is of purely occasioned relevance with regard to any given
instance of its use) that provides the occasion to take this collection of
relational pairs as a set rather than as a more or less random collection.
The activity of “giving help (for personal troubles)” may be seen to gather
together certain relational pairs and to occlude others. However, such an
activity is not omnirelevant – its relevance is a matter of members’ specific,
local, situated judgements concerning the appeals, biographies, routines,
etc., of those involved;
b. each paired categorisation within the total set relevant for giving (or
seeking) help may be seen as organised in terms of reciprocal and
interlocking category-bound attributes. This matter has two claimable
corollaries: i) each incumbent of a paired category has the oriented-to right
to turn to a counterpart-incumbent for help regarding personal troubles, and
has a correlative right to be informed when a counterpart-incumbent has
such troubles; ii) the troubled person has a category-bound right to expect
that a counterpart category-incumbent will indeed help after having been
consulted. Such reciprocally-binding, oriented-to category-based attributes
may also organise particular reciprocal prohibitions such as, of course,
those pertaining to sexual activity between parents and children, siblings,
etc. It is in this sense that along with Sacks, we can see “relational pairs”
as loci for the imputation of rights and obligations; however, we must see
such rights and obligations as ultimately traceable in terms of category-

boundedness – namely the claimable right to expect that a given activity
will be performed by a given category-incumbent.
Many of these relational pairs may be seen to possess interlocking properties

that are based upon more than “mere” incumbency of paired categorisations. For
instance, the properties of the “parent-child” relational pair may be seen to be
underscored by the property of “duplicative organisation” of the MCD “family”.
We have observed that some MCDs are commonly mundanely, assigned “team-
like” characteristics. We can further say that each team-like unit may be assigned the
characteristic of “sticking together”, and it is such team-like properties which help
bind some relational pairs together,13 since it may be treated as a category-bound
attribute of categories from duplicatively-organised MCDs, that they should be
treated as a “natural” component of a “team-like unit”.14 In this sense, the “fitting-
together-as-natural” of relationally-paired categories may be seen to trade on a
similar “fitting together” of the devices out of which they are differentiated.15 The
duplicative organisation of a relational pair such as “parent”–“child” helps solve
the local problem of which among the many incumbents of the categorisation
“parent” in the population one should turn to for help – namely, a parent from
one’s own unit; such a localised solution is particularly serviceable in that there
often exists a conventional limitation on the number of incumbents of a given
category from a unit of such a device.
Categorisations, relational pairs and “going for brothers”
It may be fairly apparent, from the above exposition, that MCDs and relational
pairings of categories are highly relevant to the understanding of “going for
brothers” as a coherent, observable and reportable phenomenon, both for analysts
and lay observers. To make such links even more explicit, we need only note
that, in terms of the cultural apparatus outlined above, “going for brothers” clearly
involves a contexted re-categorisation of the “friend”–“friend” relational pair of
categories. The observation that such re-categorisations may be taken as “fictive”
or “metaphorical” seems, according to Liebow at least, of far less interactional
significance than is the actual undergoing of the re-categorisation as an activity per
se. Indeed, – as was indicated in the “Introduction” to this book and in Chapter 1
– to describe any re-categorisation as a “mere” re-description ignores the fact that
any description is an activity; a re-description locally transacts the re-constitution
of a relationship in important respects. Such a re-categorisation may for instance
be deeply implicative, from an interactional perspective, in establishing bona fide
membership of a given collectivity, as Anderson’s work clearly indicates. In other
words, other activities can “ride on the back” of the activity of re-categorisation: as
Roy Turner has put it, “double duty” is brought off. We can now put the question:
what new interactional sense-production and what sensible outcomes are provided
for by such re-categorisations? How do these outcomes operate locally, i.e., in

situ, in their here-and-now textual incarnations? What according to the text’s
observations, can the (re)-categorisation “brother” (“sister”, “cousin”) do for a
relationship that the categorisation “friend” can not?
Perhaps the major achievement in “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)” is

that the re-categorised counterpart category-incumbent is advanced in a procedure
addressed to seeking what we must still provisionally describe in glossed terms
simply as “help”.16 As we have noted, the set of relational pairs that can be
gathered together under the category-bound rubric “giving (and receiving) mutual
help and support” is internally organised, such that a search for help can have a
commensensically recognisable course, traced through stages arranged in terms
of a set of priorities arranged concerning whom one has the right and, indeed, the
obligation to consult first. A corollary of this is that a person re-categorised from
“friend” to “brother” may be taken as having the rights to complain “Why didn’t
you tell me first?”17 if a “mere friend” is consulted before the “brother” in the case
of troubles arising for his counterpart “brother”. Similarly, a person with troubles
can invoke additional grounds for complaint if his counterpart “brother” does not
make himself available for help or consultation when the disclosure of troubles is
an occasioned matter.
In J.L. Austin’s terms, what may be “mere” complaints against friends (let
alone acquaintances, neighbours, etc.) may be seen as “aggravations” when laid
at the door of persons categorised as “brothers”. In this respect, what might at
first glance seem to be the “same” act of omission, i.e. the non-delivery of help
may be drastically re-cast through the invoking of the public identity (membership
categorisation) of the person purportedly responsible for that act.18 This does not
mean that neighbours, friends, etc., are not expected to offer help and support to
counterpart category-incumbents in the case of personal troubles and the like; to
be sure, it is with reference to these category-bound expectations that incumbents
of such categories may conceive of themselves as members of a bounded “set” of
relational pairs. The above comments refer only to the methodicity in the search
for help, including its temporal organisation.
Here, we are confronted with the way in which membership categorisations

may comprise resources or even baselines for complaints, accusations, excuses
/ mitigations, justifications / refutations, etc. There is extensive attestation to
the blame-distributive / re-distributive potential in the analytic literature on
categorisation. However, Liebow’s text remains an outstanding example of how
re-categorisation can either aggravate (amplify) or diminish the blameworthiness
of a person and her / his deed(s). For another, more complex, example see Eglin and
Hester’s (2003) study of how what one might term the (re-)categorisation of a set
of females from “engineer” to “feminist” allocated a purported blameworthiness
that, sadly, resulted in a multiple murder.
In examining the issue of which categorisation is selected for the perceptible

“upgrading” from the categorisation “friend”, (i.e. the category “brother”, “sister” or
“cousin”) it seems to hold that the selection involves a category-mapping procedure,
(viz. Watson, 1978). For example, one conventionally chooses a categorisation
from within the relevant set (in this case, relevant to “giving or receiving mutual
help and support”) which evokes a convergent age-grading. For instance, since
friends are perhaps characteristically of a broadly similar age-grade, one chooses a
re-categorisation such as “brother” which preserves the broad convergence in age-
grading. To be more explicit, one maps the categorisation “friend” onto a category
which itself maps onto the category from the MCD “stage of life”19 onto which the
first category can be mapped. The same mapping procedures may be applied by
reference to the MCD “gender” in the selection of a re-categorisation.
A central feature of the re-categorisation process is that as Sacks has pointed

out, such a process serves to re-categorise not just one but two (or at least two)20
persons. This means that a person who initiates a “going for brothers” process by
reclassifying a friend as a “brother” may be taken as acting in his own interests as
well as those of his confrère. Again, we can recall with regard to Anderson’s text
that both Anderson and Herman gained from their “going for cousins”; Anderson
gained an entrée into the streetcorner group and Herman gained perceived “social
honour” or prestige from his association with Anderson. We might, then, see “going
for brothers”, as presented in the text, as involving stratification practices – not
only in the “promotion” of “friend” to “brother” but also in, for instance, a sensible
status hierarchy based on differential degrees of perceptible “social honour”.
Put another way, the process of upgrading categorisations allows incumbents

of both categories to invoke (in talk and other communicative work) entitling
conditions – and therefore excusing and justifying conditions – concerning the
obligations not only to give, but also to seek help. Such category-based invocations
or claims as to entitlements may also form the foundation of complaints or
accusations such as those outlined above. It is in this sense that “other” actions may
“ride on the back” of the action of “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)”, and inter
alia, may be textually presented as such: that is, they may be “made textual sense
of ” in that way. That textual sense may be counted upon as a resource rather than
topicalised or explicitly focalised in the text, but it is textual sense nonetheless.
Further, we may treat the above apparatus as constituting here, in textual

terms – the communicative resources out of which are built the commonsense
equivalents of what symbolic interactionists term “moral careers”; to be sure, one
may readily see the many ways in which these analysts’ notions (textually – sited
or not) of “careers” are unrelievedly grounded upon a commonsense understanding
of “re-categorisations” (or whatever they might regard as stages of successive
“re-labelling”), upgrading, downgrading, etc. This commonsense (as well as the
textual) understanding may be treated as premised upon the competent though
tacit use of the apparatus here presented. It also counts on an understanding of the
durée, since these activities have a known-in-common temporal organisation.
However, although symbolic interactionists usually implicitly or explicitly take

it as given that the processes they describe in terms of “careers” have some mundane
analogue in commonsense usage, they very seldom explicate: a) the ordinary
language-embedded sense-making resources that “go into” the commonsense
production, identification, detection and monitoring of a given local instance a
“career”, and b) the relation between their analytic – and, thus, textual version of
careers and the commonsense versions, or, rather, the procedures that “generate
that version”, (but see Watson and Weinberg, T.S., 1982).21 Consequently, what we
get from symbolic interactionists are versions of “labelling” and “careers” which
manifest an extreme confusion of elements of ordinary members’ accounts and
purportedly analytic accounts in their textual or any other incarnations.22 Amongst
other things, this is a particular example of what Gilbert Ryle has shown us are
errors of logical category, the confusion of two games embodying distinct arrays
of relevances.
In terms of “moral careers”, then, we can see how a relationship between

two persons may, through a given durée, have a “natural history”, such as from
“workmate” to “walking buddy” or “drinking buddy”, to “friend”, to “brother”
and, eventually, perhaps, back to “friend”, etc., as Liebow describes. Indeed, these
re-categorisations mark a durée – they lend sensible structure to the passage of
time, from the perspective of participants. The serial or sequential organisation of
these categorisations (in each particular instance), lend an ordering that works as
points of reference for time-as-experienced.
We can see how the “apparatus” – I use this trope to highlight the procedural,
methodic features of the corpus of cultural knowledge – outlined at length above can,
hopefully, explicate Liebow’s textual rendition of the re-categorisation processes.
These are a fundamental element of the analyst’s or member’s recognition that
a career has reached a “new stage” in its sequential development. Indeed, the
notion of “career” has been used particularly extensively by those symbolic
interactionists who are more ethnographically-inclined, and as an ethnographer,
Liebow gives us many “local-textual” or “here-and-now” instantiations of what
a symbolic interactionist might term a “career”. In categorically describing in a
local textual instance the development over time in the relationship between Tally
and Wee Tom, Liebow observes:
… Thus, in Tally’s network, Wee Tom began as a co-worker, moved up to

drinking buddy, neighbour and finally close friend.23
One important aspect of Liebow’s text as a local organisation is how Liebow

himself localises it – giving ethnographic cases, or cases-in-point – of local
instances that embed a purportedly more general phenomenon, that of “going for
brothers”: we need to examine such local embeddings and explicate their operation.
We might borrow the term “particularisation procedures” as an initial approach to
this issue. Other issues remain to be addressed. A major Schützian one is that of
the relation between the procedures composing the ethnographic text and, those
procedures that compose “going for brothers” for the subjects of that text. This
relational issue takes on all kinds of manifestations (viz Stoddart, 1974)
Although we have here focused on the issue of mutual help and support in
such relationships, it should also be noted that such re-categorisations involve
(here, textually-presented) changes in displayed degrees of intimacy, mutual
indulgence and tolerance, etc., all of which may be organised around membership
categorisations. We might again refer to such activities as “stratifying practices”,
the practical production of a stratified local order of an intersubjectively-available
kind.
It should also be noted that issues of category-boundedness come to the fore

in a variety of senses. For instance, to re-categorise a male-female relationship
from, say, “friend” to “sister” or “cousin”, is, in streetcorner terms, a method
of invoking different reciprocal category bound activities. In particular, the
phenomenon of a man and woman “going for cousins” (or “brother” and
“sister”) can serve to disambiguate the category-bound imputations which one
might infer concerning potential sexual components in a cross-sex friendship,24
by allusively invoking the category-based taboo on sexual relations or marriage
between siblings and cousins. As Liebow succinctly puts it, “going for cousins”
is a way of saying “This woman and I are good friends but we are not lovers”,
and that “going for cousins” involves a “public disclaimer” of any romantic or
sexual content in a cross-sex close friend relationship.25 It is of relevance to
note that in the local instances Liebow produces regarding Stoopy and Lucille
– who had “gone for cousins” – did not have to bear the sexual innuendos about
their relationship that Tally and Velma (who simply categorised each other as
“friends”) had to stand for continually. Thus, re-categorisations can effectuate
the invocation of a set of category-bound prohibitions, too. We may thus more
aptly refer to “category-bound predicates (or predications)” rather than just
“category-bound activities”.
Moreover, when one observes a person performing an activity which is

characteristically “bound” to some category, one can “work back” to the assigning
of the category. As Liebow puts it in his own way, with reference to a case where
streetcorner people assigned the “label” of “sister”, “the assignment of the
label ‘sister’ to one already performing a function which frequently appears in
association with that label (is) an easy step to take.”26
These re-categorisations, then, may, through their “practical disambiguating

work”, specify and simplify a relationship which is otherwise subject to ambiguity
and attendant suspicion, or which may simply lead to confusion concerning the
“basic nature” of the relationship. The re-categorisations form a central part of
Liebow’s “textual apparatus” – that is, an instrument for making a relational
“promotion” textually available. Again, we find what we might term the “textual
(or inscriptive)” installation of an “event-in-the-world”.
For all his detailed observations, Liebow’s overall characterisation of the

activity of “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)” seems at times oversimplified,
almost a brand of what Garfinkel terms “cultural (or judgemental) dopery”. This is
particularly the case given Liebow’s stated reservations about furnishing cultural
rather than “direct-environmental” explanations of persons’ conduct in this milieu:
in view of this, “cultural dopery” is virtually guaranteed. For all its virtues, Liebow’s
text certainly constitutes an ethnographic example of what Garfinkel has, more
recently, come to term “Formal Analysis”, where a presupposed abstract pattern is
driven through “empirical” materials.27 Liebow’s text contains a variety of devices
for such an exercise. As has been stated above, Liebow characterises this activity
as being a public declaration that loyalties between friends are at their maximum.
Even judging from the documentation that Liebow himself presents in his text, we
must be cautious about seeing the process of “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)”
as straightforwardly involving a quantitative increase, as it were, in the loyalties,
rights or obligations in the relationship. To re-categorise a pair of persons is not
simply to “quantitatively” decrease or increase (as the term “maximise” implies)
the degree of loyalty, mutual obligation, etc., in the relationship. To re-categorise a
pair of persons is not simply to “increase” or “decrease” a given set of substantively
stipulated rights, duties, activities, and the like; re-categorisation also occasions
“qualitative” differences in such conventionally-organised expectations and
associated activities. Of course, the phenomenon of category-mapping is again
visible here, where, e.g., the category-pair “brother”–“sister” is mapped onto, and
trades upon, the “male”–“female” pair.
Indeed, this is the difference between simply appending a modifier such as

“poor”, “good”, “best”, “close”, “distant”, “poor”, “lousy” and so on, to a category
such as “friend”. We could, for instance, treat such modifiers as organising a
person’s priorities in a search for help among incumbents of that counterpart
category “friend”, since these modifiers may be used to resolve the problem:
“Which friends do I turn to first?” Modifiers appended to the same membership
category – as in “best friend”, “poor friend”, etc., help resolve such problems by
means of a “first among equals” procedure – namely, that what may be expected
(in terms of rights and obligations) on the basis of the counterpart categorisation
“friend” may also be seen to be oriented-to as present to different degrees, either
weakly or strongly present with regard to different specific incumbents of that
category.
By contrast, when a friend is re-categorised “brother (sister, cousin)” the

category-bound attributes themselves may change or shift significantly, in what
might term a “qualitative” way; one might expect different things, substantively,
from one’s “brother” than one would expect from one’s “friend”. This, perhaps, is
particularly the case concerning third parties with whom the counterpart category-
incumbent is associated. For instance, one might deal with a sister’s son in a
different way from the son of one’s friend. Indeed, the “nephew”–“uncle” relational
pairs provides for a “direct relationship” reference rather than one mediated via
another relational pairing, (“the son of my friend”): and again the category-pairing
maps readily onto category-pairs derived from the “age” and “sex” membership
categorisation devices.
We find some local exemplification of this point concerning qualitative

differences in Liebow’s report on Stoopy’s relationship with Lucille’s son, which
was, according to Liebow, “conspicuously warm and avuncular”.28 One can see in
this case that re-categorisation of Stoopy and Lucille’s relationship from “friend”–
“friend” to “cousin”–“cousin” provides for the “borrowing”29 of properties
conventionally-bound to such kinship categories to describe relationships with
third parties that are not so obviously called forth in a relationship with “a friend’s
son”.
In re-categorising a man and his female friend and “brother”–“sister”, or

“cousin”–“cousin” one invokes various interlocking category-bound attributes of
the relational pairs “brother”–“sister” or “cousin”–“cousin”, such as (and already
noted) the reciprocal prohibition on sexual activity. We have also already noted the
for-all-practical-purposes disambiguating work that such a re-categorisation can do
– certainly in textual renditions and quite possibly in parties in the natural setting,
too: as we have noted, it is not easy to disentangle the two. But the qualitative
differences between the categorisations which provide for such disambiguation
can also help us to explicate the notion of “help” or “help and support”, which
until now we have used as a convenient “gloss”, a cover term or collecting term.
Although we might see a set of activities such as “(giving and receiving)

mutual help and support” as gathering together a local set of relationally-paired
categories, the way in which those activities are “translated” or “expressed” in
terms of the particular category-bound properties of each category and relational
pair of categories exhibits, as we have noted, considerable variation. “Giving
(and/or receiving) mutual help and support” are, as it were, highly “open-ended”
activity-descriptors, always more visibly subject to “instanced” specifications
than to simply categorical ones: however, even in the latter case all instances are,
ineluctably, locally sited, site-sensitive and site-adjusted. It is important not to
cede to the cognitivistic analysis of categorisation in language by disembedding
categorisation activities from the particular circumstances of use – not least, in the
present case, the textual tasks (claims, characterisations, etc.) of which reference
to categorisation procedures are placed in service.
Put another way, we can only see, (textually or otherwise), such activities as
“mutual help and support” as relevant to a set of categories if we operate with
a mutatis mutandis clause or (to use Garfinkel’s term), if we operate under the
rubric of a “let it pass” rule and of other ad hoc practices.30 This means that there
may be said to exist what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblances”
between locally specific category-based manifestations of activities which can
be assembled under the aegis of “mutual help and support”.31 The matter of
family resemblances (along with matters concerning glosses: see below) helps
us to analytically formulate issues concerning specific textual incarnations and
what (for members and analysts alike) are perceptibly “transcendent” features
of categorisation.
Still on family resemblance issues, we have already noted the “help” given by a
brother may differ from that of, say, a girl friend. In a sense, then, we may observe
that “(giving and/or receiving) mutual help and support” are not so much bound in
any specifically or directly similar reproducible sense to each and every category
comprising the set, but rather that such activity-descriptors serve as a “proper
gloss” (upon which we ourselves capitalised earlier in the article) for a variety,
a “family”, of activities that are bound to each of the paired categories within
the set,32 and upon which Liebow’s text unrelievedly (if often tacitly) counts. In
the next section of this book, we shall see how another textual task is effectuated
through (re)-categorisation – the launching of a “perspective by incongruity” in a
particular textual site.
The whole issue of reflexivity in members’ language-embedded (here, textual)

accounting practices33 may be approached in this way. The gross activity-descriptor
“(giving and/or receiving) mutual help and support” may be seen to make locally
relevant a set of relationally-paired categories, whilst simultaneously these
categories, and particularly their “bound” properties, are monitored and consulted
to furnish a (for-all-practical purposes) “specific setting-appropriate application”
of that selfsame activity-descriptor. In this way, that activity descriptor can stand
as a “proper gloss” of the explication and, indeed, the whole family of explications
provided for by the set of membership categories.
We may once more observe that this family resemblance model applies to
the textual sitings of categorisations, too. The invocation of categories in the text
itself shifts between the specific local contexts in which categories or categorical
relations are invoked – whether the categories are “simple” categories used by the
text itself or whether they are textual renditions of categories used “elsewhere”,
e.g. by parties in a social setting such as a minority community. Either way, what
we have in Liebow’s (and Anderson’s) texts is a confluence of technical and
untechnical uses whose “relations” will have to be teased out in a much more
substantial account than the present one. The appropriate approach whereby
this might be done is one which treats the technical as being embedded in the
untechnical without being merely reducible to it.
Conclusion
I have tried in this essay to explicate, in sociological terms, the conceptual apparatus
which “goes into” the reading of Elliott Liebow’s (and – in a less extensive, more
background-way – Elijah Anderson’s) textually-sited ethnographic description of
“going for brothers (sisters, cousins)” as an intelligible and plausible description
for readers, both lay and professional. There are many features of that apparatus
which can not here be explicated, e.g. how we come to perform a “membership
analysis” of the process of “going for brothers (sisters, cousins)” as a “Black
American” phenomenon. This aspect of membership analysis is worthy of the
fullest consideration on its own behalf. However, it will be noted that Liebow
himself counts, for the success of his description, on the basic, generic thoroughly
ordinary intelligibility of terms such as “brother”, “sister”, “cousin”, etc. Both the
activities and (as we have observed above) categories concerned have an “open-
textured” property to them, which renders them amenable to multiple overlapping
contextualisations, instance by instance. Without such a contextual understanding
of these terms, of course, Liebow’s ethnographic report would not necessarily
“come off” as a phenomenon intelligible or sensible to his readers – particularly
those initially unfamiliar with the phenomenon of “going for brothers”. Liebow
does much to explicate these contextual matters for his readers. In this sense,
Liebow’s text contains “recipient design” procedures for the reader: it is designed
to be read by readers who, putatively, do not share his substantive knowledge of
“going for brothers” in its local context. This is just one of the particularisation
procedures to be found both in Liebow and Anderson’s texts. The texts are not
simply intended as “representations” of a given set of phenomena in the world but
as representations for particular types of recipients. In this sense, the theme of my
chapter shares much with the two subsequent ones in this book.
Nowhere in Liebow’s report do we get any explicit discussion of such procedural

issues of intelligibility and sense-assembly; Liebow bypasses, or even “buries”,
such issues whilst relying upon our ability as readers to assemble sense out of these
basic terms through which he textually furnishes his description. In this respect he
– along with Anderson – loses the phenomenon but, ironically, counts on that
selfsame ability to make procedural, categorical sense of social phenomena that he
shares with his readers. There is a presumptive interchangeability of perspectives
here. Anderson’s text is much the same. It is this process of sense-assembly which
I have tried to analyse as a phenomenon in its own right and which I hope that
the conceptual apparatus outlined here goes some way towards explicating some
of the methodic features of that phenomenon – here, a textual phenomenon (or a

textual installation and siting of that phenomenon).
At the outset, I refrained from making any comment on the role of the textual
analyst, at least if that analyst evinced ethnomethodological or conversation-
analytic commitments. I wanted to go through an analysis of a particular
textually-sited phenomenon, that of “going for brothers”, and to treat the sensible
textual rendition of that phenomenon as a situationally-accomplished order
involving local knowledge. My conception of the role of the textual analyst is
that of “explication” of that local order, and the analytic explication of the sense-
making practices involved in the composition and textual presentation of that
order. Neither authors nor readers render those methodic practices explicit: for
their practical purposes of figuring out what “going for brothers” is, they have
no need to. It is the ethnomethodological / conversation analytic textual analyst’s
job to draw out the tacitly–deployed properties and procedures of those textual
sense-making practices, and in this instance I have focused upon categorisation:
in other texts, the salient practices, their properties and procedures may well be
quite different. There is no escape from the local relevance of textual devices, as,
I hope, my citations of case studies from Liebow’s text has indicated. Of course,
part of that order involves the “curtilage” of the text, the particular contexts or
environs of its use and of which the text is itself a constituent, e.g. in seminars,
but these issues fall beyond the ambit of the present chapter. The textual analyst
must, then, uncover the tacitly–deployed instruments through which textual sense
is locally-produced by author and reader respectively in what emerges as a single
contexture, “the text-as-read”.
What we have, in Liebow’s and, secondarily, Anderson’s texts, is self-avowed

textual representation of a laic practice in one social group, that of “going for
brothers” in a Black American community. This practice might be termed a
practice of re-categorisation and thus one of lay sociological (re)-description. The
ethnographic reports by Liebow and Anderson seem indeed to show us something
about “how” “going for brothers” works as a culturally-based social practice. Local
textual exhibitings (somewhat akin to D.L. Wieder’s “tellings” of the convict code)
involve things such as case studies and examples, and the representation is built
up through a concatenation of such local instantiations. We have however noted
that what is not exhibited, either in the authors’ representations of these practices
or in the authors’ own textual deployments of relevant categories, are the taken-
for-granted sense-making procedures that authors, readers – and, we might guess,
research subjects – conjointly use, as part of the “reciprocity of perspectives”,
in their respective practices – consistency rules, economy rules, category-bound
predications and the like – let alone studying the way these procedures and rules
are finely adjusted, case by case, to the local instance. The very comprehensibility
of the text-as-read depends upon our tacit in situ use of such sense-making
procedures, rules, conventions, etc. It has also been my suggestion here that (non
ghetto-based) readers can use a categorial apparatus to make sense of this text
about ghetto practices, and that such categorisation practices may well show
“family likenesses” with those used by “ghetto” residents themselves.
In the next two chapters in this book, I shall stay with the topic of professional
social-scientific texts, and indeed, with that of the textual practices of membership
categorisation, – and, centrally, re-categorisation. These forthcoming chapters
will, among other things, examine the ways in which academic social scientists
deploy activities of re-categorisation that are the professional equivalents of what
Liebow and others have referred to as “going for brothers” in lay practice. I shall
continue to examine social-scientific representation as a topic to be explicated, as
a datum, rather than pronouncing upon its “literalness” or otherwise. Instead my
question will remain, as it has been in the present chapter, “what are the practices
(here, textual or textually-sited practices) involved in producing a representation
of, e.g., practice / set of practices, in a given social group? How is a social-scientific
representation brought off, textually, as a local production?”
Chapter 3
The Textual Representation of Nacirema Culture
Introductory considerations
This chapter subjects Horace Miner’s famous pastiche of anthropological writing

to a textual analysis. The analysis involved a detailed examination of the textual
practices involved in generating the humour of the pastiche and in establishing the
puzzle formats which are integral to Miner’s “analysis”. His text will be treated
as a phenomenal field, whose temporally-unfolding details are intersubjectively
accomplished.
Miner’s short paper is a kind of classic. It is a pastiche and as such “humorous”

rather than “serious”. The question may be posed, “Why bother at all with it as an
object of analysis?” As with most “What’s the point?”–type questions, there are
several answers. First, of course, for our purposes in this monograph, it is first and
foremost, a written text, one deploying the laic resources of the natural language
in textual form. Secondly, the textual siting of humour is itself a legitimate object
of textual-analytic attention. Thirdly, this humour can be read as carrying a serious
point, which, presumably, may well have been why it was originally published in
The American Anthropologist. For all the postmodernists’ and post-structuralists’
jouissance, it is difficult to envision this article being published in a refereed
anthropological journal today. Possibly at the time that august journal’s editors
thought the article might tell their readership about how anthropological writing
presents its object and thus might be instructive about the nature and “constitutive
effects” of such writing. Perhaps, too, the editors considered that Miner’s pastiche
might cast new light on a phenomenon heretofore seldom been conceived in such
a manner, (though there are exceptions, as the next chapter will show). Overall,
though, Miner’s paper anticipates by very many years the current vogue in
topicalising the inscriptive practices of anthropology and other social sciences
– again, deploying a jouissance of which previous generations of thinkers are now
considered to have been incapable.
Each of these considerations furnishes a reason to study Miner’s article as a

topic in its own right. Taken together – and the considerations are indeed linked, as
I hope to show – the paper presents opportunities for analysis, and derivatively for
observations on social-scientific writing and reading that are too good to miss.
A central device used by Miner is the establishing of what Kenneth Burke

terms “a perspective by incongruity”, using planned misnomers and redescriptions.
The present chapter employs Harvey Sacks’ formulation of the “membership

categorisation” apparatus to show the coherence in co-selection as between the
various redescriptions Miner undertakes, and to show the ways in which these
redescriptions graft on to the conventional descriptions which the “natural attitude”
might yield. In showing the “fitting” of Miner’s redescriptions to those given by
the natural attitude, some observations are made concerning the reliance of the
former on the latter and the primacy of the latter. Some observations are made,
too, on sociological and anthropological writing, and as I have just said, the next
chapter takes up these observations and applies them to the texts of a celebrated
author of recent date.
The article “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner1 is notable
for several reasons. First – and not least – it is notable as a pastiche-style portrayal
of the majority of America (“Nacirema” spelled backwards), in terms that social
anthropologists customarily use to describe tribal or other non-industrial societies;
in this respect it is a welcome and all-too-rare example of humour in sociology
and social anthropology, particularly since it is not only indigenously produced
by, but also addresses those disciplines. It is, indeed, quite difficult to think of
other examples which do not impose the dead hand of social science, though the
wry comments of Erving Goffman and Ned Polsky do come readily to mind.
When one thinks of other disciplines, such as economics, the record is even more
dismal. Its sardonic humour makes Miner’s paper a serviceable teaching text, and
many of the observations below have derived from the author’s pedagogic use
of this article – using it, for instance, as a cautionary tale about ethnocentrism,
exoticism and the pitfalls associated with sociological or anthropological writing
and conceptualisation.
Typically, some – though certainly not all – of my introductory level students

who read the article took it at face value for at least a certain proportion of the
time allocated in the lecture or seminar, or the time allocated for a first reading
before “realisation” of its pastiche status occurred. The students who did not take
it at face value, at least for long, are as interesting vis-à-vis the text-as-read as are
those who were taken in by it. I shall pass some comment on the constituents of
that humour, and how the text worked as humour, later on. Again, the focus will
be upon the local accomplishment of that humour, on the humour as methodically
produced as an in situ, in vivo matter.
For the time being, however, it might be pertinent to speculate upon the reasons
why social anthropologists and sociologists – and perhaps social and economic
scientists in general – seem to be so po-faced in their attitudes to their respective
disciplines. Might not the lack of humour in sociology and anthropology tell us a
great deal about the insecurity which its relatively marginal acceptance engenders?
David Berlinski (1976: p. 123) has termed the disciplines of cybernetics, information
theory and communication theory “the affable disciplines”, when incorporated
The Textual Representation of Nacirema Culture 59
into political science, in view of their lax and permissive employment within that
subject. Maybe I should term the political and social sciences, into whose service
these reassuringly “mathematical-systems” approaches are pressed, “the nervous
disciplines”. Perhaps even a Goffmanesque analysis of sociologists’ and others’
presentational work – at least in respect of using quantitative analysis in order for
their theoretical frameworks to be “taken seriously” – might be relevant. On the
other hand, as David Morgan once pointedly reminded me, rather more established
disciplines such as economics and political sciences are hardly a barrel of laughs,
either.
Miner’s article shows that the current modish concern with embodiment is far
from new. Nor have current modes actually dealt with any persuasiveness or in any
salient detail with the issue of writing about the body, about embodied practice or
practices concerning the body. Miner pointedly raises some issues regarding what
some have called issues of “alterity” or “exoticism” in social scientific writings on
bodies: what are the inscriptive devices employed in constituting the body in this
way or that?
Less conjecturally, we might begin with the elementary observation that

Miner’s paper can be taken as an exercise (and pastiche upon) sociological or
social-anthropological textual discourse – or, perhaps more precisely, upon
description and re-description. There are, of course, dangers in this initial, bland
characterisation of Miner’s text, as terms such as “description” may conflate very
many different and disparate natural-language activities, as Gilbert Ryle (1973:
p. 81) has pointed out.
The data
The passages to which I shall refer in my examination of the descriptive resources

used by Miner are as follows:
Group 1
Para. 1 “The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways
in which different people behave on similar situations that he is not apt to be
surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible
combinations of behaviour have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt
to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has,
in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organisation by Murdock. In this light,
the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects
that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which
human behaviour can go.
Para. 2 “Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention
of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very
poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory
between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib
and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states
that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was
originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great
feats of strength – the throwing of a piece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac
and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided.
Para. 3 “Nacirema culture is characterised by a highly developed market

economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s
time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labours and
a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity.”
Group 2
Para. 6 “The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the
wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which
no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of
specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose
assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do
not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients
should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing
is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift,
provide the required charm.
Para. 7 “The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is
placed in the charm-box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are
specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many,
the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous
that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the
natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining
all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which
the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.
Para. 8 “Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the
family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box,
mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of
ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community,
where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
Para. 9 “In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in
prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated ‘holy-mouth-men’.”
Group 3
Para. 18 “In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have
their base in native aesthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to
the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin
and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make
women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General
dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolised in the fact that the ideal form is
virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost
inhuman hypermammary development are so idolised that they make a handsome
living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare
at them for a fee.”
Group 4
Para. 19 “Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly known them to
be a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist
so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even
such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the
insight provided by B. Malinowski when he wrote:
Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed
civilisation, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But
without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical
difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of
civilisation.”
I might, at the outset, and to specify matters somewhat, observe that all the
phenomena referred to in Miner’s article, from material objects such as the “small
font” (paragraph 8) to persons such as the “women with almost hypermammary
development” who purportedly go around “allowing the natives to stare at them
for a fee” (paragraph 18) have, for members of the culture being discussed, their
own culturally-indigenous descriptions, namely “wash basin” and “striptease
artiste” respectively. In Kenneth Burke’s terms, what we have, then, is a planned
misnomer, a name which somehow “substitutes” for culturally-indigenous
“commonsense” names.2
Names, naming and description
Let me discuss more extensively the first case, that of material objects. I must first
note that their constitution as cultural objects refines and elaborates their socially-
defined uses out of possibilities given by their “sheerly physical properties”, if I
may adapt an excerpt from a set of comments on physical objects made by Dorothy
E. Smith (1978) (broadly in accordance with G.H. Mead’s observations).3 With

a rather different emphasis, one can analytically consider the place of material
objects in courses of action and interaction: this kind of analytic consideration is,
necessarily, grounded in and addresses society-members’ own conceptions-in-use
of the incorporation of material objects into their conduct. The socially defined
uses of material objects in relation to their oriented-to enabling and constraining
physical properties may be seen as involving sets of “cultural instructions” for
how to appropriately act towards, or deal with, the material object – or, as Smith
again puts it, “how (the material object) may be inserted into human programmes
of action”.
These intersubjective “cultural instructions” for “handling” or “using” a

material object may be seen as embedded in, and reflexively constituting, a
framework of cultural understandings concerning the “nature” of the object(s)
concerned. In this case, Americans’ conventional understandings of, say, wash
basins (Miner’s “small fonts”, paragraph 8) may be seen to operate largely within a
vernacular framework of hygiene and cleanliness, a language game within which,
for instance, activity-terms such as “washing” operate and find their specific
sense. One of the founding social-scientific studies which examine culturally-
defined physical handlings and uses of objects is to be found in David Sudnow’s
brilliant ethnomethodological study of the playing of a piano within the rubric of
jazz music (Sudnow, 2001). Here, we have a phenomenological analysis of the
handwork, from the actor’s standpoint, “going into” jazz improvisation, whereby
the actor’s orientation to the jazz frame of reference yielded an understanding of
the hands’ work on the piano as appropriate (or inappropriate) moves (for jazz).
Another, analytically very different though highly celebrated example concerns the
physical co-ordinations involved in one person lighting another person’s cigarette
whilst integrating that activity within the exchange of speech; this is, of course,
Birdwhistell’s “cigarette scene”.
To return to the Nacirema’s “small font”, I can begin an initial, highly apparent,
formulation of the re-description which Miner has brought about. He has, in effect,
transposed a set of moves from one language game (hygiene and cleanliness)
to another (ritual and magic). It treats one ecological locale (the home and the
bathroom) in terms of the conventions pertaining to another (e.g. witchcraft, the
church). The upshot of this is that whilst in Miner’s work we can see conduct-
according-to-a-rule, the rule under which that conduct is rendered meaningful
by Miner is different from the rule under which that conduct derives its intrinsic
meaning for members of the culture being studied. This technique is at the heart
of the “constructed ambiguity” (M. Czyzewski)4 in Miner’s text. In terms of
language games, we can treat the “recontextualisation” or “redescription” of the
phenomenon as its emplacement into a family of concepts to which, for members,
it does not “belong”. Indeed, this is the sense of “ecology” intended here.
In P. Winch’s terms (which he derives from those of L. Wittgenstein),

description is an integral part of action (Winch, 1958: 1972).5 For Winch, a given
action is rendered meaningful by virtue of the concept(s) or “rule(s)” which describe
it. For Winch, it is impossible to understand an action without understanding the
concept under whose aegis it falls. One of his examples is the concept “war”.
Understanding that concept is both necessary and sufficient to understanding how
combatants will conduct themselves and to appropriately identifying (making
sense of) their conduct. (We may leave aside, for the purpose of the discussion
at this juncture, the ethnomethodologists’ potential relocation of Winch by their
insistence that the analyst empirically render far more explicit the “interpretive”
– itself a problematic term – methods whereby society-members bring a given
item of conduct under the aegis of a rule / concept.) For Winch, sociology too is,
at bottom, a conceptual enterprise, which places the language of the discipline on
centre stage.
What Miner, then, is doing in his article is also to impute descriptive sense to
material objects and activities in terms of rules or concepts which identify them
– except that the rules or concepts derive from a language game which (in this
context or ecological locale at least) is not that oriented to by members of the
culture themselves. However Miner, for the purposes of the article, describes
the orientations of these members as though they were addressed to a religious
or magical ritual “game” rather than (say) practical efficacy cast in terms of
an orientation to the rules of the hygiene “game”, and maybe germ theories of
contagion and illness and the like. In Garfinkel’s (1967, 1984) terms, Miner is
importing and applying an “external standard”, a conceptual scheme derived from
outside the setting and beyond participants’ conjoint orientation to the setting
(which is itself an integral feature of that selfsame setting) in order to describe it.
In essence, then, what we have in Miner’s article and what makes the pastiche
work, is an irony, an ironic stance such that activities, etc., are assessed in terms
alien to those through which they were produced – something which is quite typical
of many orthodox social-anthropological and sociological approaches. In orthodox
sociology, for instance, religious or legal activity is frequently conceived in terms
integral to another institutional sphere, the economy. Think, too, of Bourdieu’s
notion of “cultural capital”. In the case of Miner’s article, the framework or
“game” within which the activity of washing makes sense in terms of a set of
practical relevances, or grounds, is subverted in favour of another, quite different
(for members6) “game”. This is not to reify the notion of game, as spatialised as
ecological conceptions tend to do. Just such a reification is risked by analysts such
as Norton E. Long in his paper “The Local Community as an Ecology of Games”,
(Long, 1958). Indeed, it might be interesting to explore the ways in which Sacks
(1992)7 terms “spatialised references” operate as parts of orthodox social scientists’
formal-analytic technology of reification and reduction.
Issues of social description are crucial because members have at their disposal
a whole range of communicative devices for giving their conduct (and the
settings produced through such conduct) an intrinsic, built-in describability. As
ethnomethodologists have put it, members impart the actions and settings they
produce with a “self-explicating”, self-describing and self-reporting quality. The
setting itself is produced such that it descriptively “folds back” upon itself, as
Aaron V. Cicourel (1970) has aptly termed it. These self-descriptive features take
on immensely varied forms, though these forms share one characteristic, i.e. they
are treated by members as integral and intrinsic to the setting described, whilst
at the same time, members are unceasingly involved in building those self-same
features into the actions and the settings they produce. Sacks (1963, 1990) has
referred to this self-explicating character of society by using the “representative
metaphor” of a “commentator machine”.
D.L. Wieder and D.H. Zimmerman have, indeed, claimed that if a sociologist
from another planet were to land on Earth, the first thing s/he would notice is that
society-members here are constantly busy with making themselves accountable,
e.g. making their actions visible as having intrinsic sense, coherence and
intelligibility.8 (I shall, incidentally, be making reference to the analytic use of the
conjectural; devices where observers from other planets and the like are spirited
into our societies in order to examine our familiar practices, etc., later in this
chapter.)
This routine “building-in” of intrinsic accountability is a pervasive aspect of all

actions and settings. As has been outlined in other articles, (Watson, 1985; Sharrock
and Watson, 1991), tourists in typical holiday settings may exhibit the nature of
their membership category-in-setting through their clothing, comportment, use
of maps, photographic work, travel documents, talk to other tourists, writing of
postcards, etc. Other “commentaries” on their holiday may involve credit card
account statements, hotel bills, receipts and the like. Similarly, people in queues
display the nature of their setting and their participation in it, exhibiting the
head / front and end of the queue, the serial placement in social space of waiting
persons, the sanctioning and other treatments of “queue-jumpers”, latecomers,
those who leave the queue for a while, etc. All these activities render the queue a
self-descriptive, observable-and-reportable setting, thereby making it visible and
otherwise accountable to all as a queue. Finally, there is the case of formulations
in conversation, where interlocutors produce and ratify (or otherwise) a gloss,
perhaps a “gist” or “upshot” of the ongoing conversation so far, rendering it what
H. Garfinkel and H. Sacks term a “self-explicating colloquy”. John C. Heritage and
I (Heritage and Watson, 1979) have built upon this conception elsewhere, applying
it to the sensible organisation of conversational interaction:9 an analogous task
could be undertaken for textual organisation / texts-as-read. Part of the motivation
for Heritage and myself was to more explicitly integrate ethnomethodological and
conversation analytic concerns, and I have kept faith with that motivation in the
textual analyses in this book.
It is the analyst’s primary task to explicate the descriptive apparatus and

activities involved at the “level” of everyday life and conceptions.
Members, then, typically and routinely orientate themselves towards the

descriptive features that they build into their settings. It is this “first order”
describability of settings – including the material objects actively incorporated into
the setting – which Miner’s (re-) description of the Nacirema ironically disattends
and often subverts. Much of the humour and other interest of his paper derives from
the reader’s skilful orientation to the contrasts between the juxtaposed descriptions
by the natives and by Miner respectively: the reader’s artfulness must match that
of Miner in order to grasp the ironic and sardonic intent.
It is here that we have the crux of Miner’s analysis: if readers are to recognise
his work as pastiche – and as a pastiche on social-scientific writing – Miner’s
ironic treatment, however subversive or “de-bunking” it might appear to be, relies
unrelievedly upon his, and his readers’, commonsense knowledge of the ordinary
descriptions of their familiar world. In common with all ironies, his account of
the Nacirema necessarily relies upon the selfsame ordinary descriptions that it
subverts. This is not the paradox it appears to be at face value when one begins to
explicate these relevances in detail.
However, even the process of explication is not quite so straightforward as it

appears. If Miner’s pastiche is to be recognised as such by readers, his re-description
must unavoidably rely on members’ primordial cultural understandings but does so
in what at first glance is a tacit way. It does not, for instance, furnish instructions,
guidelines, rules of evidence for the correction of decisions, “recipes”, and the
like, let alone “giving the game away”, “frankly revealing the key to the pastiche”
in so many words. This is not to say that there are no hints, clues, allusions, etc.,
provided per se. What I am suggesting is that Miner himself does not provide a
“definitive” revelation per se that it is a pastiche; there is, for instance, no preface
attesting to the ironic nature of the exercise: there is no provided formula or
algorithm for reading the piece as a pastiche.
Even if one recognises “Nacirema” as “American(s)”, one still has to know

about “wash basins” such that the sense, and the irony, of the term “small
font” is to be retrieved by the reader. One has to possess native knowledge
concerning the primitive recognisability of wash basins in order to recognise
Miner’s transformation, and it is this primordial knowledge which constitutes the
“bedrock”, the only scheme to which one can appeal. There is no way of proving,
independently of actually performing the transformation, that one has correctly
interpreted “small font” as “wash basin”. There is no independent or extractable
criterion as to whether the reader’s decision is correct; there is no independent

evidence (as, say, some idealisation of scientific method might conceive of it),
to such correctness, nor are there separate ways of establishing falsification, of
guaranteeing finality, or whatever. Even our unceasing, ordinary reliance upon the
paramountcy of the attitude of everyday life only yields the general or “guideline”
character of the transformative operation; it does not unambiguously yield the
term “wash basin” for “small font” – there are other ordinary terms which this
operation might yield. Indeed, the search for such finality, for the “ultimate
warrant” for closure, such that the reader’s decision is deemed as having totally
settled the interpretation of “small font”, is illusory. To be sure, as indicated above,
the decision regarding correctness is itself subject to an ad hoc rider of the “let it
pass” kind, as “Nacirema” on occasion requires the addition of an “s” – Americans
– in its inverted form in order to make specific situated sense.
All readers have is the primordial, commonsense recognisability of the material

objects, social types and activities so exotically described by Miner. That primordial
recognisability is, then, all the ethnomethodological analyst should address. In
these major respects, then, the “interpretive” decisions made by readers are not
explicitly instructed, nor – as Garfinkel assures us – are there external standards
for the “validation” of these decisions. Instead, the matter must be recognised by
the analyst as a practical, not a principled, one. Concluding that a given decision
such as “small font” = “wash basin” can be nothing other than a matter of settling
for the practical adequacy of the decision; the question is, simply, “Does it work
here and now?” As Garfinkel puts it, it is a decision for practical purposes; it
is not to be judged in terms of scientific adequacy (and, especially, idealisations
thereof).
I hope to have established thus far that Miner has substituted one descriptive
frame of reference for another, whilst inescapably counting on that which he has
replaced. Following Louch, (1966, Chapter 19, especially pp. 213–6), we may
treat Miner’s account of the Nacirema as involving a “frame of reference” rather
than a theory (though Louch places what many would regard as unacceptable
strictures on what counts as a theory), that is, an overall rubric for bringing a body
of “facts” or “observations” into a relation with each other, into some kind of
coherent pattern. The next step, then, is to consider what type of frame of reference
has Miner established for his description of the Nacirema?
A perspective by incongruity
My first observation is that Miner’s descriptive framework falls within a set of

approaches (characterised by what Wittgenstein calls “family likenesses”) which
have been termed by Kenneth Burke “perspectives by incongruity” (Burke, 1965:
pp. 69–163)10. Such perspectives characteristically work on the basis of some
extended simile or metaphor such that social life, agency, etc., are conceived in
terms, for instance, of games, espionage, confidence tricks, exchange, dramaturgy
and the like. Similar examples may be found in the sphere of philosophy, where
some authors have devised analytic scenarios which, purportedly, assist us in the
suspension of some elements of what Alfred Schütz and others have called “the
natural attitude”, or in the relaxation of the paramountcy of that attitude. These
scenarios may employ devices such as “Imagine a Martian came to earth...” (and,
indeed, see Wieder and Zimmerman’s comments, cited above), “Imagine Robinson
Crusoe, isolated in a desert island... or someone isolated there from birth”, etc., so
that an analytic framework for the examination of some familiar aspect of human
life may be examined “afresh”.
Each of these approaches has its ironic elements, since each involves a re-
description of phenomena to which members have already imparted intrinsic,
primordial descriptions (this re-description including an implied re-description of
the motivated character of agency, as A.R. Louch points out). They re- interpret
a pre-constituted world and rely upon it as an essential resource. In this regard,
Miner’s approach is by no means unique, though, as I have observed above,
perhaps somewhat distinctive in its humorous approach. Here, we can conceive of
irony as a methodological device in social formal-analytic science, albeit with its
anchorages in the lay ironies members perform in everyday life. Indeed, in a sense,
Miner’s article operates particularly perspicuously at both “levels”.
We might also remind readers that incongruity has long been associated with
humour: commentators on Shakespeare from G. Wilson Knight right up to Ken
Dodd have noted this, and, clearly, the employment of a perspective by incongruity
proves to be a “machine for producing humour” in Miner’s work – the humour is
quite systematic in that respect: it is an extensible humour showing a stylistic
unity: we may, perhaps, note the employment of a perspective by incongruity
as the major source of Goffman’s piquant humour, too. Such incongruity-based
humour involves our “looking askance” at the world or some feature(s) of it, and
we shall return to this issue shortly.
In order for the lay (or at least relatively naive) reader to recognise the name-
substitutions and the incongruity perspectives thus brought into play, this “mis-
naming” procedure must, at bottom, be a lay or commonsense one – say, a way
of ordinarily doing humour. However, these incongruity perspectives also have
their analytic elaborations and associated advantages, as indeed Burke pointed out
with reference to literary matters. For a start, these perspectives were often turned
upon what Garfinkel and others have called “the seen-but-unnoticed” features of
routine everyday life and or ordinary, quotidian activities. In this respect, these
perspectives have helped some sociologists and social anthropologists to “see”, or
at least cast some light upon, the more or less disattended features of the ingrained,
mundane bases of cultural membership.
As a corollary, the employment of incongruity perspectives somewhat reduced

sociologists’ and social anthropologists’ reliance upon, and fascination with,
“exotic” cases for such observations – cases from other cultures, from domains
involving deviants, marginals, the stigmatised, etc. – the more bizarre, the better.
Instead, we began to get studies – many deriving from Everett C. Hughes’
version of symbolic interactionism – which did not have to analytically isolate
the apparently “non-conventional” social categories of persons, but incorporated
them within a unified framework for the formal examination of such phenomena
as conduct, licence and mandate, status etc., in general and generic terms. Indeed,
we have a mild, humorous example in Miner’s case of “[some] women afflicted
with almost inhuman hypermammary development [who are] so idolised that they
make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting
the natives to stare at them for a fee”. Note the use of a perspective by incongruity
in the humour of this statement. Another classic example, this time with analytic
intent that is quite in line with that of his teacher, Hughes, is Erving Goffman’s
application of some organisational features of the adaptation to failure in general
U.S. culture.11 Here, adaptations to educational and other forms of failure are cast
in terms of the dynamics and terminology of the management of a confidence
trick: one family of concepts is replaced by another in the (re-)description of
adaptations to failure.
Perspectives by incongruity, then, can, as Garfinkel phrases it, “help the goldfish
become aware of the water it swims in.” These perspectives, as methodological
or stylistic devices, help the sociologist and social anthropologist to devise a
culturally indigenous analysis. As the ethnomethodologist Sheldon Messinger and
his colleagues point out,12 they are designed to force into visibility the features
of everyday activities and settings which are taken for granted in the natural
attitude. The use of a dramaturgical analogy, however, does not model the actor’s
consciousness, nor is it (always) intended to do so. Instead, it impels the reader to
orient to his/her own culture “as a stranger”, a “foreign traveller” in his/her “own
land” as it were, and to see all-too-familiar objects anew. Building upon Messinger
et al.’s observations, we might suggest that these perspectives by incongruity
occasion a “look-again” procedure on the part of the reader, a procedure which
renders one’s own culture “anthropologically strange”. This move, however, is not
effected without cost, as we may now see, and as we shall see in the chapter on
E. Goffman’s work.
Louch (1966: pp. 214–6) sounds the first warning bell. He points out that the
extension of a simile or metaphor in order that it can comprise the basis of a general
and unified “frame of reference” runs the risk of neutralizing the discriminating
power which the simile / metaphor depends on for its sense and impact. He points
out that the effective use, in ordinary discourse, of any given simile / metaphor
is conventionally tied to (say) conduct in particular contexts, where conduct in
other contexts may be defined as not conventionally being usefully or relevantly
illuminated by reference to that metaphor. Louch contends that the cogency or

pointedness of such metaphors, being context-specific, is not preserved in their
elevation to the level of “a framework” for the characterisation of conduct in
general, and that when such extensions occur, the force of the metaphor is annulled
because ordinary but crucial contextually-based distinctions are conflated.13
Analytic accounts cast in terms of the metaphor are, in Louch’s view, destined
to properly remain particularised rather than generalised. For Louch, description
of some item of conduct as, e.g., “it’s only a game” only possesses sense, impact,
cutting edge, if there are some occasions or contexts in which one characterises
conduct as, most assuredly, “not a game”. This point might be seen as having some
relevance to S. Messinger et al.’s (op. cit.) empirically-based observation that in
mental hospitals, patients typically feel that they must be “on”, i.e. performing
for doctors and others who might be in a position to evaluate patients’ conduct.
However, they feel that having to play such a role is onerous, in some sense
“unnatural”, an interruption of their routine normal perspective. To unrelievedly
“perform” for an “audience” is, for them, to falsify their ordinary conceptions and
commitments. Clearly, they too conceive of “play acting” as normally being a
situated and occasioned activity rather than an all-pervading feature of “conduct
in general”.
Whilst it undoubtedly partakes of the advantages of incongruity perspectives

as indicated above, Miner’s article undoubtedly falls under the purview of Louch’s
critique. There are, even in so-called “modern societies” of course, particular
occasions and contexts in which participants might (metaphorically or otherwise)
characterise their conduct as “ritual” or “ritualistic” or even as “magical”.
However, were a “serious” social-scientific writer to extend this characterisation,
as Miner does, in theory reduces or nullifies its discriminating power and therefore,
in strictly analytic terms (in relation to its purported object, the Nacirema), the
specific pointedness of the characterisation. However, this extension has the
compensating virtue of keeping American culture at a satirical distance, and also
of getting us to recognise a great deal about the work of social anthropologists and
of social anthropology as a practice. In particular, it allows us to explicitly consider
anthropologists’ work in inscribing culture, in “reporting” it to others. In a strong
sense, Miner’s paper casts light on the unexpected bases of anthropology itself,
especially anthropology-as-read. It also casts light on the social anthropologist’s
(or sociologist’s) constitutive implication in the phenomena s/he describes. In this
sense, the social scientist is an active player in the field s/he observes, in a sense
far more profound than that contained in the usual objections to (say) participant
observation, namely that the participation of the observer “changes” the social
organisation or the activities of those s/he observes. Miner, then, can claim to be
a precursor of the current “reflexive mode” in social science, referentially, self-
critically aware of her/his own involvement in the field, her/his own deployment
of the (problematic) resources of the discipline concerned, etc.
Indeed, Miner’s article leads us to examine a whole range of concerns

concerning serious social anthropology (and all social sciences) and language.14 It
presages current anthropological and (to a lesser extent) concern with the discursive
practices of these disciplines, and particularly, perhaps, their textual practices. All
these concerns have been ushered in by way of postmodernist and poststructuralist
concerns with “reflexivity” (not the ethnomethodological version of the term). I
start with the bland observation – of which most social scientists, still, (despite
current postmodernist and poststructuralist concerns) seem to proceed in blissful
ignorance – that ordinary language itself is generic to all societies and constitutes a
vast array of social practices and thus possesses its own social-organisational forms.
Society-members are, inter alia, unrelievedly involved in using the resources of
the language in organised ways in jointly transacting the tasks of identifying and
describing activities, events and settings – including, of course, those which are
highly institutionalised, falling under the rubric of, say, religion, law and family.
A corollary of this general point is that one can analyse institutional phenomena
as ways of talking, as ordinary language pursuits, such that (say) religion and magic
might be seen as “worded phenomena”, (D.E. Smith), as linguistically produced
and reproduced as (for members) recognisable and familiar states of affairs.
A further corollary of this is that social anthropology and other social sciences
themselves also comprise natural language pursuits, conducted in French,
Japanese, English, or some other natural language which itself contains mundane,
primordial descriptive resources for the phenomena which these social sciences
themselves describe. It makes sense, then, to examine the “relation” between
ordinary language and (say) social anthropological descriptions, and to examine
the ways in which the latter necessarily derive from, trade on, are read in terms
of, and are shaped by, the descriptive resources of the former. A foundational
resource with which to begin such considerations is Edward Rose’s conception
of a linguistically-constituted “natural sociology” (Rose, 1960), though there are
other important references too.15
Miner’s article provides us with the occasion to consider these dimensions of

language use and their interrelationships. As we have seen above, the examination
of Miner’s text directs us immediately to the appreciation of social anthropology
as a way of (re-)wording the already primordially-worded objects, events and
settings within the society in question. In particular, his article highlights the
ways in which social-anthropological descriptions rely for their sense upon the
“commonsensical linguistic identifiability / describability” of the phenomenon.
The social anthropological description (re-)encodes an already-encoded set of
ordinary language descriptions onto which the anthropological descriptions (even
those intended to ironicise those selfsame ordinary descriptions) are mapped.
As we shall see, the article relies for the redressing of its deliberate mis-naming
upon readers’ ability to “de-code” its analytic redescriptions. Our appreciation
of the article as an ironic exercise generated through planned incongruity relies

specifically upon the specific operations we, as readers, use to effect such a de-
coding: that is why we must needs treat such articles as “texts-as-read” not simply
in terms either of production or reception to the exclusion of the other.
Moreover, our appreciation of the transplantation of descriptive resources that

are identifiably derived from one institutional area (magic, religion)16 to another
(hygiene, health, “modern” medicine), relies heavily upon our understanding of
institutions as vernacular linguistic phenomena. In sum, Miner’s account comprises
an anthropological “wording up” of the vernacular terms from one institutional area
which he then transposes to another. The question, then, for us, is a linguistic one:
what are the linguistic devices whereby this complex exercise, with the elaborate
properties of reasoning indicated earlier in this chapter, is effected?
There is another corollary of the presentation of the corporeal practices of

the “Nacirema” in terms of “body ritual” or “magic” (which is a typically and
recognisably anthropological way of talking). This is the phenomenon, (for
members of a Western culture), referred to by Kenneth Burke as “downward
conversion”, which is one of the effects that the use of incongruity perspectives
characteristically entails. For instance, what the Nacirema might, from their
intra-cultural standpoint, treat as “being hygienic” (based, presumably, upon a
vernacular conception of the operation of pathogens) is re-presented by Miner in
terms of another set of practices (ritual, magic). This re-presentation might well be
seen by the Nacirema as the downgrading or even degrading of their conceptions
and their grounds for such actions (perhaps by inference presenting them as “mere
superstition” rather than “well-founded” or even “scientifically established”).
Indeed, writing of anthropological discourse, Winch (1958: p. 12) points

out a similar issue in regard to “downward conversion”: “The trouble is that the
fascination science has for us makes it easy for us to adopt scientific form as a
paradigm against which to measure the intellectual respectability of other modes of
discourse.” I hold that Miner’s presentation of the practices of the Nacirema works
in a similar manner vis-à-vis the standpoint of the subjects being observed. In their
discourse, to characterise their understandings and practices as “magic”, “ritual”,
“superstition” or “faith” – the phenomena which the subjects would presumably
characterise in terms of hygiene, as knowledge or as “scientific” – might well
comprise a downgrading or downranking of their conceptions. Similarly, the
“distancing terminology” through which an “outsider’s position” is linguistically
constituted in the text, as when “the sick are forced to eat substances which are
supposed to be healing” (p. 306) might from “the insider’s standpoint” be taken
as comprising another (and related) downward conversion, largely through the
suspension of belief or of endorsement indicated in the item “are supposed to”
– demoting the practice in a hierarchy of credibility. Again, we see the work done
through the suspension of considerations concerning the practical efficacy of some

practice or other.
As J. Coulter (1979) observes, characterisations of such conceptions as

“supposition”, “belief(s)”, “faith”, serve to present these conceptions as faulted
competitors of conceptions characterised as “knowledge” (rather than, say,
“supposition”). The Nacirema might regard Miner’s re-description of their
conceptions as “supposition”, as an assessment or evaluation of those conceptions,
e.g. of their truth value, their reliability, authoritativeness, credibility and the like.
By the same token, it is a device for doing humour – “leg-pulling”, “put-downs”,
satirising and the like.
In these respects, the linguistic devices the analyst uses in the presentation
of a group’s conceptions might be taken, from within the culture, as a lack of
endorsement of the group’s understandings, as being disaffiliative. This, indeed,
may be the cost incurred by anthropological and other presentations made from
the outsider’s standpoint. It may be seen as “typical” of an outsider – and maybe
the typical way the outsider’s view is recognisable as such – to understand some
set of conceptions in terms of one language game when insiders see it in terms
of some other language game, particularly where the language game(s) used as
an external scheme of interpretation might be said to hold a relatively privileged
epistemological status on the culture concerned. Karl Marx made his reputation
using such a procedure.
Another important feature of the arrangement of a text in terms of a “perspective

by incongruity” is that, as Bittner17 phrased it in connection with incumbents’ use
of the concept of formal organisation or bureaucracy, it can serve as a model for
“stylistic unity”. The “perspective by incongruity” used by Miner (conceiving of a
diverse array of “Western” activities, types of person, settings and material objects
in terms of “ritual and magic”) comprises a device for generating what Bittner
terms a “reproducible theme”. It is in terms of such a theme – in this case an
analytic theme rather than a commonsense one such as “(the) organisation” – that
a variety of (from a culturally-indigenous standpoint) apparently unconnected, or
at best loosely-connected, items may be presented as part of a more general and
unifying pattern with, as Bittner put it, its “coherent maps”. The “perspective by
incongruity” can, then, serve to drive a pattern through such an array of items. The
interpretive procedures mobilised in the use of this scheme will be outlined below
and were at one stage in the development of ethnomethodology referred to as “the
documentary method of interpretation” (Garfinkel, 1967, Ch. 3).
Bittner18 writes about the establishing of a single thematic focus as serving

to present a diversity of items as variations on a given pattern. This issue
reappears, in a context more closely approximating to my concerns with textual
work conducted at the analytic level (in this case anthropology), in an article by
Anderson and Sharrock on the practical procedures sociologists use in presenting

their phenomena. They refer to these as “order-enhancing procedures”, which go
into the establishing of what the authors consider to be the “contextual shapeliness”
of descriptions or descriptive accounts, i.e. the ways in which a given sociological
or social-anthropological description is produced so as to exhibit symmetry,
commonality, or continuity with other descriptions in the text. R.J. Anderson
and W.W. Sharrock refer to the “thematising of phenomena” (treating apparently
disparate instances under the rubric of a single underlying theme), and imposing
a “unity of purpose” (treating individual cases as versions of each other – this
being, perhaps, particularly analogous to Bittner’s notion of stylistic unity). They
also write of the ways in which such instances may be drawn together under a
rubric consisting of simple principles derived from some institutionalised body of
knowledge, e.g. ritual and magic.
Another consequence of the stylistic unity established through the use of a

“perspective by incongruity” across a variety of instances, is that a distance is
established from the phenomena being studied and (crucially) is constantly
maintained. F. Cioffi (nd.) notes that Goffman, for example, more or less
consistently maintains a satirical distance (and the term is a most apt description
of Miner’s approach too) from his characters and situations, in The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life, but alternates between “insiders’” and “outsiders’”
standpoints in Stigma. Citing Wayne Booth, Cioffi notes that the presentation of
“insiders’ views” tends to enhance our identification with, rather than distance
from, the characters. Miner’s consistent use of a “perspective by incongruity”,
without ever resorting to “insiders’ views” (e.g. quotations from a key informant
amongst the subjects) helps us maintain an “outsiders’ stance”, forestalling any
identification with the subject on the part of the reader: this consequently may trick
us into (at least temporarily) treating the Nacirema as people from a culture other
than our own, as “them”, not “us”: we might term this the local-textual production
of alterity.
However, we cannot adequately get to grips with these devices without looking
at the written textual formats involved. Miner’s anthropological wording of the
Nacirema’s practices, conceptions, etc., is, after all, incarnate in a written text.
The text must be ordered such that readers can perform the “decoding” operations
indicated above. The text has to maintain the stylistic unity which permits of the
formal analysis across what, for members, might well be very different substantive
contexts; the use of incongruity perspectives is, to many analysts, justifiable in
terms of the rendering visible of such formal properties. How are we to provide
for the devices which permit the maintenance of stylistic unity in terms of a given
situated, local deployment of a perspective by incongruity by authors and active
readers alike?
Readership and Miner’s text-as-read
One way of analysing the devices that maintain stylistic unity is to proceed on the
basis that the text, in its design features, embodies a substantive conception of the
recipient, the reader – in this case, a set of presuppositions about anthropologists,
their interests and relevances. This involves a conception of tailoring texts to some
substantive conception (necessarily one or more categorisations) of the reader.
Consider, for instance, this quotation from a novel by Anita Brookner, (1984: pp.
27–8),19 where an authoress of romantic fiction is speaking to her publishers: “And
what is the most potent myth of all?” she went on, “The Tortoise and the Hare”,
she pronounced. “People love that, especially women ... in my books, it is the
mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with
whom he had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. This
is a lie, of course,” she said. “In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every
time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing
for the tortoise market ...”
To be sure, the Miner article is redolent with the terms in which anthropologists
conventionally and recognisably cast their substantive accounts. However, the level
of anthropological terminology is relatively low and accessible. Also, it might be
difficult to fulfil what would seem to be the methodological requisite of substantively
specifying just what particular anthropological knowledge was being assumed in a
given text, let alone specifying the domain of anthropological knowledge held by
this occupational group “in general”. Furthermore, anthropologists do not possess
a monopoly over terms such as “ritual”, “magic”, “font” and the like. These are,
of course, terms which are widespread in laic discourse, too. Even these points,
though, are relatively minor compared with the analytic pitfalls which await if
one follows, for instance, Erwin Wolff’s (1971) notion of “the intended reader”,
a substantive idealisation cast (by Wolff) in terms of a rather reified set of norms,
values, purportedly typical attitudes, etc. Whilst it is arguable that authors may
“have in mind” a conception of their typical public, the analytic reference to,
let alone reliance upon, such conceptions furnishes us with a relatively weak
heuristic device. As I have just indicated, not only trained or professional social
anthropologists can make sense of Miner’s article – hence its pedagogic uses for
the neophyte sociologists or social anthropologists in my introductory classes.
Stanley Fish’s notion of “the informed reader” sets us on a track which is

of somewhat greater analytic assistance, since he locates readers in terms of a
set of procedural operations which are assumed in texts – operations of which,
moreover, readers have a reflective consciousness. Fish’s competence model of
the reader emphasises general linguistic skills, semantic knowledge and literary
competence. However, this comprises a set of general text-processing qualities
possessed and used by readers, and are of constantly-problematic relevance to
any particular locally-available textual item. How does Fish’s characterisation
of these general interpretive procedures work “when it comes down to cases”,

where the distinctly-identifying particulars of a given textual item (such as
Miner’s “font” example) are at issue? To refer to Fish’s own favourite concerns,
how does a given textual item persuade or predispose its reader? How can we
go beyond overall characterisations with low discriminating power when applied
to individual cases? Is Fish’s “text processing” procedures used by readers just
another decontextualised, cognitivistic conception? I suspect so.
Iser20 takes us, perhaps, a little closer to a more serviceable position in his
notion of “the implied reader”. He states that his notion of “the implied reader” is
a transcendental model, whereby the text brings into effect a standpoint, a mode
of seeing for the reader, rendering a particular point of view. So far, his notion is
rather similar to that of Fish in that it stresses overall processes and procedures,
an overarching characterisation of a reader in relation to the overall structure and
organisation of a given text. However, Iser also refers to textual structure and
organisation in terms of “a network of response-inviting structures” – a rather
behaviouristic formulation.
I can take Iser’s notion of the “implied reader” further by not simply dealing
with the textually-implied reader (or readership) as a set of overall procedures
or in terms of a generally-characterised “interpretive community”, but in terms
of a set of local, i.e. locally-situated and locally-operative, devices potentiating
particular and specifiable procedural operations on the part of readers. Here, I treat
the notion of “reader” or “readership” in terms similar to Garfinkel and Sacks’
notion of membership – that is, in terms of competent and recognisable localised
courses of action, not in terms of (typifications of) substantive or “real” persons.
Parallel with Garfinkel and Sacks,21 I emphasise the local situatedness of these
courses of action, that is, the essentially in situ way in which they mobilise or
activate a set of operations on the part of (“any”) reader. Instead of simply pointing
to the mobilisation of overall sets of operations comprising readership of the text
in general, this approach allows us to examine the manner in which specifically-
placed textual items potentiate, in a here-and-now manner, a given set of sense
making (not “interpretive”) activities on the part of the reader.
This is not to disattend the overall features of a given text. Instead, it is to point
to the fact that it is through the local textual devices that these overall features
are reproduced, instantiated or highlighted anew “for another first time”, to use
Garfinkel’s felicitous phrase. I believe that this focus on local, in situ, textual
devices will serve as a corrective to the emphasis on readers’ general predispositions
concerning the text as a whole. This, I feel, is important because even those analysts
such as Iser, when they focus on purportedly local structures, tend to look for the
general properties of readership in these local structures rather than dealing with
the distinctive in vivo, in situ, here-and-now particularities of (reading) the item.
The “responses”, which, for Iser, the text invites, tend to be perused by Iser for
what they can tell us about readership per se. The time-honoured British cliché
about someone “not being able to see the wood for the trees” should, I feel, be
reversed for many analysts of reading – they, apparently, can’t (or won’t) see the
trees for the wood: with them, we end up with a wood without trees. This is not to
deny that we cannot refer to the overall text but such a task is still several stages
on; one has to earn such overall analytic positions.
Through this analysis of locally-deployed instruments in the “text-as-read”, we

might hope to at least initiate an analytic respecification of the arguments by Wolff,
Fish and Iser. We might do this by replacing notions such as the “intended reader”
by those such as “recipient design” as part of the local contexture of the text-
as-read (see my first chapter in this book). This term, taken from “Conversation
Analysis”, analytic concern with the particularisation procedures of “talk-in-
interaction”, helps us somewhat here, – although, given the multiple recipiencies
in Miner’s text, (in terms of accessibility if not “intended” readership), such design
features are multiplex. At least they help advert us to the need for the analytic
respecification of instruments such as Burke’s “perspective by incongruity”, in that
through such procedures we can begin to target not its general or formal features
but its features as deployed in situ in respect of particular textual instances. This
is how we shall proceed.
As a first move in that direction, let me now turn to the “small font”, where
“brief rites of ablution” are effected and the “women who travel from village
to village, permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee”. Unless the paper
is read entirely at face value (and this is a possibility – the text can be read as
definitionally self-contained), what we have is a set of practical textual puzzles for
readers, puzzles that derive in large part from mis-spellings, reverse spellings and
misnomers. Following J. Schenkein in his analysis of a newspaper text (1979: p.
190), I may term these “referential puzzles” – that is, puzzles potentiate questions
such as “Who, in particular, are the Nacirema?”, “Who is Notgnihsaw?”, “Where
and what is the Pa-To-Mac?” and the like. In this sense textual puzzles partake
of the properties of all puzzles, including those which Schenkein, in another
article (1978) using data from a conversational sequence (which, coincidentally,
itself refers to magic), terms “identity-rich puzzles”, and this term may help us,
particularly in relation to the second example. Of course, puzzles must be activated
by readers.
Schenkein notes that some puzzles operate with regard not only to the
distribution of some relatively explicit “official” identities, but also operate
allusively with regard to some unofficial tacit identities where the solution to
the puzzle comprises, for at least one of the interlocutors, is to establish what
these tacit identities “are”. In Schenkein’s insurance salesman-prospective client
negotiations, the “official” identities of “salesman” and “client” are embedded in
a set of “unofficial” identities concerning the use of drugs.
In the Miner article, the “officially” – and explicitly – furnished identities

such as “medicine men” trade even more intricately on the other identities since
they comprise planned misnomers; in this case, the category order “doctor” /
“physician” is furnished in part by a pun which nicely travels across – dangerous
spatial metaphors again! – two language games, those of “Western (scientific)
medical practice” and “ritual and magical therapeutic practices”. The pun
operates, in part, through what Sacks (1992: pp. 137–49) terms a “gist-preserving”
element (in combination with a mutatis mutandis rider), i.e. a concern with illness
and therapy. Sacks in fact refers to a type of unplanned misnomer in natural
conversation which he terms “gist-preserving errors”; an example he gives is of an
interlocutor saying “the Solid Gold Cadillac” instead of “the Yellow Rolls Royce”,
where the error preserves many of the elements of the correct form (prestige car,
colour, film titles). Textual items which take on their recognisable character as
puzzles through planned misnomers rely very heavily upon the base category upon
which, in one way or another, the misnomer is allusively mapped. The practical
solution to such puzzles comprises, then, a re-naming exercise, where in fact the
misnomer may trade on a set of base names since, as Burke (1965: p. 109) himself
points out, the language of commonsense is full of double or triple names for the
“same” referent. Even issues of what Burke calls “piety” are, then, multiplex. By
contrast, a perspective by incongruity employs a range of equivoques.
What I have, using Burke’s terms, referred to as the “perspective by incongruity”,

then, can take on the local form of a practical puzzle, where a given identity or
object is rendered recognisable such that, say, an “exotic” misnomer can be treated
as a substitute for the “ordinary” name or group of names for a referent. The local-
practical application of this perspective is to work the puzzle; to examine the
puzzle(s) is to examine the situated, ad hoc practicalities involved in “delivering”
the perspective by incongruity. This praxiological treatment of such perspectives
also assists us in understanding the apparent paradox whereby perspectives by
incongruity gain their heuristic power by, as Burke puts it, depriving us of the
ready-made linguistic clues to our commonsense familiarity with some object,
activity or identity, in the interests of furnishing a fresh point of view, whilst at the
same time being unrelievedly reliant upon that selfsame familiarity of which the
incongruity perspective seeks, at one level, to deprive us.
The notion of a perspective by incongruity, then, is crucial in that it reminds

us that the misnomers involved are not simply randomly selected – this is not
what “local” or “situated” means – but instead are selected according to a locally-
incarnate consistent “methodic” procedure, i.e. “re-name Western scientific practice
as ritual and magical practice”. In Gilbert Ryle’s terms, we thus have a consistent,
methodic source of “category-mistakes” in a wide range of textual contexts. Thus,
the solution to one of the puzzles can, mutatis mutandis, furnish guidelines for
the solution to the others (hence the sense of stylistic unity); in this regard, the
incongruity perspective can work as a lay device rather than a purely professional
reader’s device. The process of solving a first puzzle reflexively makes available
the particular incongruity procedure being deployed and which may thereafter be
used as a resource for the retrospective and prospective solution of other puzzles
which may then be characterised as similar in nature. This re-descriptive process,
with its constituent subtle organisation of temporal procedures provides for what
Czyzewski22 has appositely termed “re-organizing the reading of the text”, and
thus a re-constituting of the “textual contexture”: again, readers are active in this.
In such a praxiological interpretation, the next question is “How do these

devices specifically work to deliberately mislead the reader and how, specifically,
are the solutions to these puzzles made allusively available in the text?” My first
step here is to further specify what I mean by “identities” and to examine how
identities are furnished in communication.
Membership categorisations and readers’ work
Many conversational identifications for persons take the form of what Sacks, in his
really work, terms membership categories: “child”, “mother”, “German”, “doctor”
and “footballer” comprise examples of such categories. These categories may be
defined as society-members’ commonsense equivalence classes for the public
identification of persons. Any particular member of a population can, in principle,
be identified through a large number of categorisations (male, husband, father, son,
dentist, jogger, etc.). Which categorisation is relevant is a local or contextually-
occasioned matter, where “context” also incorporates a texture of procedural rules
and conventions that I shall now outline.
When I consider the practical activity of selecting and co-selecting membership

categories, however, I must necessarily examine the conventions and procedures
that members possess as part of their corpus of commonsense knowledge or
mundane reasoning. One foundational set of conventional procedures derives
from members’ knowledge that membership categories are “naturally” (i.e.
conventionally) organised into collections which Sacks calls “membership
categorisation devices” (MCDs). Thus, the categorisations “mother”, “father”,
“son”, “daughter” are, of course, organised into the device whose collecting term
or title is “family”. Of course, there may, on occasion be more than one collecting
term that is putatively relevant, e.g. “stage of life”. These categorisations may be
read as co-categorisations of that device. This particular collection / device is one
of a subset of devices which has a “team-like” organisation; families are divided
up into notionally similar “teams” within a given society. It may readily be seen
that membership categories and devices serve as the loci of a great deal of our
mundane knowledge and experience of the organisation of our social world, and
of the rights and obligations that are distributed (and may be claimed), on the basis
of that organisation (see Sacks, 1972; Jayyusi, 1984; and Hester and Eglin, 1992).
Indeed, one of the considerable analytic attractions of this procedural apparatus

is that it does not attempt to divorce knowledge of the language from knowledge
of the world. The assumed distinction between the “two” seems to be at the heart
of many of the problems of some analytic approaches to textual work – see, e.g.,
my comments in the first essay of this monograph as texts as conduits to a reality
conceived as separate, freestanding.
A basic procedure for the co-selection of two or more categories is glossed by

Sacks as “the consistency rule”. This members’ rule not only provides a procedure
for, say, some speaker selecting a second membership category after a first,
but also comprises a procedure for the monitoring and tracking of that second
selection on the part of a hearer or recipient within the conversation. On the basis
of the consistency rule, an interchangeable orientation of speaker and recipient(s)
can be sustained such that each interlocutor can make similar or aligned sense of
the selection, rather than, for instance, simply seeing the categories as randomly
or even unaccountably selected.
The consistency rule is a rule of relevance which permits of a variety of

overlapping formulations, depending upon, for example, whether it is set up from
the producer’s or recipient’s standpoint. One formulation is: if a membership
categorisation is selected to categorise two or more members from the same
population, then further categories from that MCD may be selected. From a hearer’s
or recipient’s standpoint, a stronger form, stated in maxim terms, is “if (i) one
or more membership categories are introduced proximately into a conversation,
and if (ii) these categories can be heard as being from the same MCD, then (iii)
hear them that way”. In this form, the consistency rule is particularly manifest
as a sense-making procedure and as a procedure making for a coherent strand of
continuity in the conversation; the rule is an example of how the coherence and
salience of a conversation is actively achieved from within the conversation – and
of how the device is “achieved as natural”.
The consistency rule has a corollary: “if two categories deriving from the
same MCD are co-selected and if that MCD is duplicatively-organised, then hear
the two categories as deriving from the same ‘team’ unit”. Consequently, Sacks
observes that, as a preferred hearing, “the baby” and “the mommy” as coming
from the same family unit, in the utterance “The baby cried. The mommy picked it
up”; in other words, despite the absence of a genitive, the baby is seen as the baby
of that particular mother rather than any other mother in the population. Which
MCD is relevant (where, e.g., “mother” and “baby” may also belong to the MCD
“stage of life” as well as the MCD “family”) is, again, a locally-occasioned matter.
Interlocutors perform the practical task of disambiguation by actively taking into
account the context (for members) in which the categories were introduced on that
particular occasion.
In addition, Sacks also adduces a members’ rule of referential adequacy, i.e.

that a single membership category comprises adequate reference to a person of
collectivity, despite the fact that, in principle, any person or collectivity may
be referred to by a multiplicity of categories. To this, I might add that each
membership category may be referred to through a variety of “category-labels”,
i.e. of multiple designations for a given category. Whilst, in a crude application
of Burke’s terms, these category-labels may work as synonyms, considered as
conversational actions they may not be interchangeable, i.e. the label “gay”, as
opposed to “faggot”, constitutes an up-ranked, upgraded reference to the category
“homosexual”, whereas “faggot” works as a downranking, literally degrading,
term (Watson, 1997). Indeed, considered from the point of view of conversational
actions, Burke’s notion of “synonym” often becomes problematic and is only
sustainable through the disattending of contextual considerations. Once more, a
caveat is in order: apparently degrading terms such as “queer” (for gay people)
may in certain local contexts, at certain times, be upgrading terms, terms of
approbation. This context often involves who is using the term, i.e. is it an in-
grouper, a gay person, who is using it? To whom is s/he speaking? And on what
occasion? For what purposes? All these are “local” relevances in the selection of
a category-label.
Returning to Miner’s article: at the outset, I can observe that the local parameters
of the particular puzzle are sustained by the co-selection of membership categories.
If I treat Sacks’ “hearer’s maxim” as a “reader’s maxim”, I find it difficult to
find a single MCD which incorporates what Miner terms “holy-mouth-men” and
“medicine men” and “dentists” and “physicians” respectively. Readers’ routinely-
operative employment of the consistency rule does not predispose them, in terms
of normative preference, towards finding an MCD which might fittingly collect
these categories such that the relevant introduction of “dentist” might, say, be
directly potentiated by the reference to “holy-mouth-men”. Instead, the consistency
rule here potentiates the proliferation of further categories from the MCD “ritual
healers”; our “instructed reading” militates against the salient introduction of
categories from other devices, such as “(Western) scientific medical specialists”.
In this regard, what Burke terms “misnomers” are not haphazardly selected but
bear sensibly coherent, continuous and fitting relations with each other.
In quasi-Wittgenstein terms, I might, indeed, treat this item of mundane

reasoning which Sacks termed “the consistency rule” as playing a significant part
in sustaining a frame of reference located in the “ritual and magic” form of life
rather than the “(Western) science” (or some such title) form of life – that is, in
wording healing practices in terms of one form of life rather than the other. These
things do not occur “automatically”; they must constantly and actively be achieved
and re-achieved. A “perspective by incongruity” must be actively maintained as
an instructed reading on the part both of author and reader, and it is the analyst’s
task to explore the devices used in establishing and maintaining such an instructed
reading. It is these devices, such as the consistency rule, which serve to sustain the
stylistic unity to which I have referred above, upon which, in turn, a perspective by
incongruity might be founded in particular textual circumstances.
When the puzzle is situatedly recognised by the reader as, in large part, a set of
identity misnomers and the key to the local solution has been found (even if this
occurs in the first paragraph of the first reading), the substitution of membership
categories deriving from the MCD “ritual healers” by those deriving from the MCD
“scientific healers” is itself sustained through a locally-embedded orientation to
the consistency rule for the co-selection of categories. Once the reader has arrived
at the conclusion that one of the categories from the MCD “ritual healers” may
be read, or re-read, through the substitution of a category derived from “scientific
healers”, the use of a consistency rule provides for the extension of such a solution,
the instruction being “look first for (a solution in terms of) further categories from
the MCD ‘scientific healers’”. Here, then, we have an extensible and reproducible
method, each extension being conducted in situ through the methodic vehicle which
I have termed the consistency rule. In the case of Miner’s text, what I am claiming
is that the reader, in a sense, conducts parallel, localised consistency-establishing
operations, namely, using the consistency rule to identify further categories of the
“ritual healers” device and also using such a rule to identify additional categories
of the device “scientific healers” as the key to solving a group of puzzles. It is
through this parallel method that readers maintain and deploy (categories from)
the natural attitude whilst simultaneously employing a set of, as it were, “exterior”
categories.
Readers’ parallel use of these consistency rules in order to solve not only a first,
but a second or nth puzzle, in turn means that Miner’s article as a whole gradually
appresents itself as a satirical one, as a pastiche based on a set of textual puzzles
to which this parallel treatment gives at least one major key. In a sense, the article,
from being a putatively serious piece, “hoves into view” as a pastiche, a satire of
sorts; the pastiche characterisation gradually gains sharpness and precision until
the reader comes to see the pastiche characterisation as “the” characterisation,
“what the article was about all along”. And – unlike postmodernist analysts –
readers very well might not demur from imputations concerning the motivated
character of the text, i.e. that the author intended this article to be a pastiche, that
he wished to satirise the social anthropologist’s treating of other cultures in what,
from the standpoint of the analyst’s own culture, is a set of terms which relativise
conceptions of the credibility, efficacy etc., of the practices described in the text
or of the grounds adduced in those descriptions. We might even speculate about a
possible “serious intent” informing the satiric presentation – as, indeed, satire is
usually held to involve.
In this respect, H. Garfinkel, M. Lynch and E. Livingston’s (1981) article

on a group of scientists’ optical discovery of a pulsar is useful in the present,
very different, context, especially in their (Garfinkel et al.’s) use of the simile
“the potter’s object”. Garfinkel et al. say that the optical discovery of the pulsar
gradually takes on its shape and definition through the ways in which the scientists
use their specific techniques – in this case, corporeal and communicative ones – on
the oscilloscope in order to “work it up”. These methods have a temporal order,
whereby seeing the pulsar on the oscilloscope “first time through” may give only
a crude approximation of what eventually, on a series of subsequent run-throughs
using a variety of enhancement techniques, takes shape as an “emergent object”,
an object whose definition is gradually sharpened so that, e.g., it stands out from
its background more vividly and precisely. The “final” image of the pulsar stands,
for the scientists, as “what it was all along”; the properties of that “final” image
stand as the “actual properties” of the pulsar. Garfinkel et al. thus refer to “the local
historicity of the pulsar’s production”, such that the pulsar’s existence as an object
cannot be disentangled from the particular techniques which have progressively
made it observable, distinguishable, specifiable etc. – as something that was “there
to be found” from the beginning.
Garfinkel et al.’s use of the “potter’s object” simile operates to gives us a

clearer conception of this process of gradual and progressive definition occurring
over a temporal course. The shapeless piece of clay on a potter’s wheel only “takes
shape” as (say) a vase through the potter’s manual working of the clay on the
turning wheel; the object is shaped, in time, through the way in which it is worked.
In a similar way, the emergent pulsar emerges through its “working up” by the
scientists in the course of their night’s work.
The puzzle-based reading of Miner’s text may be conceived as possessing an

analogous “potter’s object” character (as may, in some respects, the reading of
other puzzle-based types of text such as the roman-à-clef). A “first-time-through”
reading, particularly if done by a neophyte anthropologist or sociologist, may
involve the taking of the descriptions in the text “at face value”. This may, then,
also comprise an “only-time-through” reading, a self-contained naïve reading.
Only a subsequent reading may lead to the “discovery” that a planned misnomer
has been used to stand on behalf of a familiarly-named object, event or category of
person. Further readings may then yield the “finding” that the procedures used to
solve that “misnaming puzzle” can be extended to resolve a collection of what now
appears as other such puzzles in the text; this, in turn, may, through the noticing of
other “unrecognisable” names, etc., occasion a search for differently-based puzzles
in the text, so that eventually Miner’s whole text is re-documented as having been
“all along” a pastiche, a satire on anthropologists’ descriptive practices as well as of
the “native practices” anthropologists describe. Following the characterisation of
texts in the first essay in this monograph, we might treat the “text-as-read” in each
read-through as establishing a new textual gestalt contexture, a recontextualisation
of the previous read-through.
A reader may then retrospectively ironicise her/his own earlier readings

as “naïve”, “defective”, as the reader “having been taken in (at least initially /
temporarily / partly)” etc., such that the temporal order of readings may also stand
as an order of credibility as to the “real” character of the text. The text eventuated
as a satire or humorous pastiche such that earlier characterisations are now down-
ranked relative to that “final” characterisation. One might apply a similar analysis
of the retrospective-prospective character of a course of reading to a single reading
of the text, where particular sentences or paragraphs are re-read with a “fresh
view” and the like. Here again, we have a parallel with Garfinkel et al.’s notion of
“first time through”, “subsequent times through”, etc.
Similarly, we can point to Miner’s use of the consistency rule when we wish to
explicate one procedural basis of the element of planned deceptiveness in his article.
The Nacirema are, at the outset, described as living in the territory circumscribed
by the Canadian Cree, the Yacqui of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the
Antilles. The consistency rule relating to the membership categories he introduces
would yield the procedural instruction “treat the Nacirema as another tribal
peoples” (and not, e.g., as a national category even though nations are mentioned
in an ancillary way in association with “the object”, the tribes).
A further procedural element in the solution of the puzzle may be found in the
notion of category-bound activities (CBAs), (Sacks, 1974: pp. 221–4). Society-
members may find the sense of an activity by treating it as conventionally tied to
some membership category or some limited set of categories, e.g. the categories
of a single MCD (D.R. Watson, 1978: pp. 107–8). This cultural procedure of
predication works both ways; one can “project” the kinds of activity that, say,
incumbents of the category “baby” do (Sacks notes that “crying” is a mundanely-
imputed CBA of the category “baby”). Alternatively, one can “work back” from
a predicated activity to the provision of its categorial subject, the incumbent of
which might “typically”, “routinely” or “expectably” perform such an activity. It
is this “working back” procedure which, perhaps, proves particularly useful for
our present purposes. Again, we cannot escape from considerations concerning the
temporal organisation of a course of reading, which involves constant prospective
and retrospective operations.
A case in point is the passage in Miner’s article (p. 303) where he describes
“medicine men” as “… not providing curative potions for their clients but
deciding what the ingredients should be and write them down in an ancient and
secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and the
herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.” Here, we have two
activities – paired activities, in some sense – whose description is sufficiently
specific (for here, surely, Miner abandons much of the dissembling vagueness
which comprises a considerable proportion of the constructed ambiguity that
pervades the article) such that it may be treated as “gist-preserving” in a relatively
clear-cut manner; compare Miner’s description of them with, say, his description
of the waterworks as “a Water Temple of the community, where priests conduct
elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid relatively pure.”23 We can, in other words,
find the “hidden sense” of the activities by treating them as being recognisably
bound to the membership categories “physician” and “pharmacist” respectively;
the complementarity of the described activities maps relatively unproblematically
onto this “commonsensically-known” division of labour as between the categories,
which in turn are provided by a consistency rule making available categories
comprising “parties to the provision of [Western] medicine”. To be sure, this
consistency rule also helps to render the “category-boundedness” solution an
extensible one.
The back-and-forth reflexive ties between the category and its conventionally-
attributable predicate(s) provide also for a categorially-based “checking-” or
“proof-procedure”. Once the activity, “deciding upon medicament”, is tied by
the reader to the category “(Western) physician”, the other activities, or activity
– components such as “writing [the ingredients of these medicaments] down in
an ancient and secret language”, can also be scrutinised by that reader for its
conventional attributability or “boundedness” to that category, the preference
rule being “if the activity can be read as (also) bound to the category ‘physician’,
then read it that way.” Thus, the activities may be taken to form a conventional
“package”, each related through its category-boundedness to “physician”, just
as “physician” and “pharmacist”, etc., may themselves form a category-package
providing for the reading of a sequence of activities as an ensemble. Such
procedures, in turn, add further “proof” to the reader’s correctness in substituting
“(Western) physician” for “medicine man”, as “working out” and “working
through” the equivoque. Thus there is established by the reader a constant back-
and-forth mutual determination of category- and activity-as-described, such
that the category provides for the specific sense of the activity, and the activity
– along with, perhaps, other activities provided proximately in the text – adds
further warrant for the correctness of the reader in providing that, rather than any
other, category. In this sense, too the “potter’s object” simile works – an increasing
definiteness and precision evolves, in turn, during the course of reading and the
deployment of these newly-relevant procedures. I shall shortly take up this back-
and-forth mutual constituting of category and activity (or activities) in another
way, with reference to what ethnomethodologists used to call “the documentary
method of interpretation”, though some caveats and possible reconceptualisations
will also be suggested.
The notion of “typically-found”, familiar, recognisable features or properties

is, in very general terms, extensible to the realm of material objects too. As I
have indicated earlier, our cultural understandings of material objects consist of
our orientations to their place in a given (typical) course of action and, perhaps,
a typical domain of action. To identify the course of action in which the material
object is conventionally incorporated is to identify the object, too, and to provide,

e.g., the name “medical cabinet” such that the term “charm box” comes to stand
as a plausible misnomer.
Such procedures also, then, can work as solutions to puzzles, or to what I might
term “description-” or “referential puzzles”. It is important to note that whilst a
consistency principle for redescription derived from person-description / reference
puzzles (“treat membership categories from the MCD ‘ritual healers’ as categories
from [Western] medical practitioners”) might mobilise an overall scheme of
interpretation which yields a general procedure for re-describing material objects
too, it has to be emphasised that the operation of any such scheme is itself the
reader’s practical accomplishment, achieved “for another first time”, and always
with a mutatis mutandis rider whose deployment itself involves sense making
work – often work of an elaborate nature – on the part of the reader. The achieved
consistencies in the text are important because we are dealing with the text in
course-of-action terms, as a course of reading.
The apparatus of membership categories, MCDs, category-bound predicates

etc., comprises just one dimension of the textual-practices-as-read in Miner’s
article. This apparatus is part and parcel of the corpus of commonsense procedural
knowledge which is assumed, and morally required, to be held by competent
society-members; indeed, “membership” is definable and describable in terms of
the mastery of such linguistic (and other) procedures and practices – practices
which we might generally characterise as “interpretively rich” and “meaning-
saturated”. (In this case, the term “interpretively” is warranted given that there
is an in-principle systematic ambiguity in the text-as-produced that has to be
“interpreted out” by the reader.)
The documentary method of interpretation and reading activities
The apparatus outlined above also instantiates the local operation of a family
of culturally-based “interpretive procedures” which Garfinkel,24 following
Karl Mannheim, in one phase of his work termed “the documentary method of
interpretation” – a set of lay methods of practical reasoning which constitute the
“bedrock level” of members’ sense-making. The concept “documentary method of
interpretation” basically models a set of mundane reasoning procedures tacitly held
and used at the level of membership rather than exclusively and explicitly used by
professional sociological analysts. Much of Garfinkel’s early ethnomethodological
work was cast in terms of this model of members’ sense-making, and I shall
discuss his rescinding of this model later. Suffice it to say that, for the moment,
announcements of its death are premature.
The core feature of members’ use of the documentary method is their imputation
of an underlying coherent pattern to an array of particulars or appearances. Each
particular is treated as evidencing, or as “a document of” this imputed underlying
pattern, and is treated as indexing this pattern (hence Garfinkel’s choice of the
term “indexical particulars” for them). However, there is a constant back-and-forth
reflexive determination of pattern and particular, since each incessantly determines
and re-determines the other. The nature and significance of the particular, as
well as its identifiable relation to the other particulars in the array, is given by
its contextualisation in the pattern, but the pattern itself is imputed through its
particulars, and is inextricable from each particular and from the constellation or
series of particulars considered as an ensemble. The pattern, then, is treated by
society-members as a coherent texture of particulars; the relation between pattern
and appearance may be characterised in terms of the workings of a “hermeneutic
circle”, and in using the documentary method, members may be termed “practical
hermeneuticians” in operating this circle.
A central feature of the documentary method is its “open-textured” character,

particularly as this feature relates to its temporal unfolding and organisation. The
underlying pattern, for instance, characteristically casts a retrospective definition
of “what (these particulars) really were / really meant all along”, “what they turned
out to be”, and the like; or, alternatively, the particulars which subsequently appear
are treated as creating and underscoring an already-established interpretation. Any
change in interpretation may not be a radical one but may involve a subtle shift
or readjustment. The open-textured nature of the documentary method involved
a prospective element also, in that it constantly provides for and incorporates the
possibility that particulars may subsequently appear which may occasion a re-
definition (again maybe involving nuance and “fine-tuning” rather than necessarily
involving a radical re-casting) of the underlying pattern and of the array of particulars
through which the pattern is sustained. What the pattern and the set of appearances
to which the pattern lends coherence “really mean, or were, after all”, and indeed
“meant all along, as it now turns out”, is therefore re-cast, reconstituted and re-
described. As A.V. Cicourel (op. cit.) so succinctly termed it, the documentary
method incorporates a “retrospective-prospective sense of occurrence”; this, of
course, greatly complicates any straightforward characterisation of a course of
reading as occurring in real time.
In an important and recent article, Harold Garfinkel (1996) has disavowed

reference to the documentary method, having come to regard it as, in effect, a
loose covering gloss for temporally evolving orders of phenomenal detail – a gloss
that fails to render the identifying distinctiveness of particular cases, that fails to
capture the distinguishing detail of the case and which thus concedes too much
to Formal Analysis. I demur, at least in part, from Garfinkel’s claims. Much, to
me, depends on the scrupulousness and skill of the practitioner in analysing the
specific setting – as is the case, after all, with all ethnomethodological analysis
irrespective of the rubric under which it is carried out. There are certainly some
mechanical, cognitivistic, even formal-analytic references to the documentary
method; arguably, these are present in some of Garfinkel’s earlier work. However,
one need not refer to the documentary method in a “one-size-fits-all” way which
ensures no specific fit. There is no in-principle reason why the uniquely-attuned
detail of a given setting can not be rendered in terms of the documentary method,
as I hope to indicate below: and there is every reason to suspect that if one entirely
jettisons the documentary method, one sacrifices far too much, particularly in the
sphere of identifiable order and pattern that so concerns Garfinkel in this article.
It is, moreover, questionable as to whether Garfinkel’s article isn’t addressing the
central issues of documentary interpretation in a re-worked form.
Garfinkel’s argument about the documentary method of interpretation as not

capturing the properties of any particular phenomenal field, as in any actual case
“undiscriminating” or “absurdly wrong” is ironic, given the fact that he adapted
the model of sense-making from Karl Mannheim’s original use, namely the
formal-analytic task of formulating peoples’ world views. Garfinkel employed the
model in a very different way, – to conceptualise members’ local work in making
sense of a particular, distinctive phenomenal field. Indeed, one might conceive
of his successive reworkings of the documentary method as moves towards the
progressive excision of cognitivist and formal-analytic elements of the model-
decontextualisation, reification and the rest – and its reorientation towards the
explication of a local phenomenal field. The model becomes increasingly fine-tuned
for capturing the properties of each phenomenal field. The documentary method
of interpretation models members’ contextualisation procedures – retrospective
and prospective, etc. It emphasises the methodic nature of these procedures and
presents members’ commonsense knowledge as procedural rather than purely
propositional.
Of course, the fact that the documentary method of interpretation is a model,

an analyst’s model of members’ sense-making practices, renders it vulnerable
to accusations of at least residual formal analytic or cognitivistic status, along
with the suspicion that it somewhat conflates members’ and analysts’ constructs
and highlights procedures rather than practices. (The term “interpretation” in the
model is, also, problematic: people don’t go around invariably “interpreting” their
situations.) However, the model only remains a gloss if only used by the analyst
in a glossed way rather than being explicatively keyed into the phenomenal detail
of the particular case. Our argument in the first essay of this monograph is that the
given text-as-read constitutes a particular phenomenal field, and the documentary
method is at least one candidate among others for the explication of that field:
Miner’s article is a suitable case in point, particularly if particular, locally bounded,
segments of the text comprise the object of explication – what one might call a
textual gestalt contexture, as part of which the documentary method operates.
Consequently, should the documentary method come to be seen as irremediably

formal-analytic, we can say that many of its properties are amenable to re-
specification along the lines of Aron Gurwitsch’s notion of “gestalt contexture”,
and, indeed, Garfinkel has discussed this notion (see, e.g. Garfinkel, 2002:
p. 257 ff.). Much earlier, Wieder (1974: pp. 184–90) had linked the concept of the
documentary method with that of gestalt contexture, averring that the indexical
particulars collected via the documentary method comprised a gestalt contexture:
here, of course, we see a complementarity as well as a respecification. We might
thus construe textually-given contextures, or their “phenomenal field properties”
in terms of the notions “documentary method” and “gestalt contexture”.
The issue of formalism is, quite clearly, not one that is restricted to issues
concerning the documentary method of interpretation. Consider just some of
Garfinkel’s list of “autochthonous order properties” of formatted queues (Garfinkel
2002: p. 253).
(6) We observe as the accountable properties of the order of service a social

fact’s identifying orderliness.
(7) We observe this: “All of a queue’s properties are locally produced yet a
queue is seen by its local production cohort as a pre-existing propertied
object.”
(8) We observe from one queue to the next, recurrently, “The temporally
exhibited proper ordering of details.”
(9) We observe from one queue to the next, recurrently, “The temporally
exhibited proper ordering of details tied to the organisation of the lived
work of exhibiting just this thing.”
(10) We observe “In the case of the formatted queue the order of service – and
ALL of its associated, dependent, observable and observed properties
– are produced in and as the way its production cohort has positioned
itself so as to exhibit that order of service.”
Is this conceptualisation any less formalistic, any less schematic than the
documentary method? Is there something in this conceptualisation that can not
be expressed in documentary method terms in respect of a given local instance
of (in this case) queuing? There is, clearly, a “pattern and particular” formulation
in Garfinkel’s scheme for the study of queues. Can not the above formulation of
autochthonous properties be seen as little more than a rewording of “documentary
method” issues along “gestalt contexture” lines?
Of course, the conceptualisation of any approach will (and has to) move on,
and certainly new concepts may wrench us from the routine, over-familiar use of
old concepts and afford us a fresh conceptual view of a phenomenon. However,
one must ask whether, even in principle, Garfinkel’s new vocabulary necessarily
sensitises us any more effectively to local phenomenal field properties.
We might admit that there have been, in ethnomethodology, plenty of loose

analytic references to the documentary method: but then, there have been plenty of
loose, indiscriminate uses of, say, sequential analysis in conversation analysis, too
– cases where sequential concerns have been driven through data that are (also)
amenable to other types of analysis. One might say the same of the indiscriminate
use of categorial analysis, too. Where documentary methods have been referred
to and conceptualised in a less cavalier manner, it has successfully rendered
local instances – see, for example, Wieder’s early but effective rendition of local
“tellings” of a convict code in terms of a gestalt contexture / documentary method
(where the former is often presented by Wieder as a product of the operation of
the latter). In other words, poor analytic treatments concerning the documentary
method of interpretation should not be allowed to stand on behalf of all uses, of
more subtle, sensitive and principled uses. Reference to the documentary method
is not a panacea, but in some cases it might serve well to bring to light a “pattern
and particular” configuration, as a way of showing the locally-detailed planfulness,
typicality, reproducibility, etc. of a given, situated complex of activities, i.e. of a
“context”. What is the documentary method if not such a family of contextualising
devices?
It seems clear that the excerpts I have considered above are readily amenable to
strict rather than loose analysis in terms of the documentary method of interpretation,
and that the above analysis cast in terms of membership categories, devices and
CBAs, may be seen as comprising specific and local instances of the work of the
documentary method. For instance, the category “medicine men” can serve as an
underlying pattern, as a locus as it were, for a variety of predicates which constitute
“appearances” or “particulars” of “medicine men” – predicates such as “deciding
upon the ingredients for curative potions” or “writing [them] down in an ancient
and secret language” – and, later, having an imposing temple, the “latipso”, where
more elaborate treatment ceremonies are transacted. Here, the specific sense of the
category and predicates illuminate and determine each other in a reciprocal manner;
the sense of the category and predicates are mutually elaborated and (re-)aligned
and each predicate gains its sense from (readers’ taking into account of) the other
predicates. It is to be noted that these appearances are, strictly speaking, not made
available simultaneously “at a glance”, as is, e.g., often possible in categorising
people one passes in the street. The textual format necessarily involves the serial
rather than the simultaneous introduction of appearances or particulars, each one
retrospectively contributing to the specification or re-specification of the sense of
the foregoing ones. A case in point is the “(few) women (i) afflicted with almost
inhuman hypermammary development” and who (ii) “make a handsome living”

by simply (iii) “going from village to village” and (iv) “permitting the natives to
stare at them for a fee”.
Similarly, the underlying locus “charm box” with its predicated particulars
such as its being (i) “built into the wall”, (ii) “full to overflowing” (with) (iii)
“curative charms and potions”, (iv) “decided upon by the medicine men”, can
also be seen as analysable with reference to the documentary method. The
serial provision of particulars progressively extends, “updates”, specifies or,
perhaps, changes our state of knowledge of the “charm-box”. It is notable that
the specification of the “charm-box” (not to mention “the name” itself) defines
it with reference to its commonly-known place in human activities (for it is this
rather than, say, the extension of the notion of category-boundedness from the
domain of the descriptive apparatus of membership which gives these objects their
conventionally-attributable predicates). The “charm box” case, for example, is a
good example of a local phenomenal field (or perhaps sub-field within the broader
field) whose field properties can be captured and explicated in their distinctive
detail by reference to the documentary method of interpretation. We might say that
the documentary method models how the coherence of (this feature of) the text is,
to use Garfinkel’s 2002 passim, own terms, a procedural coherence. It captures
Garfinkel’s claim that the sense of a local setting inheres in how that sense is
produced: what we understand is coterminous with how we understand it.
It is also to be noted that the description of the “charm-box” trades upon

the membership category “medicine man” and therefore upon all the predicates
attributed in the text to that category. Thus, one puzzle in the text intertwines
with another, and this in turn provides for the mutatis mutandis extensibility of
the solution which derives from one particular puzzle; witness, again, the way in
which that extensibility is both a retrospective and prospective one, where if one
effects “correction” of the planned misnomer “herbalists”, one can then work back
to a resolution of a prior category, “medicine men”. In this way, the puzzles might
be said to have a network of overlapping properties.
Indeed, careful reference to the documentary method helps us understand

how practical solutions to the puzzles are arrived at and how they are used. It
might be noted that some predicate of the membership category “medicine man”,
or of the material object “charm-box” might, say, be relatively transparently
re-describable as a predicate of the category “(Western) physician”, rather than
“medicine man”. The upshot of this is that the replacement of the former by the
latter category – through the reader’s active “reversing” of the irony or perspective
by incongruity – is established through, and acts as a rubric for, the re-description
of the predicates provided in the text. Here, then, is a prime instance of later
appearances occasioning a revision of earlier ones, the revision being effected
through the reciprocal back-and-forth consultation of pattern and particulars.
Such pattern-detection and revision comprises an exclusively cultural operation

rather than an operation conceived in mentalistic “information (text)-processing”
terms, as is the case with some of the textual analysts mentioned above (see Quéré,
1996 and Watson, 1998 for a general position on Cognitivism and Mentalism).
The operation of the documentary method of interpretation involves members’
conjoint use of lay cultural resources in situ to make culturally-standard sense.
Two more things must be emphasised here. Firstly, – again with reference
to the “potter’s object” simile – it is not the analyst’s intention to predict if or
when the reader will arrive at the “realisation” that some item-as-described can
be attributed to (say) a category not explicitly “made available” in the text. This
may occur, if it occurs, very early in the text (even the title and opening paragraph
are, together, redolent with hints, furnishing instructions for reading and clues)
or very late, or on the first, second or subsequent readings. These are contingent
matters. Secondly, and relatedly, there is a variety of ways, or points of entry,
through which the reader may arrive at the “realisation” that some textual item
may be re-described, or that a misnomer is operative. For example, with reference
to the “medicine man” / “(Western) physician”) example above, the reader may,
as I have observed, commonsensically “recognise” Miner’s characterisation of the
categorial “division of labour” as between “medicine men” and “herbalists”. As I
have also observed, the reader may find that this division of labour is somewhat
thinly disguised by Miner compared, perhaps, with e.g., his densely-deceptive
descriptions of the “small font” with its “holy water” and “rites of ablution”. The
varying levels of deceptiveness comprise just one of the arenas of contingency
connected with these “points of entry”.
Similarly, the puns, equivoques and terms that, at least as glosses, “travel” in
some sense between the misnomer and the category-title that the reader may come
to decide is “really intended” by the author (e.g. “medicine” or “medicine man”)
may constitute the occasion of such a re-description. Again, the mis-spellings
(“Pa-To-Mac”), reverse spellings (“Notgnihsaw”), combinational forms such as
reverse mis-spellings (“latipso”) and the various gist-preserving devices (e.g.
preserving the gist of, say, Western medical/hygiene beliefs in the description of
purportedly “ritual” practices) all comprise hints and clues provided by Miner
as well as – once “realisation” has occurred – providing a rich source of wit and
humour and a way of finding “similar” humour in “similar” examples.25 The hints,
of course, also occur even when humour is not involved, e.g. in the first line of
paragraph 3, where the Nacirema are characterised as having a “highly-developed
market economy” – something readers might not, perhaps, perceive as congruent
with a “tribal society”. This characterisation “breaks out of frame”.
If and when such “realisations” will occur, or on which particular occasion of

reading, cannot be codified by the analyst in any “recipe-like” manner. Readers’
practices in arriving at such “realisations” involving re-descriptions would comprise
and require an empirical study in itself, in the way that A.W. McHoul (op. cit.) has
already attempted to devise a protocol for the examination of readers’ work per se
rather than inferentially “deriving” that work simply from his own reading of the
text or from some theory-driven characterisation of that text. Indeed, this would
comprise a necessary next step in the analysis of readers; textual practices with
regard to Miner’s paper.
One important point is that “realisation” may not, strictly speaking, be

occasioned by intra-textual sources at all. “Realisation” and re-description may
derive from sources which are in no direct way integral to the text as such. To be
sure, it seems to be a (largely unrecognised) pitfall of those analysts who confine
themselves to using texts as data or, as is often the case, as the occasion for
theorizing about reading / textual practices “in general”, that they treat the text as
a self-contained entity. It is still often assumed that all decisions, imputations, etc.,
made by the reader derive from “the text” itself. Such a fallacy in turn derives from
the removal of the texts from the praxiological context of social relations of which
they are constituents, as, again, Smith so aptly observes. Texts, just as is the case
with other material objects, must ultimately be understood in terms of their place
in courses of action and interaction. Smith notes, for instance, that written texts
are constituents of social actions and of the social relations which those actions
accomplish and sustain. And anyway, we are always, inevitably, dealing with
texts-as-read-in-a-given-context. Thus, contextual contingencies such as being
informed by others of the “key” to understanding Miner’s text may well figure in
the reader’s approach to the text, whether it be an initial or subsequent reading.
In other words, we need to recall the comments made in the first essay in this
monograph, concerning the “text as a phenomenal field”: so it is, but it also furnishes
“field details” for a “broader”, enveloping phenomenal field. To be sure, the text
may well be recast as part of the recasting of the enveloping field. For instance, a
seminar of first-year university students may recast the field on the second, or even
nth, reading through, perhaps moving from taking Miner’s article at “face value”
to reading it as a “spoof”. This is a major recasting of the phenomenal field but,
of course, the fact that students are doing this in a seminar with this being the set
text is also part of the field. Thus, the issue may be “what can we (or what are we
supposed to) learn from this?” Thus, realising that there is a puzzle and solving
that puzzle may well be understood as part of an educational task or the making of
an educational point, and more specifically, an educational point about sociology
or social anthropology. Texts, then, are not freestanding phenomenal fields. Their
particular constitution depends upon the weave of purposes, relevances, activities,
etc. that we gloss for convenience as “context” – context for readers themselves,
not just for the analyst.
Textual analysis: Further considerations on temporal organisation
Bureaucratic relations, scientific relations and discourse, management forms,

etc., all rely unrelievedly upon an immensely varied array of textual materials –
computer printouts and video displays, wage cheque notifications, hotel registration
forms, faxes, drivers’ licences, credit cards, street signs, court orders, etc., are all
just as “textual” as, say, works of literature, dramatic scripts or musical scores.
Smith suggests that such texts, and “textual flows” of information, are constituents
of social relations rather than, say, merely the passive products of the operation
of the cognitive equipment of individuals psychologically conceived; texts are
generically social. The issuing of a ’bus ticket, for example, is a move in the course
of taking a ’bus journey. Taking a ’bus journey is, then, an instance of what Smith
terms a “textually-mediated social action” and the purchasing and inspection of a
ticket are “textual events”. We might provisionally refer to this phenomenon as the
“local within the local” – the text as a phenomenal field operative within a more
enveloping (but still strictly local) phenomenal field.
Social relations and the social actions that compose them is mediated and,
in certain ways, structured and oriented in their character and course by these
textual-materials-in-use. It is in this sense that Smith regards texts as “active”
constituents of social relations. They are activated by (say) readers or users in the
course of producing social actions. I may also add to Smith’s observations the
notions of texts as, perhaps, quintessentially reflexive features of social relations
and courses of action. Wage-cheque notifications report in a variety of ways on
the employee’s work, her/his relations with the State (tax, pension and national
insurance deduction items) and so forth. In a strong sense, as I have noted above,
texts comprise particularly perspicuous examples of the self-reporting and self-
describing aspects of social actions, relations and settings – an essential feature of
our making, displaying and therefore sharing of sense concerning these practical
matters. Texts report and make sense of, and advance, local social relations from
within those selfsame relations. They are integral features of those relations. As
loci of descriptive, sense-making resources, texts elaborate the sense of their
enveloping settings and are elaborated by them: that is reflexivity.
Smith’s analysis has the great virtue of directing our analytic attention to the
frequent analytic requirement to look at “other” things than simply the intrinsic
organisation and format of the “texts themselves”. Smith directs us toward the
need for more than an intra-textual analysis and it is in this regard that my study
can be deemed as no more than preliminary (indeed, McHoul, op. cit., some time
ago initiated a study which treats readers’ work in this broader frame of reference).
Of course, one may, for certain analytic purposes, legitimately (at least pro tem)
make a purely and self-consciously methodological decision to treat texts as
self-contained entities, but it would be a mistake to reify this self-containedness;
again, we are always dealing with texts-as-read and thus must always attend
analytically to the “text-activating” practices of readers in certain local contexts,

e.g. educational seminars.
However, Smith’s recommendation that texts be treated as constituents of

“broader” weaves of courses of action can itself be limiting if we disattend the
(members’) fact that texts can be treated in the first instance as self-contained
phenomena, too; after all, we do not need to have been on holiday with the person
from whom we receive a postcard in order to understand a report on that holiday. To
be sure, we must treat the text’s orientation to a broader course of action as part of
its self-contained character. In this regard, there is a reflexive orientation between
text and enveloping context, the “curtilage” of the text, where the phenomenal
field details of each exhibit an orientation to the other: text addresses context
and vice versa – each elaborates the other, and the “two” are in fact reciprocally
constitutive of each other, are, in a sense, each permeable to the other. Whilst we
may, perhaps, refer to “text” and (oriented-to) “curtilage” in terms of “the local
within the local” we must not overdetermine the boundaries between the two.
In the case of Miner’s article, we can, then, turn Smith’s analysis “on its head”
in certain respects, although it must be said that in her own article she tends de
facto to treat the texts she examines as self-contained phenomena, for all practical
purposes. The realisation that Miner’s text is “really about U.S. society” rather
than, say, some virtually unknown tribe, may indeed come from some intra-textual
source, from some hint, clue or irony, as I have said; however, such realisation
may well be brought about contingently by extra-textual matters. For instance,
what readers might come to describe as the “real meaning” of the text, rather
than its face value, may be furnished as part of a set of pedagogic relations, e.g.
the giving of an Introductory Sociology / Social Anthropology or high school
course, where the topic is, perhaps, that of ethnocentrism, the description of one’s
own society in terms usually reserved for other, very different, societies. Or the
classroom context may be of a somewhat more advanced kind, where the issues
concerning the conceptual apparatus and terminology of anthropological analysis
and its relation to the mundane conceptions of the people being studied may be
subject to consideration – a kind of “sociology of sociology” / “anthropology of
anthropology”. Or, (relatedly), the “instructed reading” of the text may be that the
seminar is about “anthropological or sociological writing”.
Consequently, the teacher may point out that the anthropologist as an active
describer of a society is very much a constitutive part of the circumstances s/he
is describing rather than a merely passive receptor of societal information. Or a
more phenomenologically-oriented teacher may well point out to his/her students
the ways in which we may suspend belief in anthropological accounts, the ways
in which suspensions work and may be re-cast. Or a postmodernist might point
out the ways in which “otherness” or “alterity” are constructed through discursive
practice rather than, say, its being an intrinsically-defining feature of the object of
study in itself.
There is, then, a wide variety of occasions where the “solutions” to what come
to be seen as “practical puzzles” may be furnished, ab initio or otherwise (and again
the temporal placement may be variable but is always important) from a source
conceived as “beyond” the text itself. Indeed, it may never lead to or involve the
actual reading of the text at all by some students (not to mention the lecturer).
How the revelation of the “real, underlying meaning” of the text occurs is, then,
a contingent matter involving both retrospective and prospective concerns. Given
such a context, people may bring their “revelations” to a first reading of the Miner
article or to a subsequent reading of it. Alternatively, an informed anthropological
reader may bring to the text the specific item of knowledge that the anthropologist
Ralph Linton in the 1930s recommended that his American colleagues look at
their own society, that they embark upon a culturally-indigenous anthropology
– as indeed Miner himself indicates. This item of substantive knowledge – whose
possession is largely contingent on membership of a particular epistemic community
– might in turn allow an informed reader to turn Miner’s reference to Linton into
a critical item for the (re-)reading of the article. Again, we have an illustration of
the contingent character of “revelation”, where the contingency involves, in large
part, differential “contexts of knowledge”. However, it must be pointed out that
these “other” phenomena “beyond” the text are all part of a configuration of items,
each of which lends sense to the other(s), and thus cannot be isolated or extracted
from the others; as I have said, even an item considered as self-contained will
exhibit an orientation to, and embedding in, these “other” items.
However, in, say, the lecture-room or seminar context described, it might be

observed that the local nexus of social relations “reflects back” upon, and primarily
confers (a) sense on, the text rather than vice versa, i.e. we have the obverse of
the pattern described by Smith, though I would not wish to present this matter in
“either-or” terms. As we have indicated above, textual items elaborate the sense of
the praxiological contexts of which they are integral components and are in turn
elaborated by (participants’ orientation to) those selfsame contexts. Nonetheless,
the precise nature of these varied reflexivities needs to be teased out, again with
reference to the documentary method of interpretation respecified in terms of
gestalt contexture (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 176–9).
Whatever the way in which “realisation” occurs, however and whenever the key
to what readers may construe as the “real meaning” of the text, the “solution(s)”
to the practical “puzzle(s)” is uncovered, analytic reference to readers’ use of the
sense-making practices comprising the documentary method of interpretation
will assist us greatly. At the very least, reference to the documentary method
allows us to avoid treating indexical particulars atomistically, to avoid mistaking
the term “self-contained” as also connoting “in vacuo”: any such connotation
would be misconceived. In this respect, another unacknowledged aspect of the

“documentary method of interpretation” is that it furnishes a bulwark against the
decontextualisation of this or that item, whether or not the item be textual in nature.
In this sense too we should be wary of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”:
before we jettison the documentary method, for all its alleged formalism and the
rest, we should be sure that our reconceptualisation preserves all the advantages,
pointers and caveats comprised within it: but is can be respecified.
I have already indicated the way in which the documentary method operates
at the “local” (e.g. single puzzle-specific) level – the fundamental and generic
level, I contend, in the text. We may now observe that it also works to provide
us with a greater understanding of how the solution to a given puzzle can be
made by the reader to work as (again, with due attention to detail differences)
an extensible solution, a solution that works “over the course (of reading)”. The
puzzle-as-solved can come to be treated by the reader as a particular instance of
some family of referential puzzles, e.g. the family of identity puzzles of “medicine
men”, “herbalists”, “holy-mouth-men”, and the like, or the family of “material
objects”, puzzles such as “charm-box”, “small font” etc. A “due attention to detail
differences” rider is required because the links between the individual cases of
a given family of puzzles are, in Wittgensteinian terms, to be characterised in
terms of family likenesses / resemblances. The instances of the family are not
precisely or totally coterminous or duplicative, but instead are connected through
overlapping similarities at various levels, though they are also characterised by
differing properties, differing emphases or differing centrality of some common
properties rather than others, etc. As part of the identification of locally-situated
cases of such families in the text, the reader can use the solution to one practical
puzzle to (a) find other cases of that family of puzzles, and (b) use the solution as
a putative discovery procedure, further puzzle-finding and / or solution-searching
procedure, for others of that family.
Thus, an underlying pattern or general rubric is established for a significant

proportion of the text, where each puzzle-as-solved serves as a particular, an
“appearance”, of the general pattern, again with many “let it pass” riders and
other ad hoc localisation practices. The general rubric for identity puzzles, for
instance, was “read the collection of tribal ritual identities as familiar US / Western
identities” (particularly where an MCD such as “medical identities” may be seen as
covering a substantial subset of identity puzzles). At this juncture, the reader may
begin to treat textual devices in terms of “solution-before-puzzle”, as Anderson
and Sharrock (op. cit., p. 86) put it (though in relation to a different textual
context). To somewhat modify their terms, given the availability of a solution, a
set of puzzles has to be found for which that solution can stand – with all due detail
modification – as a solution. In this sense, a given solution can come to gather
together a “family” of puzzles and, in turn, to make an array of puzzles visible as a
family, linked at least by resemblances if not by a single strict criterion.
Similarly, the “family” of material object puzzles might be seen to be subject

to a general rubric of re-description from “ritual objects” to the “familiar practical
objects” of Western / US culture, particularly those connected with health and
hygiene. Since this rule for solving “material object puzzles” is an exhaustive
one (within this text), the rule gives, and confirms, the sense-in-common of
these puzzles as an ensemble, as a “family”. It must, though, be emphasised that
although this sense-in-common may be treated by lay readers and analysts alike as
imparting a strand of continuity to the text, the primary level is that of each device
as a locally-situated item. The “solution” can only operate across some variation
of detail in regard to the contingencies that comprise this local situatedness.
The text thus appears as a phenomenal field apperceived as a gestalt contexture,

but one which – to again invoke the “potter’s object” simile – is an emergent
phenomenon, assembled through the progressive articulation of its constituent
parts. The pattern comes into view over the course. The gestalt has the temporal
form of what McHoul (op. cit.) terms a “scenic course”, such that a given, locally-
situated puzzle and solution could furnish what he calls a “key” to a number of
other features in the text. The “re-organisation of the reading of the text” (again,
Czyzewski), may, therefore, involve a gestalt switch, though typically with none of
the instantaneousness commonly associated with the term “switch”. More routinely,
however, the pattern evolves not as a radical alternation but as an evolving one that
is best characterised in terms of the “preservation” and “transformation” – terms
introduced by Sacks in his lectures on a rather different phenomenon.
Indeed, McHoul’s closely-observed study of persons actually reading texts

– pace its residual cognitivism – helps provide a protocol for the next step in
a “textual analysis” of Miner’s work, i.e. the audio- or video-recording and
detailed transcription of readers’ active work as “pattern detectors” in relation to a
particular scenic course. (In this respect, the current study might best be described
as an utterly preliminary probe.) Despite Garfinkel’s later position, McHoul, too,
stresses that the bedrock level of operation of the documentary method is the level
of local devices or operations (taking into account their varied manifestations), and
it is through this local level that underlying patterns to the course of reading “as
a whole” (glossed as “what the text is about”) are imputed. The solution-before-
puzzle procedure, outlined above, is a case in point.
As McHoul also points out, and as we have already found, a course of reading
operates in a glossed overall sense in real time (I might term it real reading
time), but reference to the documentary method helps us unravel the many issues
relating to the temporal operations which may be performed through such a
course – operations which, as I have observed, operate a constant back-and-forth,
rather than in a strictly “linear”, manner. To be sure, I feel that the examination
of an article which works through a “perspective by incongruity” might be a
particularly fruitful way in which to examine the “retrospective-prospective
sense of occurrence”, which is such a central feature of the documentary method,

regarding a course of reading. The study of the perspective by incongruity can
itself do incongruity work.
Such properties of the documentary method may be seen to be particularly

highlighted when readers are identifying and “remedying” the planned misnomers
through which, in large part, the “perspective by incongruity” takes on its form.
The additional reference of the “apparatus” of membership categorisations,
MCDs and category-bound predicates further assists in empirically specifying
how the “perspective by incongruity”, with its planned misnomers, is specifically
“delivered”, again with reference to the varieties of temporal operation (activities
providing for the “working back” to a category etc.).
As I indicated with regard to the “potter’s object” simile, reference to the

temporal operations integral to the documentary method is central in that, for
instance, the method provides for the observation that some subsequent particular /
“appearance” may force in retrospect a revision, redefinition or respecification of
earlier ones, and for the imputation of a new or modified underlying imputation.
I can thereby begin to examine the phenomenon of re-reading under a different
rubric (say, “Western cultural identities and objects” as opposed to “tribal / ritual
identities and objects”). Consequently, I can move away from the sometimes-held
assumption that texts are read only once – let alone in toto – by a reader. Similarly,
the prospective sense of occurrence is deployed when (in this case) the solution
to a puzzle placed earlier in a text, or in an earlier reading, provides the rubric
for the solution of subsequent ones. From this, it may be seen that considerations
of temporal procedures in reading extend far beyond the serial order of events in
the text and/or “in reality” – I can, for instance, read the day’s obituary listings in
the newspaper without assuming that the persons listed there died in alphabetical
order.
There are very many other textual devices in Miner’s sly and artful essay
which could be analytically examined. The title alone deserves considerable
analytic attention. Another is Miner’s attempt at formulating – however allusively
– a concluding moral for the paper, in the same way that a fable or parable
possesses such a moral. The moral takes the form of a concluding quotation from
Malinowski, and could easily stand as a caution against Western ethnocentrism
(though itself showing some strong elements of the very standpoint that it warns
against). “Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the
developed civilisation, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But
without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical
difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of
civilisation.” This quotation, redolent with irony, not only works to present the
paper as a cautionary tale (for teaching or whatever purposes) but, of course, also
works as a closing clue to the “real meaning” of the article to those readers who
have persisted in taking it at face value, i.e. as a final occasion for retrospectively
revising “what the article means (after all)” and of re-organizing the reading of the
earlier “local specifics” of the article.
Similarly, the opening paragraph of the article presents prospectively-usable

clues, including what some might read as a curiously “un-anthropological”
comment about the Nacirema showing “the extremes to which human behaviour
can go” and, indeed, projects a judgemental context for the subsequent text. A
moral does not need to come just at the end of a fable. In all, a perspective by
incongruity can raise moral issues into view, too: “how would you like to be
written about in these terms?”
In this sense, we see that the stylistic unity to which I have referred above has
a practical, not just aesthetic, quality for the reader, allowing her/him to identify
an overall interpretive frame of reference (ritual or magic, or, for the initiated
reader, its transformability into Western scientific and hygienic practices) through
a diverse range of particular textual devices. This, for instance, provides a general
domain within which particular solutions to particular puzzles, hints, puns,
anomalies, etc., can be sought, though the provision of such a general domain can
provide no more than an interpretive backdrop informing the specific local work
involved in such a search. In this, though, we can again see the interpretive process
of reflexive determination of particulars and overall pattern which comprises “the
documentary method of interpretation” as a family of lay sense-making practices
held in common by members. Despite my attempted defence, we may well, in
the light of Garfinkel’s recent work, have to reject the documentary method, but
if we do we must be careful not to lose the distinct advantages it carries as a
characterisation of local contextualising devices. As indicated above, the most
appropriate respecification, one repeatedly invoked in Garfinkel’s recent work but
that has been always present in EM, (e.g. Wieder, 1974) employs the notion of
gestalt contexture. EM has developed the concept from Aron Gurwitsch’s original
formulation, with an even greater emphasis on the identifying phenomenal detail
of local social orders, and the concept clearly preserves the focus on indexicalities
and reflexivities.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I hope to have shown how Miner’s characterisation of the Nacirema
counts on the locally-instantiated textual use of a perspective by incongruity. I
hope also to have shown some of the devices of redescription which form the
systematic basis of the incongruity perspective Miner utilises, and which generate
and sustain that perspective. The issue of description and re-description has been
discussed with reference to (a) the naming of specific objects or implements, and
(b) the “substitution” of membership categories, i.e. identification categories for

persons.
In the next chapter in this book I shall show how many of the textual devices
analysed above are employed in an actual case of social-anthropological /
sociological writing, namely Erving Goffman’s use, in many of his publications, of
similes in his analysis of communication conduct and impression management.
Through the analysis of a parodic piece of writing, this essay has tried to bring
into view the mundane foundations of the analytic instruments of professional
sociology or anthropology and how the analytic extensions and transforms of
these instruments operate to produce a sociological / anthropological account.
Sociologists might say of this that they are of course aware of the natural
language and naturally-theoretic aspects of their analyses. Maybe, maybe not (I
suspect that often they are not) but the issue is not one of simply “being aware” of
these issues and then passing on and performing the analysis as though they did
not matter or simply by default: we might refer to this as a trivial “awareness” of
the issues.
Instead, we might hope that sociologists and anthropologists might begin to

take on a non-trivial awareness of the way their actual accounts are formed as
particular confluences of mundane and professional knowledge – particularly
“knowledge how”. What would such an awareness involve? It would involve an
extensive appreciation of the profound methodological consequences of these
issues. It would, as a consequence, involve much less confusion of the lay and
the professional in their accounts, much less of a readiness to allow the former
to masquerade as the latter, much less of a willingness to tolerate the conceptual
confusions, logical disjunctions and mistakes concerning analytic status that are
attendant upon the conflation of technical and untechnical language. It might also
help sociologists and anthropologists to understand how their accounts are shaped
by ordinary language and laic textual conventions, a matter about which they
seem, currently, to be largely ignorant or at least uninterested.
Chapter 4
The Textual Incarnation of
Sociological Analysis:
The Case of Erving Goffman’s Writings
Initial observations: Goffman and sociological description
This chapter substantiates, amplifies and, I hope, advances the three major
concerns of this volume so far. These are: a) a concern with ordinary, sense-making
practices as incarnated in texts, b) a concern with the textually-incarnate making
of professional sociological sense and c) a concern to explicate the intertwinings
between the two, e.g. how professional social scientists’ writings necessarily
employ and depend upon ordinary-language textual instruments, where features
of analytic reasoning such as (most fundamentally) practices of sociological
description and redescription are ineluctably shaped by and through the mundane
linguistic-textual resources that are deployed. Thus, issues concerning variations
of alignment of professional practice with ordinary reasoning, both oral and
textual, are treated as focal – an issue that animated much of Alfred Schütz’
phenomenological philosophy and Harold Garfinkel’s early EM studies: we may
(or may not) nowadays see the latter studies as “proto-ethnomethodology”, but
this is no reason at all to disattend the issues they raised. Indeed, the publication of
Garfinkel’s book Seeing Sociologically helps, albeit indirectly, to keep these issues
at the forefront of our attention.
In the “Nacirema” chapter we have examined a sort of double irony. Miner’s

perspicuously ironic “take” on social scientists’ own methodological ironies, as
evidenced in their (re-)descriptions of mundane reasoning, effectuates a dual shift
in our perspective on professional textual practice. In the “Going for Brothers”
chapter, we have examined the way social scientists textually formulate ordinary
practice within a minority community as the practices of that community.
The present chapter examines some of the textually-based metonymic devices

employed by Erving Goffman in much (though not all) of his writing. It considers
Goffman’s writing, in the relevant parts of his work, as quite systematic exercises
in the sociological description of mundane practices. That is to say: as Schütz tells
us at considerable length, the professional sociologist encounters a “ready-made”
social world, a world that has already been described by ordinary society-members
using received laic descriptions. In this sense, to lay members and professional
social scientists alike, the world appresents itself as “pre-constituted”.
The social scientist, then, is in principle presented with an analytic decision –

whether to explicitly preserve the phenomenological integrity of these primordial
descriptions in her/his second order “professional” descriptions or whether to set
up those descriptions “in competition” with the primordial ones. For very many
social scientists, however, there seems to be no explicit decision; they simply
inherit and adopt a sociological tradition, itself “ready made”, where that decision
has already been taken and, for them, “naturalised”.
This charge, though, can not be levelled against Goffman. He was a self-aware
user of metonyms, and acknowledged the methodological stance involved, and
systematically employed it to a specific end. For instance, he cited as an influence
some of Kenneth Burke’s analyses of style and rhetoric. Thus, he said,
Burke, Kenneth Burke, was an influence in somewhat the same way. Louis
Wirth, at the time we were all students in Chicago, felt that Permanence and
Change was the most important book in social psychology. So we all read that
and that was a real influence on us all, I think.
(Verhoeven, 1993).
Whilst Goffman states that Burke’s later work was less of an influence, we can
also note that other elements of his analysis did find their way into Goffman’s
thought. Burke’s “pentad of motive terms” is a case in point. Indeed, one way in
which one can effectuate a methodological irony is for the professional analyst to
alter a given ratio of motive terms away from the ratio deployed by lay members
in their ordinary circumstances. However, the influence of Burke’s work on that of
Goffman is not restricted to ironicising devices and, anyway, in the present chapter
our focus will be on features of his deployment of methodological irony other
than those involving Burke’s pentad. Burke’s pentad is part of his “dramatistic”
approach, to which Goffman’s dramaturgical approach shows some elective
affinity.
The “systematic” aspect is important, not least because it is so often missed,

even by sociologists taken to be aficionados. Phillip Manning (1992: p. 15)
tells us that Goffman’s use of a theatrical analogy affords us “an idiosyncratic
map of the social world”. Manning is in good company; Pierre Bourdieu, in his
obituary to Goffman in the newspaper Le Monde says that Goffman’s work “can
not be defined in terms of technique”,1 (Bourdieu, 1983: p. 112). These, though,
are extraordinarily misleading statements, as I hope to indicate in this chapter.
The real question is, though: how did these two writers, one a commentator on
Goffman’s work and the other a general sociological luminary, so spectacularly
miss the point?
I suggest that they have failed to grasp the point because they have failed to
undertake a full textual explication along the lines of the three major considerations
I enumerated in the opening paragraph of this chapter. Without a thoroughgoing
attempt to deepen the analysis of Goffman’s texts along those lines, the rigorous
and exhaustive patterning and systematicity of Goffman’s analysis can not even
initially be identified, let alone approached. The “Goffmanian phenomenon” is
lost.
More elliptical bearings on Goffman’s systematicity – elliptical if for no other

reason than that Goffman himself was sceptical about sociologists’ claims as to
what they were doing – came in a discussion I had with him at his home at 2048
Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, in March 1976. The topic was some items of
canonical CA and I expressed my disquiet at the apparently “mechanistic” cast
of these particular items. Goffman’s rhetorical response was that his goal was to
produce “as mechanistic an analysis as possible” of communication conduct. He
was no opponent of “systematics” and no proponent of “soft qualitative analysis”.
This chapter will consider (sometimes critically) the strongly systematic

element in Goffman’s work – elements that involve his use of particular textually-
sited stylistic devices. I shall consider the alignment of these devices with lay
members’ instruments of ordinary reasoning. This issue is a difficult one for
the alignments are multiplex. Largely, though, in setting up incongruities with
members’ conceptions, Goffman relies very heavily on laic resources for his (re-
)description of ordinary practice – not least the resources that his readers bring to
his texts: in terms of reasoning, he relies on such congruences.
My interest, then, in Goffman’s analysis derives in part from a more generic

interest in how sociologists describe the phenomena they observe and how these
descriptions at the analytic level are related to society-members’ common-sense
description of those “selfsame” phenomena. Consequently, I intend in this chapter
to examine the stylistic devices Goffman uses in the linguistic-textual presentation
of his work and through which he attempts to render visible the mundane objects
of everyday life. The observation that the commonplace phenomena of ordinary
life unremittingly resist any attempt to render them visible is often made but
seldom dealt with. Garfinkel usually refers to this difficulty as “getting the goldfish
to become aware of the water”; that is, it is difficult to strip away the taken-for-
grantedness which is an integral feature of such a phenomena and which all but
buries them from view in the natural attitude – an attitude all too pervasively
employed by very many sociologists. These phenomena are, to be sure, taken into
account by lay society-members but are taken into account in a routine way, as part
of the background of manifest action rather than as explicit matters.
It is no secret that Goffman uses – particularly in his early work – a variety of

metaphors and similes in order to illuminate what is usually left in the penumbra.
Such analogies include terms derived from what one might call a variety of
“language games” – the theatre, team games, confidence tricks, espionage etc.,
and also from sources that do not derive from conventional social domains, such
as his reference to ethology in defining ritual (Goffman 1971: p. 62), as Yves
Winkin (1983: p. 111) has reminded us; hence Goffman regales us with ersatz
ethological terms like “family flock” (1971: p. 20).
I hope in this chapter to indicate how an examination of Goffman’s textual

devices enables us to address two distinct analytical tasks with regard to his work.
Each of these tasks, in its own way, involves our paying attention to the foundational
issue of the descriptive apparatus used by sociologists. Whatever “explanations”
the professional sociologist proposes, they are all premised on (and, in turn, help
to constitute) on her/his prior description of the phenomenon to be explained: of
course, such descriptions are most often assumed rather than topicalised. What,
then, do we need to do to topicalise Goffman’s descriptive work?
The first, analytically prior, task is to turn Goffman’s textual devices into objects
of analytic attention on their own behalf, and I shall indicate some approaches
and analytic resources that might be mobilised in the pursuit of this. I propose
this approach largely because I believe that the treatment of Goffman’s family of
stylistic or textual devices as topics for analytic examination in their own right hits
one of the few analytic standpoints from which it is possible to characterise and
assess his work. One cannot, I feel, find the right analytic level if one is wedded,
for instance, to the notion of a sociological “perspective”. We may not agree with
Bourdieu that one cannot conceive of Goffman as having had a “technique”,
and I shall hope to document this disagreement by showing that when it comes
down to the level of specific discursive practices, Goffman can be seen as having
an identifiable technique, and without properly characterising this technique an
appropriate analytic appreciation cannot be established. This is stylistic analysis
deeply conceived. If Goffman has a “sociological perspective” it is an emergent
one. It is my argument that a proper characterisation cannot be undertaken without
a systematic consideration of the mundane linguistic resources Goffman deploys
in this work: I shall return to this issue below.
An additional attraction of a critical appreciation premised upon a linguistic

examination of Goffman’s stylistic devices is that it bypasses the pitfalls inherent
in the kind of approach which conceives of Goffman’s analysis in terms of some
ad hoc aspect or other of his biography or biographical epoch or situation, as, for
instance, L. Boltanski (1973: pp. 127–47) has attempted in France. I tend to agree
with Jeff Coulter (1979: pp. 164–6), in his comments on this stock sociological
move, when he says that such an approach runs the risk of working as an ad
hominem discrediting device (as it also and generically does in its lay uses), and
as such disattends the reasoning which informs the analysis under scrutiny. In that
an analysis of the textual devices necessarily involves an examination of such
reasoning procedures, I feel that not only will it find the right level but that it also
potentiates a critique which addresses, in a grounded way, rather than arbitrarily
downgrading or undercutting, that reasoning. My central argument, namely that
Goffman’s work comprises a major exercise in sociological re-description, will, I
hope, allow us to preserve Goffman’s practical reasoning.
As A.R. Louch (1966: pp. 213–16) points out, Goffman’s analysis involves
the establishing of a (loose) “frame of reference” rather than a “theory” in the
explanatory-validatory sense. In other words, Goffman brings together a variety
of observations under the aegis of some internally coherent pattern. The particular
frame of reference Goffman mobilises in much of his work belongs to a class
which the analyst of style and rhetoric Kenneth Burke (1965: Part II) has termed a
“perspective by incongruity”; indeed, as I have said Goffman himself acknowledges
his general indebtedness to Burke’s dramaturgical analysis. I think it can be shown
that elements of a perspective by incongruity can be found throughout Goffman’s
work and not just in the early pieces where similes and metaphors are most densely
found (see my comments below, and D.T. Helm, 1982). Goffman’s extension of
a dramaturgical metaphor / simile is a classic example of the mobilising of a
perspective by incongruity, where a set of terms from one form of life, the theatre,
is extended to what members, in the natural attitude, might well see as a very
different form of life. Thus, Goffman capitalises greatly on what the philosopher
Gilbert Ryle would term a “category mistake”.
This is not to say that members in the natural attitude never use dramaturgical
terms in metaphorical ways. Indeed, Goffman unrelievedly relies upon his
readers’ common-sense linguistic ability to do this: however, he extrapolates
such metaphoric uses well beyond their conventional locations in ordinary usage.
So, for instance, Goffman’s notions of “dramaturgical loyalty”, “dramaturgical
discipline” and “dramaturgical circumspection” (1959: pp. 212–28) focus attention
upon the displayed and exhibited features of adherence to norms, whether these
norms pertain to family life, household-servant relations, management of stores
and filling stations, streetwise hustlers, professional life and so on, and is designed
to highlight what Goffman takes to be formal similarities in such features.
Goffman’s use of similes and other tropes, is then, a major part of his “machine
for making formal properties”, in the tradition of his teacher E.C. Hughes and
others in the “symbolic interactionist” genre of sociology (though Goffman
himself can not really be conceived as a symbolic interactionist tout court). As we
shall shortly see, his is a stylistic technique that extends a comparative one used by
initiators and proponents of various strands in the “Chicago School”, all of which,
by his own account, influenced Goffman.
We might, then, say that Goffman’s employment of a “perspective by

incongruity” comprises a production procedure for formal analysis – or, as
we shall see, an array of such procedures. In a strong sense, perspective by

incongruity is a device for “figuring up” what are held to be formal similarities and,
simultaneously, for relegating to the background matters of “content”. However,
the fact that content is so relegated does not mean that it is still not counted upon
for “recognition” or “face validity” purposes.
Another, seemingly unacknowledged, aspect of the linguistic / textual

constitution of Goffman’s analysis is the way in which he adopts and appropriates
local, often subterranean, “lingoes” in order not only to characterise the phenomenon
to which the “lingo” is indigenous2 but also to establish formal similarities with
activities and settings other than the indigenous one.
Indeed, the very title of one of his early papers, ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’
(Goffman, 1953), is a prime instance of this. Again, we see how what is, in this
case, is the argot of a particular criminal group, confidence tricksters, is taken out
of its local context of indigenously appropriate use and transposed into another
context where it can serve to highlight an otherwise dimly-discernible phenomenon
– in this case, ways of adapting persons to the identity threats or “loss of role”
attendant on sudden failure. As we shall see below, not only is this technique by
Goffman characterisable in terms of Kenneth Burke’s notion of a “perspective by
incongruity” but also shows a strong derivation in various strands in the “Chicago
School” tradition, e.g. the work of Robert Ezra Park and Everett Cherrington
Hughes. Indeed, Hughes himself invoked Burke’s work, so the elective affinities
involved are quite manifest.
Goffman’s work involves, then, a secondary transformation in the ordinary

apparatus for describing social scenes or actions; this transformation comprises the
replacement of primordial terms given in the natural attitude by terms derived from
(the proliferation of) a family of terms from a given conventional domain – terms
which, in terms of familiarity for lay members, might not prima facie be integral to
those original scenes or actions. A “perspective by incongruity”, then, involves what
Burke (1965: Part II) terms “planned misnomers” or “methodical misnaming” of
objects that have more familiar or conventional names. Parenthetically, we might
observe that Goffman’s use of misnomers is not restricted to the deployment of
a perspective by incongruity; he also has a less than endearing habit of renaming
and otherwise encoding accepted analytic terms for no apparent reason other than
analytic appropriation. Helm (1982: p. 156) – to whose analysis this chapter is
greatly indebted – gives the example of his rewording of the phenomenon that
conversation analysts call “repairables” by “faultables”.
Goffman’s use of a “perspective by incongruity”, as its title indicates,

establishes incongruous applications of terms in that it violates the conventional
uses of those terms. The use of such a perspective produces “new alignments
with the alignments flowing from other modes of classification” (Burke 1965:
p. 102), predominantly those modes rooted in the natural attitude. Necessarily, this
involves a decontextualisation and a recontextualisation of actions and/or settings.
We might also add that the use of planned misnomers, plus incongruous or even
contradictory predicates and the rest as exposited by Burke, relies unrelievedly on
the primitive common-sense recognisability and identifiability of the phenomena
to be redescribed.
The planful violation of the proper conventional uses or applicability of a term

may involve a variety of practices concerning subjects and predicates, such as his
attaching of the predicate “cooling out” to the subject “educational (etc.) failures”
rather than restricting it to its usual subject “marks” (victims of confidence tricks).
Moreover, Goffman’s approach goes way beyond these relatively straightforward
descriptive transformations, as he uses more than one metaphor in parallel. In
Strategic Interaction (1969a), for instance, Goffman uses terms derived from
espionage in combination with terms derived from team games: indeed, I suspect
that although Goffman is commonly noted for his use of dramatistic imagery, the
term that does most of the “underlabourer” work is that of the team. Hence:
Perhaps the key problem in maintaining the loyalty of team members … is to

prevent performers from becoming so sympathetically attached to the audience
that the performers disclose to them the consequences for them of the impression
they have been given …
(Goffman, 1959: p. 214)
All these techniques assist in the development of what is by and large a culturally
indigenous anthropology, and I should argue that incongruous metaphors work by
occasioning a “look-again” technique in order to see unremarked objects anew,
to render them “anthropologically strange”, by getting us to see them (or selected
features of them) at one remove from the standpoint of the natural attitude whilst
still using that attitude. The composite uses of metaphor, particularly, add multiple
layers of incongruity, where terms from different metaphors are welded together
to occasion a variety of perspectival shifts that are pressed into the service of
Goffman’s “dart-like style” (to use Burke’s term). This style, pace critics, is more
allusive than elusive in that Goffman’s approach is entirely planful in Burke’s
sense.
In Burke’s notion of a “perspective by incongruity”, we have a first step

in turning Goffman’s analysis into a topic in its own right; in Burke’s notion
of “planned misnomers”, we have a further clue to the linguistic nature of the
exercise. However, the next step takes “the linguistic turn”, namely a specification
of the ordinary textual devices, the textually sited “production procedures” as it
were, through which the perspective by incongruity is linguistically generated and
sustained. It is also to be hoped that we can thereby indicate the generic properties
of these procedures, i.e. their properties at “bedrock” common-sense level, that of

ordinary linguistic usage.
We might first, though, discuss the “elective affinities” to which we alluded

above, namely those between Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” and certain
methodological techniques originally used by doyens of the Chicago School such
as R.E. Park and E.C. Hughes, and subsequently by their students – not only
Goffman but also other well-known practitioners such as Howard S. Becker and
Raymond L. Gold.
Gold reported that in his celebrated study of caretakers or janitors, (Gold,

1952, 1964), supervised by Hughes, Hughes filled the margins of Gold’s report
with comments comparing janitors with medical doctors and other established
professionals. Hughes believed that processes that were not evident or even
concealed in one occupation could be clarified by reference to other occupations
(Gold, 1964: p. 49). Thus, the “dirty work” covered up by doctors might be seen
more clearly by reference to janitors’ more overt orientation to dirty tasks: and
processes in janitors’ work might be elucidated by reference to doctors’ work.
Hughes held that one could “learn about doctors by studying plumbers and
prostitutes by studying psychiatrists”.
Previously, Robert Ezra Park had recommended a similar technique,

recommending that, for instance, beggars might not best be considered as jobless
but instead as a “profession” with its own body of knowledge ways of carrying
on the occupation, relations with colleagues, etc., thus rendering visible the
occupational knowledge, culture as it informed the basic patterns of street activities
of beggars – things which might have remained unnoticed had this technique not
been deployed.
What a reading of Burke does is to help us move toward what we might call
the “linguistic turn” in conceiving of such “comparative” techniques that seek to
profit from seemingly incongruous pairings of doctors with prostitutes. Goffman
is often conceived as taking the “linguistic turn” (considering linguistic data)
late in his career but Goffman had taken a different kind of linguistic turn much
earlier, using, largely, similes, to effectuate a linguistic equivalent and extension
of the Park / Hughes comparative technique. He took the vocabulary (and Burkean
“vocabulary of motives”) from one occupational domain, the theatre, and applied
it as a simile to non-theatrical settings, (both occupational and non-occupational).
His specific deployment of that technique was textual: his similes and other devices
were inscriptive. This was, of course, a major stylistic move ahead from the Park
/ Hughes technique. Since Goffman’s use of metonymy is often not conceived in
terms of its precedents in Park’s and Hughes’ work, he has not, I feel, received full
acknowledgement for this quite radical advance. We can now begin to consider the
implications of this “linguistic extension”.
Stylistic analysis: The linguistic turn in sociology
My argument here, then, is that the stylistic analysis of Goffman’s work must
be founded upon an analysis of linguistic usage, namely the consideration of the
linguistic resources or procedures Goffman employs in his work. This argument
applies a fortiori to the use of simile and metaphor, and the following section
of this chapter gives a signpost to one (and only one)3 of the ways which the
linguistic turn may take us.
The basic point to acknowledge is that professional sociologists inhabit a

social world which has already been described or linguistically pre-constituted. As
Edward Rose put it in a pioneering study (Rose, 1960), we already have a natural
sociology, a common-sense semantic order, a set of collective representations in
society. Rose submitted the English semantic record to a diachronic analysis, and
his observations on the conventional usage of the terms employed in an analytical
way by professional sociologists – terms such as “group”, “interaction”, “role”,
“function” – point to a generic issue.
This issue is that whatever its claims to an analytic vocabulary, sociology is,
au fond, a natural language pursuit, an undertaking which perforce employs the
ordinary resources of some natural language or other, be it English, Japanese or
whatever. These languages furnish a variety of resources, e.g. descriptions of social
organisation (see Rose, 1960: pp. 194–7), and the vehicles whereby activities such
as making claims, glossing, formulating, refuting, etc., are performed; indeed,
describing is itself such an activity, and a linguistic one whether it be effected
orally or textually. Typically, these resources and vehicles are not explicated
in “mainstream” professional sociology: they remain tacit but nonetheless are
unrelievedly and utterly relied upon, not to say active in sociological texts.
The unrecognised and unacknowledged nature of professional sociologists’

dependence upon lay linguistic usage cannot easily be overstated, even when
analyses, particularly those by sociologists, in the sphere of stylistics and rhetoric
are involved. Just one case in point is Philip Manning’s analysis (1991) of metaphor
in Goffman’s work. In this paper a variety of angles are discussed concerning how
Goffman employs metaphor in his analyses. Manning understandably presents an
unavoidably very selective set of studies, but in this selection edits out the sine qua
non of such an analysis, namely the systematic linguistic analysis of metaphor, the
analysis of such “imagery” as necessarily involving the use of a range of natural
language resources and language-based procedures.
All the angles on metaphor that Manning sets out are derivative, necessarily
having their anchorage in such lay usage – though this is not acknowledged by
Manning himself. Their form and character are actively shaped by the features
and properties of such usage – features and properties which Manning relies upon
but does not explicate. Thus, Manning’s analysis employs as a tacit resource that
which in fact should be treated as an explicit topic on its own behalf and which has
analytically prior status.
Manning’s analysis – as are others of its kind – is thus fashioned in largely

unknown ways by common-sense usage. Such an analysis cannot but be idle,
cannot but beg the question. In Garfinkel’s terms, it is characterised by “the missing
whatness”, telling us everything except that which we really need to know. Instead,
an analysis which turns lay usage into an object for inspection in its own right will
strike the right analytic level. It is at this generic level that the focus here will be
upon membership categories but the analysis could equally well have focused on
other procedural aspects of ordinary linguistic / textual usage.
An indispensable corollary of this shift from the epiphenomenal to that which

has primacy is the discipline it imposes on the analysts in their use of language in
their analysis. Manning, for instance, tells us that:
The overall view in The Presentation of Self is that of a world in which people,
whether individually or in groups, pursue their own ends with a cynical disregard
for others. On the rare occasions when audience and performer co-operate, both
endeavour to return hastily to the shelter of their various masks and disguises
and to avoid disclosing their inner selves. Here Goffman views the individual as
a set of performance masks hiding a manipulative and cynical self …
(Manning, 1991: p. 76)
“Cynicism” and “manipulativeness” are, in ordinary usage, predicates that apply

to individuals: such predicates serve to impute psychological predispositions.
There are several reasons why Manning’s use of such terms is injudicious. First,
if we wish to play Manning’s moralistic game to the reception and monitoring of
presented appearances, we might equally say that Goffman’s work indicates not
the cynicism but the credulity and artlessness of people in that they are, de facto,
characterised as being taken in by these performances: one needs only to consider
the situation from the standpoint of the recipient of these performances in order to
recognise that.
However, such considerations do not take us to the core issue, which is the
psychologistic cast in much of Manning’s interpretation of Goffman’s argument.
Throughout his early work, and in later avowals too (see J.Verhoeven, 1993:
pp. 321–6), Goffman cites his indebtedness to E. Durkheim and his latterday
interpreters (Radcliffe-Brown, Warner, Parsons and others) and his comments on
impression management can equally – and far more productively – be seen as
comments on the active operation of a normative social order, on the features of
social, not psychological, organisation. Characterisations in terms of “cynicism”,
“manipulativeness”, “deceptiveness” and the like, because of their common-sense
implications in ordinary language turn our analytic attention away from what
is clearly a major theme in Goffman’s work. Indeed, many facets of Goffman’s
treatment of the presentation of self might be seen as exhibiting the orientation of
self to the other and to the values and norms shared between self and other rather
than what Manning terms a “cynical disregard” for others.
Such points help us reprise and rework our comments on the characterisation
of social actors as credulous and artless. Instead of conceiving these predicates in
psychological terms, we might instead treat them again in terms of the workings of
a social organisation. This is perhaps most explicitly and perspicuously illustrated
in Harvey Sacks’ Goffman-derived study (1972b) of police officers’ assessment
of moral appearances and character. He points out the moral enforceability of
“naïvely”, presenting oneself as “who one is”, but also of others taking those
presented appearances at face value. The inferential work involved in such
presentation and monitoring comprises cultural methods for the assessment of
persons, these methods being constituents of the production of a social order.
Of course, such a social order can be exploited by those “concealing” criminal
activities and the like. Indeed, the occasioned detectability of such concealments
gives Sacks his analytic theme. However, the theme of the observability of
criminal identities is also, of course, part of the methodic production of social
order. Thus, to present either Goffman or his objects of study as “cynical” or, for
that matter, “naïve”, runs the strong risk of not simply of irrelevance but also of
misdescribing the analytic character and significance of Goffman’s project. It is
not just that analysts such as Manning hit the wrong level of analysis but rather
that they miscast the very auspices of the analysis.
The next move, then, is to give an example of the ordinary linguistic resources
used by Goffman and to indicate how they might be analysed so as to cast light
on the “production procedures” for Goffman’s analyses: we shall proceed on an
instance by instance bases as these procedures are always locally-embedded,
locally-deployed.
Linguistic resources and stylistic analysis: An illustration
One major, and in other respects well-documented, set of common-sense linguistic

procedures is that of membership categorisation. Membership categories are
ordinary language equivalence classes which may make reference to at least one
member of a given population – “mother”, “American”, “tennis player”, and so
on. (The emphasis on naming is not a bad place to begin since it is a foundational
– though questionable – aspect of Burke’s approach that the operation of naming
is prior to and formative of just about any other operation we perform on the
world.)
A first observation, then, is that Goffman’s metaphorical transformations

involve substituting one set of membership categories for another; this is primarily
what the effecting of planned misnomers involves. As we shall see, a characteristic
technique that Goffman uses is to present a first-part categorial “misnomer” and
then to present one or more “real world” examples, with categories named in what
are prima facie more immediately recognisable ways. We are, in other words,
first given the misnomers and then we are given the categories they misname and
encouraged to see the latter, individually and as an ensemble, in terms of the former.
A vivid example can be found in Goffman’s writing about the “dramaturgical
loyalty” of a team where he refers to strategies for forestalling the forming of
sympathetic attachments between the performing team and the audience:
A second technique for counteracting the development of affective ties between

performers and audience is to change audiences periodically. Thus filling station
managers used to be shifted periodically to prevent the formation of strong
personal ties with particular clients. It was found that when such ties were
allowed to form, the manager sometimes placed the interests of a friend who
needed credit before the interests of the social establishment. Bank managers
and ministers have been routinely shifted for similar reasons, as have certain
colonial administrators. Some female professionals provide another illustration,
as the following reference to organised prostitution suggests …
(Goffman, 1959: p. 215)
Most basically, we can readily see that this passage contains a dense concentration of
membership categories|: “performers” and “audience”, “filling station managers”,
“clients”, “friend”, “bank managers”, “ministers”, “colonial administrators”,
“professionals” (and, by implication, “prostitutes”). Both the serial organisation
and co-selection of the categories are introduced first, as a prospective rubric for
the subsequent array of categories. This rubric works not so much through the
finding of substantive similarities in the selected categories as through procedural
or formal similarities. We are invited to consider the relations between filling
station managers and (their) clients, bank managers (and, by projection, their
customers), etc., in terms of the performers / audience analogy, such that the
former are recognisable in terms of the latter. This recognisability seems to be
provided for largely at the procedural level, and I shall now hope to be able to
illustrate this.
I have referred to the cultural “apparatus” of membership categorisation

practices in previous chapters, but they bear a restatement here, if only for readers
who are reading a single paper in this volume. Membership categories are, in
the conventions of each culture, grouped together into what Sacks (1972a: pp.
31–84; 1974: pp. 218–20) has termed “membership categorisation devices”
(MCDs) where, e.g. “mother”, “father”, “daughter”, etc., may be treated as a co-
categorisation of the MCD “family”. One of the major procedural rules for the
combinatorial use of membership categories is the “consistency rule”, which,

broadly paraphrased, runs: “if two or more categories are introduced proximately,
and if these categories can be heard a coming from the same MCD, then treat
them that way”. This rule, then, comprises a sense-assembly procedure, a cultural
method for making sense of co-selected categories. Consequently “performers”
and “audience” may be seen as co-members of an MCD with a title such as “parties
to a dramatic performance”, just as “bank manager” and “customer”, “prostitute”
and “client”, etc., may all be seen as “standardised relational pairs” of categories
(as Sacks 1972a: pp. 37–8 put it), each pair respectively being derived from more
inclusive devices, and therefore as relevantly co-occurring.
The consistency rule, then, provides for our making sense of the co-selection and
proximate placement of categories such as “performer” and “audience”. However,
a notable feature of the passage I cited from Goffman’s early work is that the entire
list of categories – “performer”, “audience”, “filling station manager”, “bank
manager”, “friend”, “minister”, “colonial administrator”, “(female) professional”,
“prostitute” – cannot be seen, through the application of the consistency rule, as
categorisations from the same device (the MCD “occupations” comes about as
close as one can get, though the categories “client” and “friend” would remain
anomalous). Observe, also, how the category “friend” appears disjunctive with
those of “filling station manager” and “client”, since it cannot prima facie be
seen as deriving from the same device as (say) “parties to a garage transaction”.
Through such a disjunctive construction, and often through the addition of another
category, e.g. using “friend”, Goffman renders visible an (improper) “affective tie”.
At the substantive level, the categories seem quite diverse and incommensurate.
However, the diversity of the general collection also comprises a considerable
resource for Goffman, because it allows him to make the next move of finding and
showing an apparently powerful unity in this diversity.
In effect, what Goffman does is set up the first categorisations “performer(s)”

and “audience” as a metaschema or master transcoding device, a set of instructions
for reading the other categories as being relevantly and plausibly introduced, as
being cases in point. For instance, the order of his listing predisposes the reader
towards performing “category-mapping” activities, e.g. mapping the “performer”/
”audience” relational pair on to the subsequent categories and their supplied or
projected paired counterparts, such that we can find a homologous pattern in the
collection. We are then led to read these subsequent categories as heir to the same
predicates as the master device (e.g. see the supplied or projected paired categories
as not being members of the same team, just like “performer” and “audience”).
Here, of course, we also encounter the “Chinese box” uses of MCDs, where
lower-order devices fit into higher order ones, e.g. the category “bank manager”
is one of a set of categories which may be drawn together under the MCD “bank
staff”, where the “manager” and “client” categories might be drawn together under
the MCD “parties to a bank transaction” (and where, again, “performers” and
“audience” comprise a master device). It is our lay knowledge of these formal,
standardised tools upon which Goffman relies. He uses the lower-order device, for
example, to render the undesirability (for the team) of developing affectional ties
with incumbents of categories which – although they have a proper place in the
higher-order MCD – do not derive from the lower-order device. It is to be noted
that the same lower-order and higher-order device organisation, with parallel
consistency rules, also applies to almost all the categories and their supplied or
projected counterpart categories introduced by Goffman in this paragraph, e.g.
“religious minister” and “member of the congregation / parish”.4
Observe also that this cultural apparatus for sense-making is brought to, and
indeed elaborated in, a reading of the illustrations Goffman provides, as in the
exemplification of his reference to organised prostitution which follows on from
the extract I have cited above. Speaking of the development of affective ties
between prostitutes and their clients, a pimp who is a member of an organised
team declares:
The Syndicate handles that these days. The girls don’t stay in one place long
enough to really get on speaking terms with anybody. There’s not so much
chance of a girl falling in love with some guy – you know, and causing a squawk.
Anyway, the hustler who’s in Chicago this week’s in St. Louis next, or moving
around to half a dozen places before being sent somewhere else. And they never
know where they’re going until they’re told.
(Goffman, 1959: p. 215)
There is a strong sense in which Goffman gives us an instructed reading of this

illustration, such that we read it in terms of the sense-making apparatus which his
previous example, and above all his master transcoding device, have activated.
Never is this apparatus made explicit by Goffman himself, although his analysis
relies upon it in a tacit manner so that the reader can apprehend the organisation of
the text. Insofar as he is able to potentiate the application of this cultural apparatus
on the reader’s part, he “allows” readers to “see for themselves”, to detect on their
own behalf the patternings which Goffman wishes to render noticeable and salient.
Such persuasive or predispositional techniques make it easy for readers (especially
a “first-time-through” reader) to “arrive at their own conclusions” – conclusions
entirely consonant with those required by Goffman. Such is the seductive quality
of Goffman’s prose; it is all too easy to read things his way.
Similarly, in the collection of categories furnished by Goffman in the paragraph

on page 112 we can see the way in which given predicates are conventionally tied
to given categories – predicates such as typical rights, obligations or activities.
Indeed, as I have pointed out above, he imputes the predicate “strong personal
ties” to the category “friend” in order to render accountable the manager’s actions.
Elsewhere, he shows how these predicates may apply to all the categories of what
Sacks terms a “duplicatively organised device” (1974: pp. 220–4), i.e. a collection
of categories which, as with the device “families”, divide into team-like units. For
instance, the predicate of “in-group loyalty” may be seen as “travelling across” all
the categories of a performing group. Thus:
One basic technique the team can employ to defend itself against [such] disloyalty
is to develop high in-group solidarity within the team, while creating a backstage
image of the audience which makes the audience sufficiently inhuman to allow
the performers to cozen them with emotional and moral impunity.
(Goffman, 1959: p. 214)
Likewise, the metaphors of game teams, confidence tricks, co-conspirators in

espionage, etc., can all be seen as mapping on to each other at the procedural /
organisational level, since they are all duplicatively organised. Such a mapping
provides, especially, for their combinatorial use. This empirical issue is worthy of
far more extensive pursuit than can be afforded here.
To be sure, Goffman artfully uses the predicates attributable to dramaturgical

categories as part of the application of a perspective by incongruity (as indeed we
might expect in a text which has a section titled “Dramaturgical Loyalty”). We
can see, for instance, how the phrase “cozen [the audience] with emotional and
moral impunity” can come to stand as a gloss of an array of deceptive activities
or practices. Also, as Helm insists (1982) with reference to Goffman’s analysis of
“response cries” (1981a: pp. 78–123), Goffman remains in the dramaturgical or
impression-management framework when describing actions and their motivated
character. Even the actions themselves are represented dramaturgically (e.g.
utterances such as “Good God!” which Goffman terms “floor cues”) or are treated
as bound to dramaturgical categories (e.g. “audience”). Through these techniques,
Goffman redescribes courses of action. As John Heritage reminded me (personal
communication, 1987), Goffman’s use of a perspective by incongruity is by no
means merely stylistic affectation or rhetorical flourish, but a praxiological shift – it
moves from one descriptive rubric for action to another. Dramaturgical metaphors
often comprise action-descriptions (or redescription) or are action-implicative (via
category-bound activities, etc.).
I hope now to have specified to some extent the way in which Goffman
establishes a perspective by incongruity, and how he works his transformations
on lay descriptions of phenomena whilst remaining utterly reliant on our ordinary
knowledge of those descriptions, of how to use them and how to map them on to one
another. Not only does Goffman quite clearly count on the primitive recognisability
for the reader of the phenomena he redescribes, but also he counts heavily upon
a very precise fit at the procedural level between the common-sense descriptive
apparatus we mobilise and the descriptive apparatus he utilises at a (putatively)
analytic level. Of course, a perspective by incongruity must be relevantly used if

it is to be at all effective, and for it to be relevantly used it has to show procedural
affinities with that which it redescribes. The redescription outlined above only
comprises incongruities at the level of content or substance, where again for these
redescriptions to work at all they must possess a very precise consonance at the
procedural level with the lay descriptions they replace.
An apparent paradox which Burke does not note, then, is that for a perspective
by incongruity to operate recognisably and relevantly at all, it must show a finely
adjusted congruity at the procedural or formal level with that which it transforms.
This at least complicates any simple Burkean “piety” versus “incongruity”
opposition. To be sure, my argument is that the substantive transformations
necessarily partake of the selfsame descriptive apparatus in terms of which the
first-order descriptions are organised. Whilst, of course, these transformations /
redescriptions rely upon our common-sense understanding of their substantively
incongruous nature in contrast to the familiar description, they also rely without
relief upon our lay procedural knowledge, our “vulgar competence”.
Of course, one should in passing at least mention that the procedural apparatus
of membership categorisation, consistency rules, etc., is not the only set of lay
procedural concerns to be found in Goffman’s textual work. Chief among the others
is the family of common-sense interpretive procedures referred to at one stage
by Garfinkel (1967, Chapter 3) – following but reworking Karl Mannheim – as
“the documentary method of interpretation”, which basically refers to the mutual,
back-and-forth hermeneutic determination between a given set of particulars and
an underlying homologous pattern.5 The particulars are taken as “pointing to” or
projecting the pattern, whereas in turn the pattern reflexively gives coherence to
the particulars both separately and collectively. This mutual determination and
redetermination works in much the same way as do the mutual determination of
“part” and “whole” which characterise gestalt phenomena, and operates flexibly
and revisably through time. Despite Garfinkel’s more recent attempted refutation
of analyses cast in terms of the documentary method, this particular formulation
works here very well in accounting for the identifying particulars of parts of
Goffman’s work (see also Ch. 3 of this volume).
An excellent example of Goffman’s reliance on this set of common-sense

methods for analytic (and textual) purposes and, centrally, on the serial organisation
of the text is given in the extract (Goffman, 1959: p. 215) discussed on pages 112–
4 above. McHoul has argued (1982: pp. 11–36) most cogently for the importance
of considering the documentary method in terms of temporal considerations
in a “course of reading”, and Goffman’s text shows the aptness of McHoul’s
observations. Instead of initially giving a set of particulars which potentiate the
identification of a homologous pattern, Goffman characteristically first provides
the pattern, thereby also providing a set of instructions predisposing the reading
of the subsequent list of particulars as a proliferation of pattern elements. Owing

to its first-place positioning, it is the pattern rather than the particulars which
gains salience. The pattern is maintained and manifested throughout the corpus
of particulars in the paragraph. The solution, as it were, is provided before the
puzzle and, indeed, defines the puzzle. We consult the solution to establish what
the puzzle is: our reading is an “instructed” one.
The use of the documentary method (and of course the procedural apparatus
built into categorisation activities) establishes and maintains what, adapting the
application of one of E. Bittner’s phrases, we might term a “stylistic unity”. That
is to say, the documentary method provides a set of procedures for generating
what Bittner terms a “reproducible theme” (1974: p. 78), where “many specific
instances can be compared with each other as variations of a single pattern”, which
in turn “works against centrifugal tendencies and heterogeneity”. In this respect,
we can see that the organisation of stylistic unity into the text has a practical
rather than merely aesthetic or rhetorical quality for readers, allowing them to
inspect a diverse array of instances for their transformability into the general and
unifying theme of impression-management as conceived through dramaturgical
and associated concepts. It does so through making available a set of “generative
guidelines” which permits the maintenance of such a single focus in what, at the
level of the natural attitude, comprise a diverse (indeed divergent) set of haecceities
(Garfinkel and Wieder, 1992).
Readers can, then, embark upon the practical task of finding those features
which stand as homologous instances of the theme established in the paragraph,
such that the theme is thereby reproduced, instantiated “for another first time”,
in Garfinkel’s immortal phrase (1967). In this respect, the conception of readers
as active “pattern detectors” is particularly manifest, though Goffman, through
careful and persuasive editing and purpose-building of his examples, certainly
guides and facilitates the “successful” accomplishment of the task. Again, we
see an instance of Dorothy E. Smith’s point (discussed earlier in this book) that,
readers make sense of texts, but not entirely in conditions of their own making.
Using Anderson and Sharrock’s term (1982), we might scrutinise Goffman’s text
for its “order-enhancing procedures”, where a given description is produced in
ways which make available its symmetry, continuity or commonality with other
proximal descriptions in the text. To find these is to find the text’s “coherent maps”,
where individual instances can be treated as formal versions of each other. To
cannibalise Karl Marx’s phrase too, we actively produce our readings of Goffman
but not entirely in conditions of our own making.
Let us move on to consider, all too briefly, some of the criticisms which the
above focus on description and redescription makes available, though it must be
added that I have some sympathy with the argument that the suppositions of this
form of explication do not straightforwardly permit critical assessment (at least
of certain kinds). Perhaps the most elementary set of concerns surrounds what
Howard Schwartz (n.d.) calls the “phenomenological intactness” of the social
world, i.e. does Goffman’s establishing of stylistic unity through misnomers falsify
or otherwise destroy the authenticity or phenomenological intactness of each of the
diverse examples and instances he provides? After using Goffman’s approach, are
we left with the same world with which we started out? By and large, this question
derives (certainly in Schwartz’ case) from traditional phenomenological concerns
but is also to be found amongst the more methodologically radical symbolic
interactionists, such as Herbert Blumer (1972). Blumer castigates Goffman for
disattending the specific point (for the social actors involved) of the examples
he gives, and for disattending the distinctive content of the scenes of action he
itemises.
In a general sense, at least, Blumer is providing a symbolic interactionist’s

equivalent to what Garfinkel has variously termed the “quiddity” or (later) the
“haecceity” of actions and their settings. In his December 1985 visit to Paris, and
in his 1992 paper with Wieder, Garfinkel urged the audience to examine what are
for members the uniquely distinguishing local aspects of given courses of action
and the particular settings they produce. It might be held that Goffman’s devices
for establishing stylistic / thematic unities across such actions and settings forestall
such analytic moves by conflating such haecceities. At least, we should consider
Burke’s warning (1965: p. 97) not to mistake similarity for identity.
In a way, though, it should come as no surprise to anyone that if the social

world is describable it is also redescribable (and – as we have seen elsewhere in
this monograph - not just to sociologists). Some derivative issues may, however,
prove recalcitrant. One of these concerns the extraordinary extension of a metaphor
such as “game” so that it forms a basis of a “frame of reference”. Louch (1966:
pp. 213–16) points out that in ordinary discourse, metaphors, similes and the like
are conventionally tied to particular contexts, where conduct in other contexts may
be pointedly characterised as not describable in terms of such a metaphor. Thus,
the characterising of some setting or instance of conduct as “it’s only a game”
relies for its pointedness on the understanding that there are some cases in which
conduct is most assuredly not a game. In this sense, Goffman may stand accused
of using a metaphor that is over-extended or even torn loose from the occasioning
contexts which give it its ordinary relevance and impact. Goffman here might
be suspected of the equivalent of the “fallacy of unwarranted extrapolation”: the
effect, though, is “the Goffmanising of the world”, as Edward Rose lucidly put it
to me (personal communication, 19 October 1994).
This point finds some sort of equivalent at the level of membership (or should
we state it the other way round?) in S. Messinger et al.’s empirical observation
(1962) that in mental hospitals patients felt they had to “perform” for an “audience”
(doctors, nurses, visitors, etc.) all the time, and that the constant requirement
to “perform” is experienced as unduly onerous, “unnatural”, alienating, or an

interruption of their usual orientation to the social world. It seems that they too
see “play acting” as a locally-occasioned matter rather than a pervasive feature of
conduct in general.
Perhaps these issues, considered at the analytic level, derive from what
Burke regards as a basic feature of approaches which consider human conduct
dramatistically, namely that they incorporate a theory of agency rather than a
theory of knowledge. One might, instead, wish for a theory which treats agency as
informed by knowledge, as knowledge-in-action, as indeed does ethnomethodology.
There is also the difficult issue of what Burke calls “downward conversion”, i.e.
to metaphorically present all actions as moves in a game or as play-acting, or
whatever, is – in members’ common-sense knowledge – to downgrade or ironicise
them in important ways – treating such actions as less than fully seriously meant
or consequential in their own terms (hence, perhaps, Goffman’s reputation for
cynicism and the like). Anderson and Sharrock (1983) treat such “ironies” as
major methodological devices in orthodox sociologies.
A related matter derives from my earlier comment about Goffman’s

dramaturgical redescription of actions and settings involving a praxiological shift.
That is, he often creates dramaturgically-given scenarios of action rather than
preserving what conversation analysts call “naturally-occurring” and “naturally-
organised” courses of action or action-sequences. The virtues of recorded and
meticulously transcribed action-sequences have been too devoutly intoned
elsewhere for me to risk a travesty, but Helm’s example (1982: pp. 152–3) from
what Goffman terms “response cries” is a significant one. Goffman treats response
cries as, by and large, examples of licensed “self-talk”, talking to oneself. Helm,
however, points out that such cries are all potentially available for interactive work
and might more profitably be treated as public matters rather than “self-talk”.
Furthermore, if one were to inspect recorded and transcribed instances of

such cries, one would find that such items as “floor cues” (see above) can be
seen as minimal pre-announcement sequences, the formal properties of which are
necessarily tied into the intricacies of the turn-taking system for speech exchange
rather than merely being contingently related to that system, as Goffman tries to
insist. The term “self-talk” in no way renders the organised communicative work
done by such a verbal action: it is only by dint of Goffman’s presentation of a
dramaturgical characterisation of such verbal actions and of the dramaturgically
reconstructed scenario within which they occur that we can see these utterances
as “soliloquising”. In this way, the use of a dramaturgical metaphor has obvious
pitfalls in rendering the sense of given verbal actions, given that the sense is
typically only to be established in situ (in its specific sequential location), and at
the level of members’ orientations to these. I feel that in Goffman’s metonymic
approach, we have no way of modelling members’ orientations (as opposed to
stipulating them in advance), or certainly no way that accords with what Burke, in
his logology, terms “piety”.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I hope to have charted some of the contours

of a treatment of Goffman’s “dart-like style”, which is as I have observed above, a
good deal less unique, elusive and idiosyncratic than is commonly supposed.
My reservations about Goffman’s approach do not simply amount to a

complaint that he is not specifically doing ethnomethodology or conversation
analysis (although Goffman himself on occasion set up in specific competition
against those twin approaches whilst, it must be said, frequently cannibalising
them). The intent informing these reservations is merely to raise some generic
concerns about the “empirical” character of various interactional analyses –
concerns such as what counts as data, how much data might be analysed and what
might be the constraints on any empirical interactional analysis. The comments in
the second section of this paper on the way in which the resources of the natural
language figure in the shaping of sociological description and analysis in the first
place comprise part of the essential backdrop to such considerations.
To be sure, this concern with the typically unexplicated use of and alignment
to natural language by sociological analysis leads us to what is, perhaps, the most
fruitful of all the moves in analysing Goffman’s work – a move whose utility I
have, at least provisionally, attempted to indicate above. This move derives from
the observation that (for instance) the categorial work done by Goffman in his
analytic enterprise – including the categorial substitutions or redescriptions of
persons, as outlined above – is, at bottom, all of a common-sensical kind, found at
the level of the natural attitude. The corollary of this observation is that Goffman’s
analyses may be treated as itself a datum, an object of analysis.6 A notable literary
analysis with this theme has been conducted in a book by Livio Belloi (1993). He
not only elucidates Goffman’s work through a comparison with Proust in relation
to tropes, etc., but also, as Yves Winkin has put it to me (personal communication
5 June 2005) does the work of “Goffmanizing Proust”. A concern with the stylistic
devices used by one author is used to elucidate the writing of the other. This shows
that, pace Manning and Bourdieu, Goffman not only has a technique but has one
that is extensible to other authors. Thus, K. Burke’s interest in subjecting “non-
literary” works to a “literary” analysis can be seen to bear fruit, and I hope the
analysis in the present article may contribute to that tendency: however, I have
tried to show that “literary” analysis rests on more mundane foundations – a point
that is not so clear in Burke’s approach but, perhaps, not entirely at variance with
it either. Goffman’s work may be treated as a textually-sited ensemble of common-
sense procedures to be analysed as a topic in its own right. This is what the present
analysis has attempted to recommend.
Endnotes
Introduction
1 This example is adapted and extended from an article by myself and W.W. Sharrock:
“Something On Accounts”. Discourse Analysis Research Group Newsletter,
(University of Calgary, Canada), vol. 5, 1989.
2 H. Garfinkel: “‘Good’ Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinic Records”, in
Garfinkel (1967), pp. 187–207.
3 “Methodological Adequacy in the Quantitative Study of Selection Criteria and
Selection Practices in Psychiatric Outpatient Studies”, idem, pp. 208–61.
Chapter 1
1 Macfarlane uses many other textual sources too, of course. He examines parish
registers and other records, land rental and sale records, and so on. The attitude he
adopts towards these texts in the process of using them does not vary, however: he
again treats them simply as mere conduits to the phenomena they “report”.
2 For analytic commentaries on this, see Clifford and Marcus (1986). These comments,
however, are seriously mitigated by a methodologically-ironic cast.
3 It might be added that the comments above on transcription procedures in
conversation analysis, and the ethnography of communication are not (entirely)
critical. My primary interest is in turning the work of transcription into data to
be analysed in its own right in order to show the basis of professional sociology
in mundane cultural (in this case textual) reasoning and sense-making. It is not
easy to see how such transcription practices could always be avoided in this kind
of analysis. The only sociological studies that analyse (inter alia) conversational
interaction without stipulating identities in the left-hand column tend to be highly
formalistic and behaviouristic in character. An inventive and detailed example of
such a study, which often does not count on the imputation of categorical or other
identities to interactants is that of Collins and Collins (1973). See, for instance, their
“behaviouralised” sequential analysis of conversations in Example 9: pp.124–6 and
Example 10: pp.127–31.
4 Thus, blame-allocation is one of many specific and consequential activities the
text may bring about just as “signing a contract” helps bring about a commitment,
“signing a death warrant” works to facilitate an execution, “signing a marriage
contract” helps execute another state, and so on. In this respect, texts draw heavily
upon the conventional properties of the natural language as such, in its oral form,
too: “saying” things can be “doing” things, e.g. “promising”, “threatening”,

“condemning” and the like. All these and very many other activities can be textually
as well as orally transacted by anyone having a competent mastery of a natural
language in both oral and written forms.
5 I owe this point, and this example, to Wes Sharrock: manuscript “Rules”, nd,
Sociology, University of Manchester, U.K.
6 Other members of the overall research team, funded by the French Government’s
Plan Urbain programme, were Kenneth L. Brown, Isabelle Haumont, Michèle Jolé
and Georges Knaebel. I should like to thank them for their valued input into my
analysis. Thanks also to the then Programme Director, now the late Isaac Joseph.
The team’s report was title Comment trouver sa place? (Plan Urbain, 1993) and
the document of that report for which Dr Lee and I were primarily responsible was
Final Report: The Interactional Organisation of Public Space.
7 For a specification of the term, see Smith (1984).
8 However, given the rise into prominence within Ethnomethodology of “topics” or
“fields” such as human – computer interaction, science studies, computer – supported
collaborative work, etc., one wonders whether some of the concerns of conventional
sociology have been permeating (and compromising) ethnomethodology.
9 I use the term “interpretative” / “interpretive” with considerable trepidation. As
Garfinkel insists, we do not go around interpreting our world, interpreting signs
or interpreting signed objects. In ordinary parlance, which as Rose says, shapes
analytic usage despite the stubborn resistance of some academics, “interpretation”
is a term used where, for instance, the making of sense becomes non-routine,
subject to perturbation, etc. This is one “grammatical” problem with the notion of
the “documentary method of interpretation”. In extreme cases, there may be variant
versions of a given state of affairs. Thus one may say “that’s your interpretation,
not mine!” Often, as indicated in the penultimate section above, the apprehension
of a text is quite routine, unproblematic and uncontested, and its sense is “taken as
read”.
Chapter 2
1 Liebow, E. (1967), particularly chapter XVI.

2 Ibid., p. 167.
3 Anderson, E. (1978), Ulf Hannerz’ classic ethnography (Hannerz, 1969) notes
similar “going for brothers” phenomena.
4 This, of course, raises complex conceptual issues. Some of these are raised in P.
Winch (1972), pp. 8–49.
5 This is not to suggest that all ethnographers are equally adept in, or equally receptive
to, such subcultural differences in communicative style or dialect; nor do I suggest
that all ethnographers would posses the social credentials for bona fide participation.
Consequently I do not deny that there may be divergences in the interchangeability
Endnotes 123
of interpretation, reportage, etc., to varying degrees in various cases. For some

comments on how the ethnographer arrives at a characterisation of the use of a
term that is convergent with the use of that term by his sub-cultural subjects, see
K. Stoddart (1974).
6 After all, there are competing analytical views on the significance and derivation
of the term “brother”. Roger D. Abrahams, (1970), pp. 146–7, claims that the
term “brother” in “soul brother” invokes (along, of course, with the term “soul”) a
religious model for relations between Black ghetto dwellers. The terms “brother” or
“sister” are seen as invoking the co-operative relations pertaining among members
of a church, so that a term such as “brother” presents, for Abrahams, “the church
(as) the model for co-operative life”. Of course proponents of the view that such
terms are in turn located in the co-operative nature of family life will not be entirely
persuaded by Abrahams’ argument, but this simply attests to the possibility of
proliferating divergent analytic interpretations: this is a problem for Rose (1960)
too.
7 D.H. Zimmerman and M. Pollner: (1970), pp. 90–1. The quotation nicely expresses
one of the bases of the convergence of the ethnographer’s textual and the subject’s
oral reports, referred to earlier in the present chapter.
8 Ibid., p. 91.
9 H. Sacks (1972a), See also H. Sacks (1972b). It must be added that these articles
comprise the earlier developments of conversation analysis in ethnomethodology,
and that more recent developments have tended to play down the issues raised in
earlier stages. The present article simply attempts to work out “situated properties”
of the various analytic issues in the social identification of persons, as pioneered by
the late Harvey Sacks. The apparatus outlined by Sacks, plus certain modifications
and extensions of my own, are deployed in the analysis of “going for brothers”;
indeed, I believe it is through the conducting of such analyses that any modifications
and extensions may be derived and their “adequacy” assessed.
10 H. Sacks (1992), vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.
11 H. Sacks: “An Initial Investigation …”, op. cit., p. 37 ff. Note that the procedure
used in the present paper to explicate Sacks’ work differs in significant respects from
the procedure used by Sacks himself; there exist some differences, for instance, in
the order in which analytic issues are introduced and logically related.
12 Unless, of course, special provision is made in a particular instance: we might refer
to this as a contextually-occasioned co-selection of categories, i.e., the achieved
coherence, consistency, rationality, etc. of the co-selection is, if necessary, accounted
for by an appeal to context rather than to any “natural” or “routine” relation.
13 On this issue, see D.R. Watson (1974). The analysis here, directed towards one
set of analytic concerns (the “sacred” – “profane” opposition in Formal-Analytic
Sociology) was developed in relation to other concerns in Watson (1974).
14 Some of the lineaments of “device-bound” predicates are explored in a preliminary
way in R. Watson (1978). This article involved an attempt not simply to explicate
and extend the notion of “bound activities (on predicates)” but also to indicate that
these processes are not freestanding but particularised for specific, contextualised
tasks.
15 This, of course, may not be the case for the “fitting together” of the helping
relationship that is constituted through the client-professional relational pairing,
which may perhaps be taken as a duplicatively-organised MCD in itself.
16 The converse also holds. The reclassification of a person from a “lover” to a
“friend” serves to downgrade that person’s priority in his / her counterpart’s search
for help. Indeed, such a re-description may be part of what Goffman refers to as
someone’s “cooling out” by his / her lover: “…but we can still be friends.” Such
re-categorisations are not focalised by Goffman, though they are surely part of the
apparatus of “cooling out”.
17 An instructive general approach to this issue is to be found in H. Sacks (1975).
18 J.L. Austin. On the invocation of membership categories in the construction of
complaints, accusations, etc., see P. Drew (1978): also D.R. Watson (1975), and
Watson (1978), op. cit.
19 On the “Stage of Life” MCD see Sacks (1972), p. 220, and M.A. Atkinson (1980).
20 The number, of course, depends on conventions concerning the number of
incumbents of a given category.
21 However, Thomas S. Weinberg and I began to examine some of the categorial
apparatus that, in a laic and taken-for-granted way, goes into the sensible discursive
production of homosexual “careers” in our 1982 paper.
22 On such confusions as manifested in the work of symbolic interactionist, H.S.
Becker, see M. Pollner (1974). Sadly, however, Pollner’s own article is not entirely
free from such confusions, e.g. in the realm of “secret deviance”, his critique of
Becker does not hold.
23 Liebow, op. cit., p. 166.
24 Note the in-principle ambiguity of the term “girl friend” in this regard – an ambiguity
that usually (though not always) achieves practical disambiguation through the
provision by participants of specific context.
25 See Liebow, op. cit., pp. 171–4.
26 Ibid., p. 173. Here Liebow was discussing the case of Stanton’s daughter who was
being looked after by a woman whom Stanton and others called his “sister”, though
it was acknowledged she was not “really” his sister. Liebow notes that the woman
was performing a function frequently performed by a sister. Note Liebow’s use of
the relativising term “label”– a frequently found methodologically-ironic element
in ethnographic texts. Often, in ordinary discourse, people protest “I have been
labelled” as part of a claim that they have been falsely accused or falsely assigned
some identity. The question in each case is: do the parties being analytically
described as “labelling” each other actually conceive of their practices in that way?
And what does so conceiving achieve? We might say that the concept of labelling
is, in each local instance, intersubjectively problematic, or potentially so.
Endnotes 125
27 H. Garfinkel (2002): see, especially, Chapter 2.

28 Note that Liebow himself here categorises qua analyst a relationship rather than
purely and simply addressing how parties themselves (here, Stoopy and Lucille)
categorise it. It is characteristic of ethnographic texts that several such issues are
almost inextricably entangled – the parties’ uses, the analyst’s uses qua analyst,
analyst qua member, etc. The present chapter can not be the place to set out those
issues, but Pollner (op. cit.) makes a start, as do Zimmerman and Pollner (see their
quote, op. cit.).
29 The issue of “borrowing” has been examined by W.W. Sharrock in his paper “On
Owning Knowledge”, in Turner (ed.), op. cit., pp. 45–53: see also Sacks (1992), pp.
382–8 (vol. 1) for related considerations.
30 Harold Garfinkel (1984), especially pp. 18–24.
31 This set of resemblances is analytically distinguishable from the family resemblances
of specifically contexted manifestations of “Mutual help and support”, even if
performed by incumbents of the same membership category. For one practical, if
schematic characterisation of family resemblances, see J. Heritage (1978): especially
pp. 86 ff.
32 This is not to say that the activity-descriptor “(giving and/or receiving) mutual help
and support” serve only problematically as a rubric for gathering together a set
of categories, i.e. of including some categories and excluding others. To be sure,
this is part of the work which a gloss can do. However, the use of the gloss in this
way is certainly not exempt from the mutatis mutandis clause indicated above: as
Garfinkel and Sacks show, glosses are by their very nature embedded in the very
circumstances they gloss. See, H. Garfinkel and H. Sacks (1970).
33 See Garfinkel, (1967), especially pp. 7–9, and Chapter 3.
Chapter 3
1 The text to which I refer is Horace Miner (1956), reprinted in Polhemus (1978). Any
page references to this article in the present chapter are to the latter volume.
2 Burke (1965). Even in what seems to be a simple name-substitution exercise, we
run into problems concerning the descriptive apparatus of any language, e.g. the
possible existence of (at least) two or three different names for the “same” object, as
Burke points out (p. 109).
3 Smith (1978): on material objects as culturally constituted, see especially pp. 45–7.
4 The notion of “constructed ambiguity”, as applied to Miner’s text, was suggested to
me by Marek Czyzewski, of the Institute of Sociology, University of Lodz, Poland
(personal communication, 10 October 1986).
5 Winch (1958). For an application of Winch’s approach to so-called “primitive” (just
the kind of linguistic description that Miner sends up) societies, see Peter Winch,
“Understanding Primitive Society”, in his Ethics and Action, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1972: pp. 8–49.
6 Of course, social scientists generate analytic “news” on problems such as hygiene

through the effecting of such transpositions. This is particularly the case where the
analyst is attempting to formulate a highly abstract or formal theory – a typical
formal-analytic enterprise. A classic instance in relation to the formal and general
(cross-cultural) analysis of hygiene rules and practices is to be found in a study by
Mary Douglas (1970), though my analytic position is in direct opposition to hers.
7 Harvey Sacks: “Poetics: Spatialised Characterisations”. Lecture of May 17, Spring
1971, in Sacks (1992), pp. 396–401.
8 D.L. Wieder and D.H. Zimmerman (1976). Again, this point has been brought to my
attention by Marek Czyzewski. See also H. Sacks’ metaphor of “the commentator
machine” (in Sacks, 1963, 1990). Edward Rose has taken up the discussion of
Sacks’ “Commentator Machine” metaphor at several points in his book The Werald,
vol. 1 (Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.: The Waiting Room Press, 1992) – see, e.g., his
chapter entitled “A Conversation with Harvey Sacks”.
9 J.C. Heritage and D.R. Watson. See also W.W. Sharrock and D.R. Watson, (op. cit.
1991).
10 Ken Dodd puts it most directly: “Humour is a perception of incongruity” he declared
at his lecture “Shakespeare and Comedy”: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-
upon-Avon, 22 September 2005. As EM analysts, though, we should prefer to see
incongruity as a device, a production procedure rather than a “perception”.
11 E. Goffman (1952), pp. 451–63. It should be noted that the origins of the
“perspective by incongruity” as a methodological device stretch back even beyond
Everett C. Hughes. Robert E. Park, for instance, employed some elements of such
a perspective by recommending that social scientists treat street beggars as though
they were an occupational group, with its own working knowledge and expertise, its
own working techniques, etc. Such an approach “re-describes” the frequently-found
conception of beggars as “inadequates”, “deficit systems”, and the like.
12 S. Messinger, with H. Sampson and R. Towne (1962), pp. 98–110.
13 This argument is rather similar to its truth-functional equivalents which have long
been discussed in philosophy under titles such as “the fallacy of unwarranted
extrapolation”, where what is found to be true within certain conditions and limits
should not be presumed to be “generally true”, i.e. as holding beyond such limits
and conditions.
14 The comments in the following two paragraphs and the observations which
immediately follow, are adapted from a paper by W.W. Sharrock (1988).
15 E. Rose (1960). See also G. Watson (1991).
16 Even this formulation involves a certain over-simplification since Miner describes
the Nacirema in terms of what many would argue are discrete institutional domains,
namely religion and magic, and in so doing, as I have said, conflates terms derived
from two language games.
17 Bittner (1974). “The Concept of Organisation”, Social Research, vol. 32 (1965), pp.
239–55.
Endnotes 127
18 Note that Bittner risks a cognitivistic formulation in his term “coherent maps”. His
term is not to be confused with the term “cognitive maps” but instead comes from a
phenomenological / “gestalt contexture” origin as respecified by ethnomethodologists
such as Wieder (1974: pp. 188–202), and Garfinkel (2002, Chapter 8, especially
pp. 257–8). The term “coherent maps” is, perhaps, best construed in terms of
the term “phenomenal field properties” which has gained prominence in recent
ethnomethodological respecifications of Gurwitsch’s original term.
19 Brookner (1984), pp. 27–8.
20 Iser (1978). I owe much of this brief discussion of textual matters to Iser’s
considerations, and also to discussions with my colleague W.W. Sharrock.
21 H. Garfinkel and H. Sacks (1970).
22 Marek Czyzewski, personal communication, 10 October 1986. The notion of “re-
organisation of readings” points to the organisational properties of texts as locally-
recognisable matters for readers.
23 Of course, both examples work in part by suspending members’ considerations
and understandings of the practical efficacy of these objects. It is important to note
that “practical efficacy” in this respect is adjudged as relative to a given language
game.
24 Garfinkel (1967), Chapter 3. An interesting resource on the documentary method
in relation to textual practices is A.W. McHoul (1982), especially pp. 11–36. Of
course, as I have noted, Garfinkel rescinded reference to the documentary method as
a model of members’ sense-making, replacing it with Gurwitsch’s concept “gestalt
contexture”, (Garfinkel, 2002).
25 To be sure, even Miner’s article, whose internal diversity is, of course, necessarily
limited by the stylistic unity indicated above, serves as a cautionary note to those
analysts who seek the “essence” of humour, as though there were some unified,
univocal core to all instances of humour. In fact, humour is immensely diversified,
as diversified as the local contexts in which it is found. It is incarnate in, inextricable
from and potentiated by, the virtually infinite array of linguistic activities and
devices. There is no more of a common “essential” element amongst items of
humour than there is a common “core element” amongst the linguistic devices,
contexts and activities through which they are delivered. As a corollary, it might be
noted that it is hopeless to attempt to analyse humour in vacuo, as separable from
the linguistic devices which convey it – devices which can and do, also on occasion,
convey nothing but seriousness. Indeed, “humour” and “seriousness” might not be
straightforwardly a contrast set; humour can have a “serious point” to the extent that
one is incarnate in the other.
Chapter 4
1 Not least because both Bourdieu and Manning tend to ignore one aspect of Goffman’s
dramaturgical approach, i.e. its close relation to what Trifiletti (1991: p. 150)
terms (Goffman’s) “… analytic passion for taxonomy …”. Goffman’s taxonomic
orientations hardly qualify for Manning’s description as “idiosyncratic”. Trifiletti’s

study is exceptional in that it explicitly and extensively considers Goffman’s method
of working, and presents it as systematic and precedented. See R. Trifiletti (1991).
2 Nor was Goffman’s use of such precedents any kind of end-point. Others, notably
Ned Polsky’s study of pool hustlers (Polsky, 1969: pp. 31–l08) appropriates and
employs hustlers’ argot to explicate the “inside” organisation of pool hustling.
Contrary to some claims, one doesn’t have to be Goffman to do Goffman’s work:
there is an available method there, and others have used it. Yet others have treated
this appropriation as an analytic object, e.g. K. Stoddart (1974).
3 This, perhaps, accounts for the extraordinary diversity of theoretical positions
amongst those analysts who seek to pursue or criticise Goffman’s work; as, for
instance, the range of contributions to the Ditton (1980a) collection illustrates. For
our purposes, the most pertinent paper in this collection is that by Lofland, whose
paper has greatly influenced the present chapter.
4 Note that the procedure supplying the implied or projected counterpart category
is also provided by the category-mapping procedure given by the “performer”-
“audience” master transcoding device. On category mapping see also, inter alia,
Chapter 2 of this volume.
5 As stated in the previous chapter, Garfinkel later abandoned his earlier analytic
formulation of sense-making procedures in terms of the documentary method of
interpretation (see Garfinkel, 1996), but that formulation nevertheless helps us, at
least initially, to sketch out the pattern-detection activities in the texts here under
consideration. This preliminary sketch having been done, we are then in a position to
consider these matters in terms of Aron Gurwitsch’s notion of “gestalt contexture”,
(viz. Wieder, 1974: pp. 186–98). For a treatment of a specific social phenomenon in
terms of the family of concepts given by the collecting term “gestalt contexture”,
see H. Garfinkel and E. Livingston (2005). I have attempted to indicate some aspects
of the analysis of texts in terms of gestalt contextures, and to move textual analysis
in that direction, in Chapter 1 of the present volume.
6 That this analysis finds its proper level when it is “literary-textual” in nature is
even acknowledged by Goffman himself (Verhoeven, 1993b: p. 313). Nor is it
any accident that Goffman’s work has been compared with that of novelists, e.g.
particularly (and aptly), Proust. See L. Belloi, (1993) and, though to a much lesser
extent, J.A. Hall (1977). Of course, such elective affinities can be forced too far
– and can even become pretension.
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Index
accountability, examples 64 category-bound taboos, and re-

The American Anthropologist 57 categorisation 49
Anderson, Elijah 38, 45, 47, 53 CBAs (Category-Bound Activities),
Anderson, R.J. 73, 96, 119 Miner’s “Body Ritual” 83–4
anthropology, lack of humour in 58 Chicago School 105, 106, 108
Austin, J.L. 46 Cicourel, Aaron V. 64, 86
Cioffi, F. 73
Becker, Howard S. 108 coherent maps 72, 117, 127n18
Belloi, Livio 120 “commentator machine” metaphor 2, 64
Berlinski, David 58 applied to Weber’s Ancient Judaism
Bittner, Egon 4, 72, 73 4, 24
Black ghetto culture and social organisation 3
fictive kinship 37 see also textual analysis
see also “going for brothers”; “going Coulter, Jeff 72, 104
for cousins” cultural capital 63
Blumer, Herbert 118 Czyzewski, Marek 62, 78, 97
Boltanski, L. 104
Bourdieu, Pierre 63, 102 description, and re-description 118
bureaucracy, and texts 7–8, 93 documentary method of interpretation
Burke, Kenneth 57, 61, 80, 120 85–9, 122n9
downward conversion 71, 119 formalism 88
dramaturgical analysis 105 gestalt contexture 88, 89
influence on Goffman 102 Goffman 116–17
pentad 102 Miner’s “Body Ritual” 89–92, 96
Permanence and Change 102 open-texture 86
perspective by incongruity 66-7 downward conversion, Burke 71, 119
CA (Conversation Analytic) approach 1 dramaturgical analysis, Burke 105
example 11–13 Durkheim, E. 110
Goffman on 103
transcription practices, 10-11, 121n3 Eglin, P. 46
Carlin, A.P. 10 EM (Ethnomethodological) approach 1, 4,
categorisation 43–4 5, 33, 40
category-mapping procedures 47, 50
relational pairings 44–5 “family resemblances”, Wittgenstein 52,
upgrading 47 125n31
see also CBAs; MCA; MCDs; re- Fish, Stanley, on the informed reader 74–5
categorisation formal analysis 33, 50, 73, 86, 105
“category-bound activities” 42–3, 44 formalism
category-bound attributes 44 documentary method ofinterpretation 88
formatted queues example 88
Garfinkel, H. 50, 81, 85, 86–7, 90, 99, 110, in sociology 58

118
Seeing Sociologically 101 identity, similarity, difference 118
Studies in Ethnomethodology 4 incongruity,perspective by
gestalt contexture 95, 97, 99 Burke 66–7
documentary method of interpretation on everyday activities 68
88, 89 examples 108
Goffman, Erving 22, 34, 58, 103 Goffman 105–6, 106–7, 115–16
active readers 117 and humour, 67, 126n10
analogies, use of 104 Miner’s “Body Rituals” 67–73, 77,
Burke’s influence on 102 97–8, 99
on CA 103 origins 126n11
documentary method of interpretation inscriptive practices
116–17 sociology 5–6
“lingoes”, use of 106 texts 6
linguistic turn 108 interpretive communities, and texts 23
Manning 102, 109–10 Iser, on the implied reader 75
MCDs, examples 112, 113–15 Israel, Ancient, pariah culture 4
metaphor, use 107, 109–10, 119
metonyms, use 102, 108 kinship, fictive
misnomers, use 106, 112, 118 Black ghetto culture 37
perspective by incongruity 105–6, examples 38
106–7, 115-16 as special friendship 38
re-description 105, 115–16
response cries 119 language, and social order 1
textual devices, use of 104, 120 Lee, John R.E., MCA 5, 14, 22, 25
works Liebow, Elliot 37, 45, 48–9, 50, 53
The Presentation of Self 110 linguistic turn
Stigma 73 Goffman 108
Strategic Interaction 107 sociology 109–11
“going for brothers” phenomenon 37, 38 Linton, Ralph 95
mutual help entitlement 46 Livingston, Eric 20, 30, 31, 32, 81
re-categorisation 45–6, 101 Long, Norton E. 63
“going for cousins” phenomenon 38, 47 Louch, A.R. 67, 68–9, 105
significance 49 Lynch, M. 81
Gold, Raymond L. 108
Gurwitsch, Aron 32, 88, 99 Macfarlane, Alan 8, 10
McHoul, Alexander W. 21, 92, 97, 116
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) Malinowski, B. 61
analyses 26 Mannheim, Karl 85, 87
Helm, D.T. 106, 115, 119 Manning, Phillip, on Goffman 102, 109–10
Heritage, John C. 64, 115 Marx, Karl 117
Hester, S. 46 MCA (Membership Categorisation
Hughes, Everett C. 68, 105, 106, 108 Analysis) 40, 58
humour newspapers 5
in anthropology 58 MCDs (Membership Categorisation
and perspective by incongruity 67, Devices) 41–2, 45, 78
126n10 consistency rule 79, 81, 113
Index 141
examples 112 Omissi, David 17

in Goffman 112, 113–15
in Miner’s “Body Ritual” 58, 80–5 Park, Robert Ezra 106, 108
referential adequacy 80 pentad, Burke’s 102
Mead, G.H. 62 police records, texts 16–17, 33
medical records, textual analysis 4–5 Pollner, Melvin 6, 40
Meehan, A.J. 33 Polsky, Ned 58
Messinger, Sheldon 68, 69 potter’s object simile 82, 98
metaphor Miner’s “Body Form” 84, 91
and context 118 Psathas, George, direction maps 27–8
in Goffman’s work 107, 109–10, 119
problems with 68–9 re-categorisation
metonyms, in Goffman’s work 102, 108, and category-bound taboos 49
119 durée 48
Miner, Horace, “Body Ritual Among the examples 51
Nacirema” “going for brothers” phenomenon
CBAs 83–4 45–6, 101
consistency rule 83 mutual help 47, 49, 52
description, substitution 61–6 stratifying practices 49
documentary method of interpretation see also categorisation
89–92, 96 re-description
downward conversion 71 and description 118
as humour 58 Goffman 105, 115–16
language use 70–1 Miner’s “Body Ritual” 62, 63, 65,
MCD 58, 80–5 99–100, 101
moral 98–9 reader
passages analysed 59–61 implied, Iser on 75
as pastiche 57, 59, 65 informed, Fish on 74–5
perspective by incongruity 67–73, 77, texts, interaction 20–3, 28–9, 117
97–8, 99 reflexivity 27, 52
potter’s object simile 84, 91 and texts-as-read 34, 35
puzzle-based reading 82–3, 96–7 response cries, Goffman 119
re-description 62, 63, 65, 99–100, 101 Rose, Edward 5, 9, 31, 70, 109, 118
readership 74–6 Ryle, Gilbert 48, 59, 77, 105
“real meaning” of 94–5, 98–9
significance 57 Sacks, H. 1, 2, 3, 41, 42, 43, 58, 111
stylistic unity 67, 72, 81, 99 Lectures in Conversation 42
text-as-read 58, 74–8 textual analysis of Weber’s Ancient
textual analysis 94–9 Judaism 4, 24
title 98 Scarne, John 19
misnomers, Goffman’s use 106, 112, 118 Schegloff, E.A. 4, 12
Morgan, David 59 Schenkein, Jim 5, 15, 76
Schütz, Alfred 67, 101
naming see MCA; MCDs Schwartz, Howard 118
newspaper headlines sense-making, texts 23, 24, 27, 34, 54, 79,
guilt-implicative text 17 85, 87, 95, 101, 114
puzzle-solution formats 14–15 Sharrock, W.W. 3, 73, 96, 119
MCA application 5 similarity, identity, difference 118
Smith, Dorothy E. 13, 14, 70, 72, 92, 93–4, sense-making 23, 24, 27, 34, 54, 79,
117 85, 87, 95, 101, 114
social action, textually-mediated 23–34, 93 and structuring of academic disciplines
bus stop research 25–6 10
social order, and language 1 studies 5
social organisation, and “commentator texts-as-read 32
machine” metaphor 3 Miner’s “Body Ritual” 58, 74–8
sociology and reflexivity 34, 35
humour, lack of 58 textual analysis 2, 4
inscriptive practices 5–6 everyday artefacts 24, 29
linguistic turn 109–11 example 16–17
technical language 9 high-status artefacts 24
stylistic unity 73, 74, 77, 117, 118 medical records 4–5
Miner’s “Body Ritual” 67, 72, 81, 99 Miner’s “Body Form” 94–9
Sudnow, David 62 vacations 3
symbolic interactionists 47, 48 see also “commentator machine”
metaphor; MCA
“text-reading pair” 20, 29, 30, 35 textual mediation 27
conceptual problems 31–2 social action 23–34, 93
texts Turner, Roy 45
activation of 22, 30
as active social phenomena 14–19 vacations, textual analysis 3
and bureaucracy 7–8, 93
bus stop research 25–6 Watson, G. 10
diversity 7 Weber, Max 7–8
examples 7, 93 Ancient Judaism, Sacks’ textual
inscriptive practices 6 analysis 4, 24
interpretive Wieder, D.L. 32, 54, 64, 67, 88, 89, 118
leeway 19 Wilson, T.P. 33
schemata 23 Winch, P. 63
and interpretive communities 23 Winkin, Yves 104, 120
and local organisation 30, 33 Wirth, Louis 102
mediating role 24–5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 4, 34
multiple-author 17–18 “family resemblances”, 52, 125n31
as passive conduits 13–14 Wolff, Erwin 74
pervasiveness 7–8 world, as “worded entity” 9
police records 16–17, 33
production 5, 19, 29 Zimmerman, Don H. 6, 40, 64, 67
reader, interactions 20–3, 28–9, 117

Analysing Practical and Professional Texts: A Naturalistic Approach

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Analysing Practical and

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis are cognate approaches to the

Other titles in this series

Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes

Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-7546-7897-7 (hbk)

1 The Ethnomethodological Analysis of Texts and Reading  7

2 “Going for Brothers” in Black American Speech:

3 The Textual Representation of Nacirema Culture  57

4 The Textual Incarnation of Sociological Analysis:

Many longstanding friends and colleagues have helped me in pursuing my analysis

Wes Sharrock and John R.E. Lee (University of Manchester) pioneered

Many French or Francophone ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts

Some considerable portions of Chapter 1 of this monograph were first published

A sketch of some ethnomethodological concerns and precedents for textual

This volume consists of a series of chapters that establish a family of “takes”

My central concerns are as follows. First, I wish to examine natural language

Producing a rendition of society, or its local contexts, in terms of the trope

However, Sacks’ construal of social organisation in terms of a “commentator

As an example of the applicability to textual analysis of the “commentator

Considering the textual features of this built-in, self-commentating aspect of

submits to praxiological examination Max Weber’s reading of the Old Testament

As Schegloff (1999: p. 21) expresses it with reference to the “commentator

… supplying answers to the questions which Weber puts to [them], answers

Some ethnomethodological things can be noted, here. Firstly, Sacks is

accordance with the expectations and requirements pertaining both to practitioner

In a related study, Garfinkel (1967) examined how researchers applied a coding

As I said at the beginning of this Preface, a recurring theme is that of professional

idealisations and the like. As such, the locally-embedded, concretely identifiable

As analysts interested in language, we can examine a text as simply marks

neglect by sociologists of Weber’s important observation, not only in relation to

However, the virtually inconceivable variety of texts and the thoroughly

However, even these textual exegeses sometimes constituted an advance over

The language, numerical constellations, diagrams and other features of these

The above is an important point for sociology, particularly because professional

An example of this textual structuring of an analysis is to be found in the

Now, this excerpt of transcript might be commonsensically defined in a variety

choosing between and applying those categories. In so doing we categorise those

These categories, “police officer” and “suspect” are particularly influential

unduly) consequential in how we make sense of, and analyse, an instance of

Indeed, conversation analysts tend to be a good deal more scrupulous and

This extended illustration is simply to show how the textual practices of

Texts as active social phenomena

An example: in the journal Women’s Studies International Forum, John Lee

Puzzle-solution formats abound in newspaper headlines: note another “puzzle”

FACTORY CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

A similar guilt-implicative text – again without any explicit accusation or

social dimension is how a given writing shows a particular “recipient design”,

A first observation is that the phraseology in terms of which the statement is

The studies by Omissi and Scarne – neither of them, of course,

In an influential book, the ethnomethodologist Eric Livingston has conceived of

A culturally-competent course of reading might well involve readers’ active

Perhaps one of the clearest examples of activating a text is when lecturers

text is organised so as to potentially predispose readers towards a given set of

Textually mediated social action: Professional and everyday

analysis which focuses upon social scientific (and particularly anthropological)

As indicated in the “Introduction” to this volume in relation to Sacks’

Texts may be seen as “mediating” in a variety of ways, for example an

Furthermore, textually mediated action clearly plays a focal part in studies of

I must confess some unease at the term “textual mediation” since it is

The ethnomethodological version of this concept is that descriptions or

1 The Ethnomethodological Analysis of Texts and Reading 7

3 The Textual Representation of Nacirema Culture 57