Week 8 Presentation

Here are the slide from the group presentation done by Claire and Myself

Repost of last week

I've reposted my comment on Jess' blog, since it didn't work last time!
Looks like it worked, follow the link:
http://jesspyers.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/dramaturgy.html

Dramatugy and Performance

Dramaturgy
This week I read through some of the blogs and after reading Jess' blog it got me thinking.
I commented on her post here:
http://jesspyers.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/dramaturgy.html

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology, to put it simply, is the methods used in the study of people. 

Not so big and scary after all.

The basic ideas that led to Garfinkel coming up with this term was one question;

“How do social actors come to know, and know in common, what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it?” (Heritage, p.76)

Through his breaching experiments, Garfinkel concluded that when a person is faced with an interaction or something that is out of the ordinary, they try to normalise their behaviour in an attempt to gain control over the situation to gain a better understanding of it.

In everyday life, these instances occur more often than we think.

There are many examples of these experiments that could be used. Here’s a link to a site that gives a few examples (I’m hoping nobody beat me to it in their blog!)

http://sniggle.net/breaching.php

After reading through these examples it occurred to me that things like this could happen and do more frequently than I first thought. I guess the difference is that these are instances where it happens on purpose, rather than being honestly mistaken, the one I’m talking about is mistaking customers in restaurants for people who actually work there. This has happened to me if I go somewhere in my work uniform, as I’m sure it has with others too.

So, from Garfinkel's breaching experiments we can see how society has come to maintain an order within itself, and this order forms the basis for many, if not all our social interactions that we have throughout our lives.