Ethnomethodology

Not directly related but I just wanted to know what ethnomethodology was all about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology

"While traditional sociology usually provides descriptions of social settings which compete with the actual descriptions offered by the individuals who are party to those settings, ethnomethodology seeks to describe the procedures (syn: practices, methods) these individuals use in their actual descriptions of those settings."

"Ethnomethodological indifference. This is the policy of deliberate agnosticism, or indifference, towards the dictates, prejudices, methods and practices of sociological analysis as traditionally conceived..."

"First time through. This is the practice of attempting to describe any social activity, regardless of its routine or mundane appearance, as if it were happening for the very first time. This in an effort to reveal how the observer of the activity assembles, or, "constitutes", the activity for the purposes of formulating any particular description"

"Breaching experiment. A method for revealing, or exposing, the common work that is performed by members of particular social groups in maintaining a clearly recognizable and shared social order. "

"Sacks' gloss. A question about an aspect of the social order that recommends, as a method of answering it, that the researcher should seek out members of society who, in their daily lives, are responsible for the maintenance of that aspect of the social order."

"Durkheim's aphorism. Durkheim famously recommended that we, "...treat social facts as things" (Durkheim:1895/1982:S.45). This is usually taken to mean that we should assume the objectivity of social facts as a principal of study (thus providing the basis of sociology as a science). Garfinkel's alternative reading of Durkheim is that we should treat the objectivity of social facts as an achievement of society's members, and make the achievement process itself the focus of study (Garfinkel:2002:117-118)."

"Indexicality. ... a statement is considered to be indexical insofar as it is dependent for its sense upon the context in which it is embedded. "

"Documentary method of interpretation. The Documentary Method is the method of understanding utilized by everyone engaged in trying to make sense of their social world - this includes the ethnomethodologist. ... Mannheim defined the term as a search for an identical homologous pattern of meaning underlying a variety of totally different realizations of that meaning. Garfinkel states that the documentary method of interpretation consists of treating an actual appearance as the "document of", "as pointing to", as "standing on behalf of", a presupposed underlying pattern (Garfinkel:1967:78). These "documents" serve to constitute the underlying pattern, but are themselves interpreted on the basis of what is already known about that underlying pattern. This seeming paradox is quite familiar to hermeneuticians who understand this phenomenon as a version of the hemeneutic circle (Okrent:1988:157-172). This phenomenon is also subject to analysis from the perspective of Gestalt theory [part/whole relationships], and the phenomenological theory of perception (see Gurwitsch:1964:202-227)."

"Ethnomethodology's field of investigation. For ethnomethodology the topic of study is the social practices of real people in real settings, and the methods by which these people produce and maintain a shared sense of social order (Garfinkel:2002:117)."