Livingston - Ethnographies of Reason

This book presents a fundamentally different, ethnographic approach to the study of skill and reasoning. It grew from a collection of studies of how people do the little things in life: work on crossword puzzles, play games of checkers, use volumetric pipettes, keep their family refrigerators in order, drive cars through four-way stop intersections, make origami models, prove theorems of elementary geometry.

From the point of view of professional sociology, these studies shared one undesirable characteristic: they really were just studies of how people work on jigsaw puzzles, play solitaire, and do physics experiments. As much as the studies might have revealed about skill and reasoning, the stories I had to tell were small stories about the ways that people do things. The larger point for and about the sociological discipline was missing.

While a totalizing narrative would have been convenient, such a perspective wasnt available to me nor did creating one make much sense. Instead, I wanted to find an emerging coherence of the studies by going deeper into each of them. Ethnographies of Reason is the result of this project. Its a study of skill and reasoning in the ordinary activities that fill our lives.

Ive written the book from the perspective of a researcher, not that of a disciplinary scholar or academic historian. Its carried throughout by the examination of always concrete case-study materials, not by theoretical arguments. After some brief introductory materials, the book begins by looking at the phenomenal domain of skill and reasoning; it then describes practical techniques for learning more about that domain; it ends with the central themes that clarify and give direction to actual research.

Ive written the book in this way, in part, because it reflects the way I work and, in part, because it may help others find their way in studies of their own. The goal isnt to make the world whole again and return us to the speculative theorizing, hypothesized empiricism, and grand narratives of traditional sociology, but to create space and to develop techniques for learning new things.

As an undergraduate student, my first assignment in ethnomethodology was to go and watch people queuing. After doing so for about an hour, I was tired and bored; I had seen nothing that interested me. Then something odd happened.

The last queue I watched consisted of students selling their textbooks back to the student bookstore. Three book buyers were seated at a row of tables in front of the queue. When the buyer at the right table became free, the first person in the queue needed help with her box of books. The second person in the queue placed his books on the floor and carried the box for her.

While the second-in-line was helping with the box, the buyer at the left table became free. A service bay was open, but no one was going to it. The people in the queue bunched up as a knotted congregation, no longer maintaining their queue formation. They were looking this way and that, showing each other that something was terribly wrong and asking each other through their actions, Whats going on? They had formed the questioning queue. The second-in-line returned to the queue, picked up his stack of books, and went to the open bay, whereupon the other queue members returned to their previous positions and reconstituted the line of the queue. It was magic.

Seeing this, I realized that when the queue members were previously doing nothing, they were actually doing a hell of a lot. They were watching the service bays; they were monitoring the progress of the queue. They had arranged their bodies to exhibit the line of the queue; they were maintaining the inter-queue-member distance of that particular queue. What the queue members were doing was so ordinary, and they were doing it in such an ordinary way, it seemed as if they were doing nothing. They themselves were producing the ordinariness of the queue. Their collaborative (if anonymous, unacknowledged, and uncelebrated) work of queuing had worked for them in the past. Now something had gone wrong. They all saw that their joint efforts had failed, and they wanted it fixed. In asking why?, they also wanted someonesomeone other than themselvesto go to the open book buyer.

This chapter works through three examples of the produced ordinariness of ordinary actionone involving arithmetical calculations, one concerning the play of checkers, and one regarding the local followability of a mathematical argument. The full force of the theme becomes apparent when faced with the characterization problem. An essential aspect of what were attempting to characterize is the ordinariness of domain-specific skill and reasoning to and for their practitioners: if a characterization isnt fully embedded in the ordinariness of practitioners work, it isnt what were looking to find.