ethnomethods
I have a few more questions about ethnomethodology.
Firstly, I don't think that the distinction between anthropology and sociology has been made clear to me while at UCI. In college the distinction was clearer to me simply because I belonged to one department and what we did was not what they did. It seems to me that ethnomethodology critiques sociology in a way that is somewhat congruent to the distinction that anthropology makes between itself and sociology. Is that at all correct? I see ethnomethodology to be similar to ethnography except that the focus is on actions more than language and in fact the ology on ethnomethodology is partly a misnomer right?
I think that the HCI community could warrant a better distinction between anthropology and sociology because I hear students asking what is the difference, really, between an ethnography and a qualitative study. Anthropologists aren't atheoretical, but ethnography is, and I do believe that ethnography is a method which takes the position that one must take the words of the "natives" for truth. Linguistic anthropologists do exactly to their transcripts what ethnomethodologists do to actions in video records. Right?
Also, a word on "cultural dopes." While we may not be cultural dopes of our own culture, we are cultural dopes of the cultures of others. So when sociologists study other people and then deduce rules from their observations about that society, those rules were at least obscure to the sociologists. The problem I saw when I studied anthropology was that the rules were often stated as though they weren't lived subjectively, as if people followed them automatically and were therefore less modern than us rationalist doers who make all our own choices. Did the problem arise when sociologists studied domestic cultures?
Finally, while we might critique sociologists for "discovering" rules about society, and may very well agree that the rules are known to those in the society and don't exist except through re-enactment, etc. There are many societies that seem to be goverened by rules, not in the sense that these rules are unknown or not subjectively performed, but just in the sense that the rules are highly ritualized and long-lasting. I also learned from my tutelage in anthropology that some of the most powerful messages were the ways in which ethnographic accounts of "other" cultures could lead to a critique of our own, revealing rules of our own society that we don't typically notice or make sense of (even if we re-enact them and perpetuate them).
I still agree with the critiques of sociology. When I took a sociology class on race and ethnicity, I felt as though I learned to talk about race and ethnicity in greater detail but didn't actually learn anything about race and ethnicity. These concepts were the "phenomena" of the class. I also agree that if we study actions or language very closely we can see a great deal enacted or performed, maybe even see everything, but I think that I am constantly a "dope" of the pratices to which I am peripheral or distant, and even to those that I am too close. ??