172 Neill Korobov
Ethnomethodology: Empirically Grounded Categorizations
Ethnomethodology reflects both Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) suggestion
that people are continually displaying their local understandings of what is
going on and Harvy Sacks’s (1992) idea that such displays of local
understandings are organized and visible in the details of everyday talk.
Ethnomethodology approaches identities as relationally-responsive
categorizations that are claimed, resisted, and otherwise used in
communicative contexts to conduct social and personal life. Although
these processes are analytically tractable, they are not measurable vis-à-vis
an experimental factors and variables approach, but rather are analyzable
as a texture of orderly and repetitive linguistic, gestural, and sequential
resources. Although ethnomethodology currently encompasses a variety of
strands, apposite for this chapter is Sacks’ early interest in membership
categorization. Sacks’s early work offered rich descriptive accounts of the
ways people’s identities are rendered visible in their displays of, or
ascriptions to, membership in identity-relevant or feature-rich categories.
Sacks’s approached identities as practical categorical ascriptions that
people use as transactional tools for conducting social business with others.
For Sacks, the truth or correctness of an identity claim or ascription is not
what is central. It is not important that someone truly ‘has’ the identity that
they claimed or that was ascribed to them, nor was Sacks concerned, as
many psychologists are, about correlating identities to people’s actions or
feelings. This (lack of) interest allowed Sacks to avoid the methodological
problem of treating identities as variables or factors that could be
quantifiably measured. What mattered for Sacks was how identity
ascriptions were interactively used in live communicative exchanges, and
how such uses figured as parts of the architecture of personal and social
lives.
Sacks approached identities as membership categorization ascriptions
that are used to perform various kinds of discursive actions. A rich and
nuanced descriptive vocabulary thus emerged from Sacks’s writing and
was taken up by a broad range of language and social interaction
researchers (for a more elaborate discussion, see Antaki & Widdicombe,