Introduction to Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

Clemens Eisenmann,Michael Lynch

doi:10.1007/s10746-020-09564-1

Abstract

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order.

Highlights

Introduction to HaroldGarfinkel’s Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal FieldClemens Eisenmann1 · Michael Lynch2,3 AbstractThis article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993
Born in Vilna, Lithuania to a line of Jewish scholars, his family moved repeatedly in his early life to escape pogroms in Eastern Europe. He pursued higher education in Germany, where he developed his interests in Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, and the sociology of knowledge, and made contact with leading figures such as Max Wertheimer and Edmund Husserl
Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological misreading consists of treating the phenomenal field as a praxeological achievement that cannot be investigated solely through the phenomenological study of the perception of figures or of a series of notes that make up a melody or chord, as per Gurwitsch’s approach, but in embodied practical actions in the lived social world

Summary

Introduction

Introduction to HaroldGarfinkel’s Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal FieldClemens Eisenmann1 · Michael Lynch2,3 AbstractThis article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. In an overview of the reading assignments for the seminar in the following year (1994), Garfinkel emphasizes the central relevance of Gurwitsch’s findings for Ethnomethodology, but he recommends to the students that they should “misread” The Field of Consciousness (1964) in order to extend Gurwitsch’s phenomenological insights and investigations of “paper and pencil drawings” to the lived-phenomena, the vicissitudes of practical actions and practical circumstances, that ethnomethodology investigates: It’s not that Gurwitsch is to be criticized.

Results

Conclusion