Membership categorization and the sequential multimodal organization of action

Abstract

This chapter addresses issues in membership categorization, one of Sacks’s key contributions to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1972a, 1992). The chapter discusses the relevance of visual and embodied resources in the situated establishment, maintenance, and challenge of relevant categories. It does so by elaborating on how multimodal resources are exploited by participants to make sense of their categories, moment by moment, and on how this contributes to Sacks’s membership categorization analysis. On the basis of video-recorded guided visits, I reflect on how the detailed organization of embodied practices such as walking both exhibits and achieves the categories of the walkers. In this activity, the way in which the “guide” versus “guided” organize their walking, looking around, and talking accountably manifests their categories and, at the same time, reflexively contributes to establishing them. Here, I focus on embodied category-bound practices of walking as a perspicuous phenomenon.