Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Harvey Sacks was a student of Garfinkel's

Harvey Sacks, the founding father of Conversation Analysis, of the school of ethnomethodology within Sociology, was only 31 when he died, but left a huge impact on our understanding of face-to-face interaction and methodologies for investigating it.

Garfinkel and Goffman were both on Harvey Sacks' dissertation committee, but it is my understanding that Goffman could not agree on some parts and Sacks finally had to get someone else to replace Goffman on the committee. Harvey Sacks brought you the adjacency pair, which we'll talk about in more detail later in the semester.

He also wrote an article called, Everyone Has to Lie, and we talked about the variability and subjectivity of what is considered dishonest in social relations and what is just a required form that shouldn't be viewed at the surface level (how are you as a probing question about the details of your well being) but at the metamessage level (I'm greeting you because we are still on good terms, or whatever terms the tone of my greeting suggests, and not because we are so close that I think it would be appropriate for us to just let our hair down and tell each other all the gory details of our lives).

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