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Ethnomethodolagy is considered in relation to conventional sociology; especially with regard to the epistemological critique of conventional sociology made by ethnomethodology. The pretheoretical assumptions of conventional sociology are analogous to the pretheoretical assumptions of natural science. Conventional sociology sees itself as identifying the causes of the social order. Its assumptions are (1) that the social world is analogous to the physical world in its givenness, its already-thereness, and (2) that the perceived orderliness of the social world is explicable by social laws analogous to physical laws of the natural world. The consequences of these assumptions are (1) a programme of investigation whose aim is a hypothetico-deductive explanation, and hence a division of the world into cause and effect, and (2) as a result, the reification and ‘scientification' of the social world. Ethnomathodologists take the social order to be an ongoing accomplishment of its members. Within the ethnomethodological framework, the documentary method, typification, and some features of members' accounting practices are considered. Brief consideration is given to the potential problems for ethnomethodological research. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

This study seeks to provide an analysis of some of the features which underly any ethnographic description. First, it focuses on the daily routine of a community medical clinic in a large city in Western Canada, then it "looks back" on the methodological and theoretical issues inherent in the production of any ethnography. A daily routine known as "chart rounds" (a review of patients' medical histories) is examined in detail. That description itself then becomes a topic of inquiry in its own right. The analysis rests on field observations conducted over a year and a half within the research setting. During this period the researcher was privy to medical examinations, to chart rounds, and to much of the ongoing routine of the Clinic. I was also able to tape-record various aspects of its organization. Most of the material which I have analyzed consists of transcriptions taken from tape recordings of doctor-patient interviews and of chart rounds. Some of the issues which will be given special attention are (1) the beginning of the ethnographic report and the relationship of this section to the subsequent sections of an ethnography; (2) how it is that ethnographic descriptions are necessarily based in a set of common sense relevancies; (3) the use of 'talk' in interaction and as a source of data for "discovering" the self-organizing features of the settings and occasions from which this talk is collected; and (4) the relationship between ethnographic description and the researcher in the research setting. The research reported here is to be seen as exploratory and tentative. It is not intended as a -manual for ethnographic researchers, but as an attempt to explicate some of the organizational features in the construction of an ethnographic description. No doubt it raises many more questions than it answers, but its purpose will be satisfied if it is able to generate some debate about the organization of ethnographies. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

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Anthropological classics such as E. H. Man's On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (1883) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders (1922) are generally regarded as products of an emergent nineteenth century social science. These anthropological classics were accepted by contemporaries as authoritative statements in their authors' fields of competence, and the ethnographic 'pictures' of the aborigines they presented were accepted as accurate descriptions of indigenous life. The following thesis argues for an alternative approach to the history of the production of anthropological knowledge. It begins by exploring the gradual codification of observational practices in the nineteenth century British anthropology. The codification of ethnographic observation is examined in the case of anthropological manuals published between 1840 and 1892, and their methodological impact on the possibilities of data collection are discussed. Ethnographic observation is then approached from the point of view of media use, and the relationship between drawing and photography is discussed in relation to nineteenth century physical and cultural anthropology. The codification of ethnographic observation and the anthropological use of various representational media are the problematic for an intensive exploration of the production of anthropological knowledge in the Andaman Islands. The approach adopted focuses on unacknowledged strategies and marginalized knowledge which were nevertheless directly implicated in the production of ethnographic texts. Following this approach, the discipline of Anthropology comes to seem less an isolated intellectual activity, and more a residue of broad social, cultural, and political processes. Drawing on this perspective, the works of Man and Radcliffe-Brown on the Andaman Islanders are treated as the culmination of a history of representation that is built on and incorporates administrative strategies, representational media and s

Recent critiques of both the subject and method of anthropology have caused the discipline to reexamine its process of representation. This thesis provides an exploration of approaches to representation in visual anthropology, with specific emphasis on collaborative visual ethnography. Both theoretical and practical issues are considered. The first chapter traces the history of ethnographic film and discusses various approaches to subject participation in literature and films. The second chapter presents a theoretical basis for collaborative visual ethnography, primarily from "postmodern" critiques of anthropology and recent visual anthropology literature. The third chapter consists of an analysis of a video resulting from a collaborative project I facilitated, in order to illustrate ideas of collaborative visual ethnography in a practical setting. The fourth, and final, chapter examines the few examples of collaborative film and video that are documented in order to construct a framework for approaching collaborative projects.