Quote of the Day: John Heritage
"The social world is a pervasively conversational one in which an overwhelming proportion of the world's business is conducted through the medium of social interaction." --From Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology by John Heritage (1984, Polity Press: Cambridge).
Ethnomethodology is the study of how people within an ethnographic group go about their daily activities as members of the group. So, ethnomethodologists study what it means to be a member, how one functions as a member, how one recognizes other members, etc. While not really my bag, ethnomethodology certainly has its benefits and ethnomethodologists have contributed much to such fields as sociology and linguistics. I like this quote because its pretty much true the world over. We talk. We talk to create bonds between us. We talk to define ourselves. We talk in order to, just generally, get shit done and then get the hell out of Dodge. (Or, we talk in order to avoid getting shit done so that we can continue to stay in Dodge just a little bit longer.)
