Trouble.

Doing my group presentation this week and trying to come up with an interesting way to get a mostly nonresponsive class motivated about ethnomethodology seemed to be one mountain of a task! Garfinkel’s breeching experiments really stood out to me and the whole idea of a constantly changing social order which we view through an underlying pattern seemed particularly relevant. Not only did I love Garfinkel’s idea of messing with a stable system to see the mechanisms that hold it together, it had me inspired to see what I could mess with. Although I was well aware of Garfinkel not being able to create or find a senseless interaction, I wanted to see if it was possible myself. Basically I just love a good challenge!

So I resolved to try and cause trouble with my housemates. I didn’t knock walking into their rooms, I’d help myself to their things without asking, I was basically messing with every framework we had set up in the house, and boy did I cop some righteous hostility!! But not once, when I finally told them about what I was actually doing and as one of them so eloquently put it “what the HELL has got into you this week” did they say that they hadn’t ever found my behaviour to be senseless. Every time they had attributed it to me just being a pain, or having run out of toothpaste and food, being bored or sleep deprived. My experiment was perfect to demonstrate to me the idea of our underlying framework, and Schutz’s natural attitude in which people ignore any doubts about discrepancies in between appearance and reality and ignore it for as long as possible, and when they do finally they attribute meaning to the action, take it as a personal attack on them by my deviation and respond with righteous hostility.. Which was probably justified in my housemate’s case!