Transposing Gestalt Phenomena from Visual Fields to Practical and Interactional Work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ Social Praxeology

In lectures and writings in the decades following publication of Studies Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, founder ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” phenomenological Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty others. Garfinkel’s included selective creative treatment themes that Gurwitsch drew from Gestalt psychology, such as figure-ground, contexture, phenomenal field. Rather than identifying these with visual perception demonstrated picture-puzzles (for example, animals hidden foliage) line drawings reversible figures, Garfinkel used them to demonstrate praxeological interactional phenomena: organizations embodied activity constitute fields collective action. Phenomenal fields, for are formed through work performed concert actions Although Harvey Sacks, Conversation Analysis, did not explicitly mention phenomenology or psychology his transcribed lectures, some on sequential organization conversation seem informed, if only indirectly relationship by Gurwitsch’s auditory phenomena. Both Sacks devised innovative ways transpose phenomena perceptual social formations.