This chapter will consider the character and role of antisystemic movements in Immanuel Wallerstein's theorization of the modern world-system. It will trace Wallerstein's engagements with this question particularly since the appearance of the “movement of movements” against neoliberal globalization in the late 1990s, when he argued that the struggle for a better social world could be framed by the alternative between the “spirit of Davos” and the “spirit of Porto Alegre.” The chapter will consider Wallerstein's twenty-first century arguments relative to his classical elaboration of the subject and consider their contributions and limitations for this era of antisystemic social mobilization.

Throughout his long life, Immanuel Wallerstein was attentive to what he called “antisystemic movements” as central to diagnosing prospects for progressive transformation in and beyond the current world-system. World-systems analysis (WSA), as it has been constructed by Wallerstein as its leading architect, is normative, strategic and politically invested in its historical analysis and its prognoses for the future of antisystemic struggle. Antisystemic movements are thus central to what Wallerstein termed utopistics, or “the serious assessment of historical alternatives” to the current world-system (Wallerstein 1998, 1).

In this chapter, I review the character and role of antisystemic movements in Wallerstein's theorization of the modern world-system as they appear in his classic treatment (1990; as well as 2004, 2014). Through a comparative dialogue with the “contentious politics” tradition which has come to dominate the field, I consider the contribution of WSA to analyzing social movements, while also observing that Wallerstein replicates some problematic patterns and assumptions common to modern social theory, notably its Eurocentrism. I then turn to Wallerstein's later writings in the context of the Global Justice movements, especially his engagements with the World Social Forum (WSF) process, where he was confronted with a recomposition of the global left (Santos 2006), including “indigenista” movements arising from the exteriority of modernity or “colonial difference” (Mignolo 2002; see also Escobar 2007).

The WSF is the historical reference point for Wallerstein's exhortation of the “spirit of Porto Alegre” over against the “spirit of Davos” in contemporary struggles over a successor world-system.

A ravenous jackal emerges from his den at the edge of a cremation ground and observes a vulture speaking to a grieving family as they prepare to leave the corpse of a young boy to be cremated. As the sun sets, the vulture rushes the family along lest he be forced to resign the boy's body to the nocturnal creatures of the cremation ground, including the jackals. Reminding the family of the inevitability of death, the vulture tells them, “You’ve stayed long enough in this dreadful cremation ground, teeming with vultures and jackals and filled with skeletons—a terror for all beings. Nobody who has been subjected to the rule of Death has come back to life, be they friend or foe. This is the way of all beings” (MBh 12.149.8–9). With their hopes dashed, the family leaves the boy's body to the delight of the famished vulture.

The jackal, hoping to stall the family until darkness falls over the cremation ground so that he can claim his next meal, challenges the family's affection for the boy, and questions how they could give up hope so quickly. The vulture and the jackal go back and forth, commanding and manipulating the emotions of the lamenting family as they each seek to dine on the boy's flesh. The jackal urges them to wait a bit longer—anything can happen. Perhaps the boy is alive, or perhaps he could even be revived. In an attempt to instill hope in the family, the jackal tells them that he knows of a time when a deceased boy did, in fact, come back to life.

“There is nothing to stop you in your affection or your weeping lament,” the jackal explains, “but you will constantly ache from abandoning this dead boy. It has been heard that the child of a Brahmin was revived because Rāma, courageous and true, upheld righteousness and killed the Śūdra Śambūka” (MBh 12.149.61–62). The jackal and the vulture debate at length about the fate of the boy as the family wavers between surrendering their child to the cremation grounds and turning back to wait for any sign of life. As the arguments rage on, Śaṅkara, the god Śiva, appears before them all, prepared to grant everyone present a boon. For the grieving family, he restores the boy back to life, and he eliminates the hunger afflicting the two flesh-eating scavengers.

Kālidāsa and Vimalasūri mark some of the earliest and most consequential landmarks in the expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. I might argue that these two poets were the first to widen the boundaries of Rāmāyaṇa tradition as we know it today—boundaries that encompass an extensive amount of variability and adaptability as the epic enters new contexts. Through their poems, each demonstrated techniques on how to receive a narrative, push the limits of its messaging, and introduce a new take on an old story. Their respective presentations of the Śambūka episode are prime examples of such poetic dynamism. These two pioneering poets helped imbue the Rāma narrative with a flexibility by which others could cater the Rāmāyaṇa to their own audiences.

In the centuries leading up to and immediately following the turn of the first millennium CE, poets wrote several new Rāmāyaṇas. The current chapter focuses on this late classical and early medieval period of development in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. With the various ways of handling the Śambūka episode acting as our gauge, it becomes clear that the Rāmāyaṇa tradition has many vectors of influence that are deeply intertwined with prevailing socioreligious trends, geography, and language. The pathways of that influence, however, are not always what one might expect. A dogmatic adherence to a specific way of telling the Rāmāyaṇa based on religious affiliation, for instance, does not seem to reflect the reality of how the Rāmāyaṇa traveled across India. By way of example, narratives originating in the Jain tradition went on to find their place in the Hindu tradition and it becomes increasingly clear that we should take geographic proximity and the influence of literary communities therein just as seriously as poets’ potential desire to stick close to a narrative produced in their own religious community.

Here, I will chart a course through the various modes of telling the Śambūka story moving into medieval India. Some older modes of presenting the episode have survived deep into this period, though almost always with some sort of modification to better reflect the sentiments of the intended audience. There are also some new ways of dealing with the issue of Śambūka that originate in this period.

One of the most polarizing moments in India's recent history came with the central government's attempts to implement the recommendations of the Backward Classes Commission, also known as the Mandal Commission. The Commission was set up in 1979 headed by B.P. Mandal and, a year later, it issued its recommendation that just under 50% of available seats in educational institutions and government jobs be allocated to India's OBC, SC, and ST populations—Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution prevent the totality of reserved spots from exceeding 50%. Acknowledging that the recommendations will cause some pain to those who fall outside the reservation schematic proposed by the Commission, the report's authors question whether it is appropriate that “the mere fact of this heart burning be allowed to operate as a moral veto against social reform” (1980, V.1, p. 58). Speaking in the context of OBC reservations, the Mandal Commission attempts to argue that a top-heavy practice of reservation that favors the higher castes has always been in practice in India. In the process, the Commission even refers to Ekalavya and Śambūka, two oft-cited examples of caste-based violence in situations where one wishes to illustrate the injustices of the caste system. The document reads:

The Mandal Commission's recommendations remained dormant for nearly a decade before Prime Minister V.P. Singh attempted to implement them in 1989. The shift from a purely merit-based (and upper-caste dominated) system of admissions to this legally ordained positive discrimination ignited a controversy that engulfed India's urban centers, Delhi in particular. In addition to widespread riots, the Mandal Commission protests were famously characterized by multiple cases of self-immolation.

In February 2020, US president Donald Trump paid a state visit to India. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi organized a welcome for him at the world's largest cricket stadium with a crowd of 100,000. As President Trump entered the stadium to be greeted by Modi, the crowd was treated to the Village People's 1978 hit song Macho Man. The two macho men hugged at center stage, and two versions of ethnonationalism met in an expert piece of performance art. President Trump led a long-standing ethnonationalist project in the United States, while Prime Minister Modi led a similar project in India. Both emphatically embraced political performance, intuitively knowing that they were leading projects in political psychology. This is a rather widespread practice, both historically and geographically. With its close rela-tionship to stochastic violence, it is also a potentially dangerous one.

Economic nationalism is a form of nationalism, and nationalism is about the “nation.” Nations, however, are not states or governments. They are something different. Nations are most often conceived of in terms of an in-group and an out-group. As one researcher put it many years ago, “the concept of ‘us’ requires ‘them.’” More recently, a team of business researchers put it this way:

It would be nice to claim that economic nationalists are free of such discrimination, but this is often not the case. These authors also note that “hostility toward the out-group may be augmented during conditions of instability in the relative economic fortunes of nations” and that, during such episodes, pressure increases to maintain in-group solidarity. Such hostility is usually combined with a sense of crisis to strengthen its political psychology impacts. As noted by The Economist, “nearly all drawbridge-up parties argue that their country is in crisis and explain it with a simple frightening story involving outsiders.” This can be a volatile and sometimes lethal formula of political mobilization.

What Is a Nation?

Before delving too far into the subject of ethnonationalism, it is important to mention and to keep in mind that it is primarily cultural, linguistic and psychological.

In the preceding chapters, we have seen how economic nationalism functions as a lure for both economic policy and political dynamics. Its associated zero-sum thinking is a default in many circumstances, even though the majority of relevant contexts are not actually zero sum. We have also seen that economic nationalism, including ethnonationalism, pandemic nationalism and techno-nationalism, can set back actual economic and human welfare in multiple ways. Overcoming these defaults represents a perennial, major challenge for human progress. Nonetheless, before we conclude this book, we need to give economic nationalism its due.

Giving Economic Nationalism Its Due

This book has been quite harsh on economic nationalism in its various forms, but there are elements of it that are worthwhile and contribute to our understanding of the world. Going back to mercantilism, for example, there was a serious attempt to explore how the economic world worked and to begin to engage in real economic analysis. As stated in Chapter 2, the conception of the balance of payments possessed by some mercantilist writers was far superior to many present-day politicians. If their equation of power and plenty was too strong, they did at least identify two categories of concern that are relevant to this day.

There is less positive to say about Friedrich List and his vision of an imperial Germany. Nonetheless, his identification of both infant industry protection and the role of talented immigrants has relevance to this day. Unfortunately, his early followers also included imperial Japan, and his modern followers have both taken infant industry protection too seriously but not seriously enough. Retuning to this concept, modernizing it, and making it compatible with WTO law as a DFT remains a project surprisingly neglected. That said, we need to keep in mind that List and his followers wholeheartedly ignore the central role of services in modern economies, reducing the relevance of their ideas.

While economic nationalists often take zero-sum thinking for granted, their doing so has inspired researchers in other fields (political psychology, negotiations theory) to examine it in some detail. This examination reminds us that central concepts in economics can be difficult to understand and communicate and that, consequently, various forms of heuristic substitution are an inevitable default.

Introduction

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (WSA) has profoundly influenced research and theory on global political economy and the environment. Wallerstein's insights on the modern world-system are vital to helping us achieve an accurate understanding of ongoing processes of environmental degradation and uneven consequences from the global to the local. His ideas also help us evaluate prospects for responding to challenges such as socioenvironmental inequalities and climate change in the contemporary world-system. Furthermore, the world-systems perspective helps us imagine social change and possibilities for future world-systems. In this chapter, I first review important components of Wallerstein's world-systems perspective. I then discuss examples of how each in turn is pertinent to issues related to the environment and climate change. I take a detailed look at ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) theory, which draws directly from insights from WSA (Wallerstein 1974a). I conclude by looking at what the world-systems perspective has to offer specifically regarding the global climate change crisis and possible future world-systems.

WSA

Influenced by and building upon critical development perspectives, Wallerstein encouraged the study of the global system from the perspective he called WSA. He argued that the appropriate unit of analysis is the world-system and that it is vital to take a historical, long-view approach (Wallerstein 1976a, 1979, 2000b). According to Wallerstein, analyses must be “simultaneously historic and systemic” (Wallerstein 2000b, xvii). Along these lines, Wallerstein wrote:

After the mercantilist era, economic nationalism became intertwined with industry or manufacturing, and the two have been remained so ever since. This fact was not lost on one of the founders of the field of modern political economy, Robert Gilpin, who notes:

As we will see in this and subsequent chapters, these perspectives on manufacturing are limiting and tend to lead to conflict, something that Gilpin also notes. Further, the focus on industry turns out to be somewhat misplaced, and we need to take some time to see why.

What became known as the “Industrial Revolution” first took place in Britain or, more precisely, in the north of England. The initiating sector was the one we discussed in the previous chapter, namely, cottons. The initiating innovation was the flying shuttle, which, beginning in 1735, doubled pro-ductivity in weaving. Subsequent innovations took place in spinning. It is worth remembering that, up until the mid-eighteenth century, China and India accounted for approximately one-third and one-quarter, respectively, of global manufacturing output. Britain was playing catch-up but did so in a manner that surpassed these two previous loci of global manufacturing expertise. Eventually, these innovations had significant growth and wage effects in Europe. Exactly when this took place is a matter of debate, but it is located somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century.

Recall from Chapter 2 that the woolens sector in Britain successfully agitated for protection from cotton goods. This increased the incentives for domestic cotton goods production and innovation, including the introduction of a cotton–linen blend known as fustian that escaped the ban on cotton products. Steam power became central to the innovation processes as well. Importantly, innovations were not confined either to specific products or to specific countries. As noted by economic historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, “the technical innovations that were first made in cotton were applied to the woolen, linen, and silk industries as well.”

As a research topic, global inequalities have only been explicitly present in mainstream academic debates since the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be sure, in the 1970s, social science debates addressed the international division of labor, center–periphery dependencies, imperialism and the world-economy—and thus implicitly global inequalities. However, they took place in parallel with and independent of studies of income and educational inequality which focused almost exclusively on national contexts. It was not until the gap between rich and poor widened in many countries of the Global North, especially in the United States and Great Britain in the 1980s, that global inequalities became the new buzzword under which the world-economy was addressed together with structural inequalities.

At first, debates largely revolved around World Bank findings assessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth in the previous decades. Whether they concluded that “growth is good for the poor” (Dollar and Kraay 2002) or that “inequality is bad for the poor” (Ravallion 2005), they primarily focused on poverty as the decisive issue in poor countries and the one that needed to be addressed first. The World Bank initially argued that mean incomes between countries were converging and that global inequalities were declining. Soon, mounting evidence of a steep increase in the income ratio between the world's richest and the world's poorest individuals, alongside ever more data on rising inequalities within the largest and fastest-growing economies of China and India, overshadowed these claims. By the time Thomas Piketty published Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Oxfam first reported that the richest 1 percent now owned more wealth than the rest of the planet (Oxfam 2016), global inequalities had become firmly established as both a research topic and a focus of media attention. Yet, by that time, world-systems analysis had dealt with global inequalities for more than forty years—using a more complex and differentiated terminology and a more encompassing historical perspective while anticipating many of the recent arguments and even predicting several country trajectories by a long shot.

In 1941, a little-known economist by the name of Albert Hirschman arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship. He was 25 years old and a Jewish German refugee. In the early 1930s, as Hitler rose to power, Hirschman had been active in the German Socialist Party but subsequently fled Berlin for Paris. From there, he went to study at the London School of Economics. Completing his studies at LSE, Hirschman went to Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Then to Trieste, Italy, for doctoral work in economics and back to Paris to enlist in the French army. Peddling part of the way on a stolen bicycle, he later fled France over the Pyrenees and went on to Lisbon for his escape from European fascism.

While in Berkeley, Albert Hirschman met his wife and wrote a book. He would go on to write many more books as he became increasingly famous, and this first book has been almost forgotten. It is entitled National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade and represents a refugee economist's struggle with the economics of fascism. Indeed, the book was in part a response to Herman Göring's famous statement that “guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” As such, it was a contribution to a centuries-long argument in economics between “power” and “plenty” and still has relevance for us today.

The objective Hirschman set out for himself in National Power was “a systematic exposition of the question of why and how foreign trade might become […] an instrument of national power policy.” To address this, he engaged in novel statistical analysis of Nazi trade relations in the pursuit of national power. This analysis led him to the following conclusion:

Introduction

At the start of a seminar he convened at UCLA in 1992, Harold Garfinkel warned a visitor, “you must do what I call perspicuous settings, or tutorial problems, or when I’m in a bad mood I call them exercises. I never call them experiments.” He did call them experiments decades earlier, though he qualified this by saying that they were not “properly speaking experimental,” and that they were “demonstrations” that (in a phrase he attributed to phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg) provided “aids to a sluggish imagination” (Garfinkel 1967, 38). Regardless of what names he chose to give them, the various “experiments” he devised over many years demonstrated anything but a sluggish imagination, and they offered varied tasks, difficulties, and lessons for his students. Most, but not all, of the exercises used “trouble” as leverage for gaining insight into the routine organization of social activities. Some troubles were deliberately induced disruptions, such as in the simple case of playing the game of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) when the “experimenter” would make a move by inscribing a mark straddling a line separating adjacent squares in the 3 × 3 matrix. This maneuver regularly drew the objection from the opponent that it was “against the rules,” but the rule in question was invoked consequent to the move, rather than being an explicitly stated precondition of play. Other exercises required students to perform activities while remaining alert to troubles that regularly occur—such as getting lost in the course of following directions.

Drawing from Garfinkel's published writings, as well as transcripts of lectures and seminars in the Garfinkel Archive, I begin with a discussion of some of his early experiments, comparing them with contemporaneous social psychology experiments and discussing how they were commonly presented in sociology textbooks as methods for exposing background knowledge and tacit presuppositions that operate beneath the awareness of social actors. After suggesting that some of the early experiments and Garfinkel's commentaries on them exhibited more problematic implications for sociology, this chapter goes on to examine a raft of exercises and demonstrations that Garfinkel deployed in a later phase of his teaching and research.

Introduction

This chapter discusses instances of breaching rules and constitutive expectancies concerning witnessable conduct in public space during the Covid-19 crisis, treating the pandemic as a perspicuous context for reflecting back on Garfinkel's contributions on trust conditions as basis for the public intelligibility of social order and the concept of breaching. We show how the reference to trust conditions and breaching enable us to better understand the changes involved in the pandemic as a progressively established social fact, in particular with regard to the seen but unnoticed features of ordinary conduct in public space. In turn, the way in which social practices in public space were promptly addressed and normatively changed during the pandemic sheds new light on the conceptualization of (naturally occurring) breaching as a members’ problem that is reflexively established in and as social interaction.

In this introduction, we discuss the notion of “trust” in relation to “breaching” as introduced by Garfinkel (2002) (“Trust and breaching” section), and then situate our reflection on breaching in the sociohistorical context of the Covid-19 pandemic in general (“Pandemic and breaching” section) and as concerning public space in particular (“Public space under Covid-19 as a perspicuous setting” section). Next, after having situated the video data this chapter is based on (“Data” section), we propose a study of how the accountability of conducts in public space suddenly became inspectable and altered during significant moments of the pandemic (“Formulating what happened and the understanding of the new rules,” “Overseeing police work enforcing the rules,” “Inspecting distance between people,” “Inspecting the number of people assembled” sections). The conclusion discusses the consequences of these disruptions for how issues of trust and normative order can be revisited (“Conclusion” section).

Trust and breaching

The notion of “breaching” normative orders, as a way to reveal the constitutive expectancies that makeup the seen but unnoticed features that render the social world meaningful, was discussed by Schütz (1962) and elaborated on by Garfinkel (1963, 1967, 2002). Pursuing how to produce “specifically senseless” situations (Garfinkel 1967, 55) stems from an interest in how to account for members’ shared, commonsensical attitude to the experience of everyday life as a situated accomplishment and how to observe it in moments of trouble.

Introduction

While I was conducting fieldwork on drag king workshops (DKWs)—social occasions in which female-assigned-at-birth persons transform their gender through makeup activities, verbal resources and corporeal exercises—I was intrigued by the number of reflexive activities deployed by the participants. Drag kings spent a lot of time discussing their gendered bodily transformations, theorizing on walking and its relationship to gender norms and public spaces, testing with other co-participants how gender transformation affected their spatial perceptions, and finally, over the course of their interactions, discovering the existence of a phenomenon they had been theorizing about in preceding conversations.

By “Gender as a scientific experiment,” I refer to the fact that gender can be experienced by participants as something resembling a scientific experiment—science as it is practiced within and through everyday activities. In her study on experimental demonstration and discovery as a practical accomplishment in school science labs, Sherman Heckler (2011, 13) notes that developing a disciplined perception of the world is the result of interactional work between students and teachers. In a quite similar way, interactions in DKWs lead participants to develop a fine-grained analysis and strong consciousness of gender construction processes. In DKWs, participants experiment with the transformation of their bodies, while making inquiries into the workings of (their) gender.

I will show how drag kings mobilize what Michael Lynch calls “epistopics,” epistemic topics that relate to “description, measurement, categorization, observation, reproduction” (1993, 247), while being shared by scientists within their professional activities and by lay people in the course of their ordinary practices. My focus on gender as a scientific experiment is inspired by two branches of literature. First, I draw on research from science and technology studies, ethnomethodology and linguistic anthropology, research that approaches science and daily life as practical accomplishments situated on a continuum, rather than stipulated as discrete entities. In this framework, scholars have approached science as its practical and interactional accomplishment (Latour and Woolgar 1988; Mondada 2005; Sormani 2014), a method of the “knowing-body” (Bjelić 2003, 12–13), and in its intertwining with daily life, trivial matters, poetics (Ochs et al. 1996; Latour 2007) and art (Sormani et al. 2019).

Introduction: Trust and artificial intelligence (AI)

Daemons, or demons, may signify diverse entities. In multitasking computer systems, daemons are computer programs that run as background processes without the supervision of a user. In the entirely different context of thought experiments, philosophers or scientists occasionally imagine demons as agents which act in ways that pose intellectual challenges or highlight apparent paradoxes. In this chapter, both uses become applicable concerning the operations of a set of technologies with automated features. By extension, this argumentation could be relevant for the contemporary discussion on AI and algorithmic systems.

For the past two decades, the field of AI has undergone significant developments. What was once a marginal strand of research in computer science has now been implemented in a wide range of practices, from highly technical expert systems to common and mundane applications. The neurosurgeon segmenting her scan of a brain tumor and the teenager applying a beauty filter to his Snapchat Story can both draw on the power of convolutional neural networks. As another example, although the data differs, uniquely tailored recommendations for medical treatments and suggestions for music may build on similar clustering techniques. The content-agnostic nature of machine learning methods allows for their application across the board.

The profusion of algorithmic systems is also accompanied by some concerns regarding their trustworthiness. Systems that sort, score, recommend or in other ways inform or make decisions that affect human experience have been understood as having many risks (European Commission 2020). Trustworthy AI has become a research field of its own with dedicated venues. For example, the ACM FAccT conference brings together academics and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability and transparency in socio-technical systems. One of the goals of this research is to make AI trustworthy and explainable (i.e., understandable and predictable by humans). As topics for computer science, they may have a certain novelty to them. However, the notions of trust and accountability have a long history in ethnomethodology.

Garfinkel developed his ideas about trust most notably in “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions” (Garfinkel 1963), in which he argues that trust is a necessary condition for understanding the events of daily life. According to Watson, though, this study of trust belongs to Garfinkel's early work, and not everyone regards it as “fully fledged EM analysis” (2009, 489).

Introduction

One of the more serious challenges confronting social research is that the social practices used to create stable social order and meaning—the social facts that are sociology's fundamental object—are usually taken for granted: their use does not require conscious awareness or consideration. In addressing this obstacle, Garfinkel noted that social practices can quickly become routine, making the social world appear to be just out there, ready to hand, to be easily identified and/or categorized. But, the actual embodied work of creating social facts is not readily available to detailed observation and/or reflection. Therefore, procedures for making social processes visible and available for observation are necessary. Having noticed that “trouble” in various forms can make participants aware of the practices they are engaging in, Garfinkel introduced what he called “tutorial problems” as a way of making trouble to give his students awareness of ordinary seen-but-unnoticed embodied practices: “‘making the phenomenon available’ again” as preparation for doing research (Garfinkel [1993] 2021, 37).

Often called “breaching experiments,” Garfinkel's tutorial problems are primarily teaching exercises, not experiments, designed to raise awareness of the “constitutive expectancies” (“trust conditions”) and “phenomenal field” properties of embodied action that ordinarily remain “seen but unnoticed.” He would sometimes invoke Aron Gurwitsch, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gestalt psychology in discussing phenomenal field properties. On other occasions, in describing seen but unnoticed aspects of practices he would refer to “contexts of accountability” and/or “accountable actions and identities,” in ways that were inspired by Kenneth Burke and Karl Mannheim. Both forms of reference date from 1939 to 1946.

While Garfinkel's approach has enormous potential for rendering taken-for-granted social processes available for empirical observation, and interest in his work is increasing, misunderstandings of his position that create the appearance of discontinuity and contradiction obscure both the argument and its implications. In this chapter, we confront these misunderstandings in two ways. In the first section, we trace continuities by focusing on a letter written by Garfinkel to his parents in July 1939, and the theme of Models and Mock-ups, that originates in a report Garfinkel wrote in 1943. Both show how preoccupations that are often identified with later periods inform his early observations. In the second section, we establish continuity between various approaches Garfinkel took to trouble/trust, indexicality and embodied practices over many years.