Introduction

One of Harold Garfinkel's legacies is his sociological experiments, which are commonly referred to as “breaching experiments.” Garfinkel created and developed these experiments to discover new phenomena that his contemporary social scientists had not found, adequately discussed or properly analyzed. The experiments allowed him to adapt the properties of praxeologically and conceptually unrelated scientific rationalities to the interactions in the lifeworld (e.g., Garfinkel 1952, 1963, 1967). That is, Garfinkel experimentally made trouble in situ by breaching people's normative expectations of various kinds, but paradoxically, he described, discovered and characterized the rational properties of mundane routine activities. We refer to this interest as a spirit of experimentation.

This chapter investigates the historical development of Garfinkel's ideas through experiments and examines the ways in which the participants deal with interactional, technological trouble in human–robot interactions (see, e.g., Ruiter and Albert 2017, for an overview of conversation analysis and experimental settings). In the following, we discuss Garfinkel's orientation to people's methodical accomplishments in practical activities that since his doctoral research he explored through experimental methods. We show that the sociological experimental attitude has influenced and shaped the development of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies, including current research on human–robot interaction. By examining experimentally conducted human–robot interaction, we argue that the analysis of human–robot interaction can also reveal aspects of routine grounds of everyday activities.

Our chapter is structured as follows. First, we consider Garfinkel's breaching experiments through the lens of his overall research trajectory from his doctoral dissertation (Garfinkel 1952) through to his Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967). Second, we clarify two important foundations of background expectancies and everyday life that Garfinkel's breaching experiment revealed: (1) the temporal organization of future action, which includes projection and the anticipation of forthcoming actions, and (2) knowledge based on accountability and membership categories. Third, we describe how we applied Garfinkel's spirit of experimentation to develop and test a service robot that can interact with multiple people simultaneously (i.e., a multiplex care robot system). Fourth, we demonstrate how the two key elements of the breaching experiments work in human–robot interactions in a spice shop where a parent and a child interact with and through a robot acting as a shopkeeper. In conclusion, we provide a possible description of the reason for why Garfinkel emphasized the spirit of experimentation and discuss how it is connected to human–robot interaction research.

Introduction

In 1967, the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology by Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) broke new ground in sociology. Garfinkel's Studies not only challenged sociology's paradigmatic foundations and routine working methods, but also produced heuristic anomalies and instigated new ways of probing social order and its recognizable production in situ. Among these new ways of working figured the now widely known, if not regularly practiced “breaching experiments,” experiments for which Garfinkel invited his students to engage in odd conduct in everyday situations (for example, by conducting oneself like a stranger at home). Taken out of context, these experiments sometimes came to be seen as being “odd” themselves, where in the first place they were devised as heuristic enterprises (making investigable the routine production of social order in everyday life) and critical probes (challenging “social theory” for its epistemological, ontological or other abstractions of social reality).

This introduction to The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel concentrates on the experimental outlook of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (EM) (i.e., his “study of people's methods”). First, we shall outline EM's research rationale, as that rationale was articulated in Garfinkel's Studies (1967a), as an empirical and critical endeavor. Not only did his seminal book probe “social order” as a locally investigable phenomenon, instead of reproducing it as theoretical problem ex cathedra, but the book also challenged sociological theorization in so doing—a challenge leveraged by “breaching experiments,” yet sometimes missed in their introductory exposition. Second, we shall tease out the common ground of subsequent developments in EM, as that ground happens to be articulated and rearticulated through changes in successive program and position statements, spanning contrasting strands of conversational, practical, and conceptual analysis. Against this multifaceted backdrop, the most distinctive figure(s) of ethnomethodological experimentation will be located as a topic and resource, sometimes both. Finally, the heuristic tension between analytic detachment and practical involvement—a recurring tension in ethnomethodological research—will allow us to present this Companion and its contributions, in and for the renewal of ethnomethodological inquiry.

Cui bono? The question “to whose benefit” EM was, is or remains to be developed has, since Garfinkel's passing in 2011, been taken up under various guises, both “fundamental” and “applied.” There certainly has been no lack of voices, approaches and suggestions on how to make EM “useful,” “critical” or “reflexive,” including our own—“again,” we might add.

In the 1950s, Talcott Parsons, then Garfinkel's PhD adviser, worked on a manuscript in which he explored the “institutionalized one-price system” as a standardized feature of consumer markets (see Garfinkel 1967, 69). In a version of this manuscript published in Parsons’ and Smelser's monumental Economy and Society (2005 [1956]) the authors suggest that consumers internalize the normative basis of the institutionalized one-price system in the process of socialization and, therefore, do not engage in bargaining. This observation occasions Parsons and Smelser to argue that the one-price system “tends to eliminate bargaining over price in the immediate transaction” (p. 158).

Garfinkel (1967, 68–70) refers to the “institutionalized one-price rule” in his Studies when discussing one of his now so-called breaching experiments. In this experiment he asked his students to bargain for items sold at a standardized price. At this point of the Studies Garfinkel also introduced the often-invoked notion of the “cultural dope” as “the man-in-the-sociologist’s-society who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides” (p. 68). He uses the experiment with his students to elaborate on this notion by suggesting that sociologists often consider participants as cultural or judgmental dopes when they ascribe their behavior to “rule-following.” By the same token, they tend to overlook the possibility that participants decide to avoid situations that can become ambivalent and uncertain if standards are being challenged.

Lynch (2012) has examined discussions about Garfinkel's notion of the “cultural dope” by examining the bargaining experiment. He begins by highlighting that the experiment unsettled students at first, but after the event many of them reported that they had been successful in obtaining a bargain and would continue to negotiate for price reductions. Rather than arguing that Garfinkel and ethnomethodology offer a counter-model of the actor as “a fully conscious, self-reflexive rational agent,” Lynch 2012) emphasizes that for ethnomethodologists actions and interactions are embedded within concrete circumstances. He then offers two interpretations of the results from Garfinkel's experiment.

In the “conservative reading” (Lynch 2012, 227), the experiment reveals that in supermarkets people tend to pay the standardized price without challenging it, but in exceptional situations might consider bargaining.

Introduction

Garfinkel's early breaching experiments, exercises and demonstrations provided the tools, materials and “instructed actions” for students and scholars to encounter and examine firsthand a then unexplored domain of phenomena. His distinctive pedagogy served as a prod to the “sluggish imaginations” of novices who were being introduced to ethnomethodology (EM) for the first time (Garfinkel 1967, 38). Such indigenous, hands-on work helped students “find and demonstrate a new phenomenon” of naturally organized activities and “elucidate[d] the lived orderliness of ordinary organizational things” (Garfinkel 1981, 2). This chapter suggests a connection between Garfinkel's early experiments, exercises and demonstrations and where EM is today. Like an intellectual archeology, I look back at early EM and consider how it laid the foundation for later EM “studies of work” in the professions and sciences, which also focus on the study-able domain of activities as properties of a local production. The chapter links Garfinkel's tutorial exercises, experiments and demonstrations to a “study of work” in the law and explores the continuities between technical legal reasoning/expert activities and commonsense reasoning/nonexpert activities as “instructably observable structures of practical action and practical reason” (Garfinkel 1996, 3).

The first part of the chapter discusses Garfinkel's breaching experiments and other early EM exercises and demonstrations that offer a “perspective by incongruity” on the otherwise seen-but-unnoticed features of social order and make visible and discoverable the locally organized detail of practical action in ordinary settings. The second part of the chapter presents what Garfinkel would term a “hybrid study of work” and examines an episode of courtroom cross-examination conducted by a highly competent trial lawyer engaged in the practical tasks of his profession as he attempts to impeach the testimony of a key witness in the famous O. J. Simpson murder case. I also discuss the practical work of the lay witness in response as he struggles to provide and sustain an unimpeachable account of what happened. Like Garfinkel's breaching experiments, the cross-examining attorney seeks to make trouble for the adverse witness, who attempts to hold his ground, and in so doing each makes study-able and accountable their respective practical action and practical reasoning.

“Gosh, I wished Garfinkel had never used the term ‘experiments’!”—This, over and again, has been my line of chagrin expressed at the recurring, yet fleeting, all too narrow and often misdirected attention given to Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Where does the chagrin originate? The title and subtitle above hint at the answer developed in this postface, a postface which, ironically, will be closing this volume dedicated to Garfinkel's “experimental legacy.”

That being said, the “experiment” that I became most interested in is one that was mentioned, I believe, in Garfinkel's notes for a course called “normal environments.” For this experiment, Garfinkel apparently requested his students to go into a public toilet, close the door behind them and then bang on the door. The results must have been intriguing, although the “toilet experiment” wasn't mentioned again—if it ever existed. Mostly though, I deplore the rendition of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology in terms of “experiments” or, worse, “breaching experiments.” In the two or three years following the publication of Studies, this led to crass interventions at least in British sociology which, more than anything else, were often just pranks, nurturing reductive, superficial interpretations of “ethnomethodology” (e.g., as a methodology for “social psychology” or “applied social science”).

What is the alternative? Among the various ways of practicing ethnomethodological research, there are “conceptual investigations,” taking inspiration from Wittgenstein and Winch, as much as Garfinkel and Sacks (e.g., Hutchinson et al. 2008). What is to be said on Garfinkel's “experiments” from the stance of conceptual inquiry, for which this postface pleads? First, it is worth recalling that Garfinkel devised his experiments as “classroom demonstrations” to teach elementary aspects of sociological concepts (Garfinkel 1956). Against this backdrop, the recurring interest in sociological theory for “breaching experiments” has turned them into a hugely inflated topic, only rarely if at all connected to Garfinkel's pedagogical uses of them. Second, a general note of caution is in order. What is to be understood as an “experiment” in the first place? And, depending upon that understanding, what would be the precise nature of experimental results? What would these results, and the materials they draw upon and make available, allow us to claim?

Galileo opened the “Dark Ages” to the first ray of light with the pendulum. To use a thing as the instrument to demonstrate mathematical models as analytical foundations of all things’ causalities, Galileo invented the thing-“world” as a pair of two methods: one, of formal analysis (FA), the other, the unaccounted in situ and in vivo work with the scientific instrument, such as a pendulum. About the two methods, Harold Garfinkel observed, “just this equipment speaks of the transcendentality and universality of methods and results as local, practical achievements” (Garfinkel 2022, 35). Galileo's pendulum pairs concrete and universal technologies of accounts as two incommensurable asymmetrically alternate types of “absurdity of accounts”—formal analytical (FA) and ethnomethodological (EM).

Within the EM corpus of work, these notes on Galileo's pendulum belong to “hybrid studies of work.” The “hybrid studies of work” render a possibility of an EM account of Galileo's pendulum in the very methodological “loophole” in FA through which the concreteness of things escapes. The relation between the two methods, Garfinkel captures with a metaphor of a mythological monster of two Janus faces (FA and Ethnomethodology, EM) as two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis.

“Hybrid studies of work” refer to “mythological” accounts and accountability as in the pairing of two Janus faces, ﹛ ﹜. As each Janus's face considers the other face's sight[ed] absurdity—“There is no order in the plenum” versus “There is order in the plenum”—each account is absurd to the other account.

Introduction (by Kenneth Liberman)

During the final decade of Harold Garfinkel's life, I had the habit of stopping by his home for several days while I was driving between Eugene, Oregon (where I taught), and Baja California Norte (where my principal home is). Because I grew up in the same coastal hills of Los Angeles where Garfinkel lived, and because my parents had passed away, I liked to stay with Harold and Arlene not only to visit them but also to reconnect temporarily with the landscape, the smell of the coastal chaparral and drink in some of the Yiddish-American culture of my childhood. As my price of residence, Harold usually extracted some presentation of data from my research (a few of which became chapters in my More Studies book, Liberman 2013), or as Harold grew progressively blinder, I would read to him articles he selected.

On this occasion, which took place a year before his death, I had pulled his Ethnomethodology's Program book off the shelf (Garfinkel 2002a) and asked him which chapter he considered to be the most important. First he replied, “Oh, no one chapter in particular is more important than the others.” At this point in his life, Harold had gone 95 percent blind. He was able to detect light, and on his best days he could make out figures that stood inside a circle of visibility of about one degree (such an event occurred, to his delight, at line 4 of the transcript: “Oh! I can see you!”). After a minute had passed, Harold announced to the ceiling, “Actually, I think Chapter 9 is the most important one.” I responded, “Ohh, too bad. That's the only chapter I feel I haven't fully understood.” I then suggested, “Why don't we read that one today?” (i.e., Garfinkel 2002b). He approved the idea with enthusiasm. Because the chapter is dif¬ficult and his congestive heart disease caused him to become exhausted easily, it took us all three days of my visit to finish reading it aloud. I taped the reading so that I could capture any fresh explorations the reading might motivate, and what is included here is a selection I transcribed from that tape recording.

Introduction

By way of a reenactment, and with the help of its proceedings, this chapter returns to the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Held in Spring 1967 as a two-day conference at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the symposium brought together a group of 17 selected American sociologists, both “quantitative” and “qualitative,” to discuss the program and prospects of emerging ethnomethodology with its founding figure, Harold Garfinkel, and leading practitioners at the time, including Harvey Sacks and David Sudnow. The conveners of the symposium, Richard J. Hill and Kathleen S. Crittenden, explain its purpose in the preface to the transcribed proceedings:

More than fifty years later, ethnomethodology—the praxeological study of “people's methods”—has become an internationally established, diversly staffed and diversified research field. Why return to the Purdue Symposium then, an early conversation on ethnomethodology's “basics”? And why do so with the help of their edited proceedings, an arguably edulcorated transcript (more of which below)? Interestingly, Garfinkel himself reflected on this kind of question, when resuming the 1967 symposium on day two: “Suppose we are making a tape recording of our conversation. In what sense would the recording that we are making be available to us for our later analysis?” (Garfinkel, in Hill and Crittenden 1968, 172). This chapter returns to Garfinkel's question*, yet in an unusual way perhaps, as the chapter reports and reflects upon the symposium's reenactment.

Lily Bart's Monte Carlo Casino Garden

In Garden Plots (2006), Shelley Saguaro notes that there are “many books of fiction, poetry, and prose over the centuries which, while not always obviously or even primarily about gardens, use them as a crucial and integral part of the whole.” The House of Mirth, as we have seen, exploits Bellomont to situate Lily as a rash and imperfect reader of American nature's signs. Her struggles to decipher accurately cultural and topographical designs are magnified by the sheer scale and ornamentation of overseas gardens, especially those synonymous with the Côte d’Azur. As critic Nancy Von Rosk points out, in the opening of Book II, Selden and Lily find each other in an idyllic landscape, one far removed from all activities relating to the humdrum business of the American frontier—the material provision of life. “It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each man's humor.” This “gift” first of all implies the social and technical developments (improved roads, railway networks) that made this stretch of coastline more accessible and appealing to affluent overseas visitors. The “gift” of experiencing this region reminds us of Renato Poggioli's theory about the “psychological root of the pastoral,” which is “a double longing after innocence and happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration but merely through a retreat.” The importance that Selden ascribes to the Monte Carlo Casino Gardens “retreat” is anchored in how the locality speaks to “the holiday vein in human nature”—it “struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses.” Selden's sense of escape from a dispiriting, even Puritanical American scene of “prolonged hard work” carries a faint echo of Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous denunciation of labor as “the curse of this world” because “nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionably brutified.” However, implicit in the Riviera episodes is a sense of how entitled, self-absorbed American travelers can become “brutified” through dogged adherence to inhuman snobberies, or hierarchies of value whose cruelty—seen in the lack of empathy for figures like Lily—is magnified by the glamorous foreign setting. The gardens here throw into sharper relief a spiteful underside of expatriate privilege and patronage. Such somber reflections do not vex Selden at this time.

Spring in a French Riviera Garden

The Republic of Peru enjoys a rich and storied history, and this is especially true when it comes to its external affairs. General José de San Martín in early August 1821, six days after he declared Peru independent, established the Ministry of State and Foreign Relations, appointing Juan García del Río as the first minister of foreign affairs of Peru. Following the decisive patriot victory at Ayacucho in 1824, Peruvian independence was finally secured, and the goals, capabilities, options, and constraints of Peruvian foreign policy began to clarify. In common with most of its neighbors, Peru from the outset focused on the accomplishment of a limited number of core objectives central to the well-being of any independent state, including political sovereignty, territorial integrity, continental solidarity, and economic independence.

With the exact location of its boundaries in dispute, Peru embraced the principle of uti possidetis de jure de 1810 which generally stated that each new state was entitled to the territory formerly under the jurisdiction of the colonial administrative unit from which it was formed. Territorial issues were often complicated by the commercial advantages at stake as the coastal states of South America quarreled over trade routes and seaports. Ideological differences intensified all of these conflicts as did concerns for regional hegemony. Peru shared with neighboring states a profound awareness of interlocking interests, and bilateral disputes frequently assumed multilateral dimensions as states shifted alliances in search of relative advantage. The conflicting demands of independence and interdependence, as determined by this mix of domestic and international forces, strongly influenced the content and expression of Peruvian foreign policy over much of the next 200 years (Wagner de Reyna 1964, 1: 9–14).

End of the Beginning

Under President Ramón Castilla (1845–51, 1855–62), Peru first acquired the degree of internal peace, centralized and efficient state organization, adequate and reliable public funding, and an emerging sense of national unity necessary for the formation of a foreign policy. During his two terms in office, Peru experienced for the first time a government that outlined a foreign policy at the outset of its term and then worked to achieve its stated objectives. Articulating a coherent, comprehensive foreign policy founded on the principles of continental solidarity, nonintervention, and national integrity, Peru under Castilla assumed a leadership role in continental affairs.