Sacks, Harvey (1935–1975)

An American sociologist, early collaborator with Harold Garfinkel, seminal ethnomethodologist and conversation analyst, Sacks received his AB from Columbia University in 1955, LLB degree from Yale University in 1959, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. He lectured in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, and at University of California, Irvine. While Sacks published some landmark essays during his lifetime, including “An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology” (1972) in Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Interaction, “On the Analyzability of Stories by Children” (1972) in R. Turner (ed.), Ethnomethodology, “On Formal Structures of Practical Action” (1970, with Harold Garfinkel) in J. Mckinney and E. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology, and “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking in Conversation” (1974, with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson) in Language, the bulk of his work remained unpublished until after his death. Sacks is best known for systematizing the formal study of language use by means of audiotape recordings of naturally occurring conversations, though his work is by no means confined to this approach. Most prominent among his many contributions to sociology is the identification of turn-taking systems in conversation. He also introduced the study of what he called membership categorization devices (MCDs) in conversation. The study of MCDs provides a highly nuanced analytic appreciation of how interactants utilize characterizations of their own social identities and those of others in the course of social interaction. This research technique allows analysts to identify empirically how social actors incorporate social status ascriptions into the conduct of social interaction at a level of empirical detail still unmatched by any other analytic approach.

DARIN WEINBERG

sacred and profane dichotomy

Symbolic (as opposed to technical) classification towards understanding the hierarchical relations between things in society was a central interest of Émile Durkheim, initially outlined in his coauthored essay with Marcel Mauss (Primitive Classification, 1903 [trans. 1963]). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912 [trans. 2001]), Durkheim elaborated on two universal categories of things: the sacred (that is, things set apart and forbidden), and profane things from which the sacred must be isolated and protected.