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.