Bloody 'bloody'

This week I commented on Nicholas Corr's post. My comment is below!

'So we have been looking at the way in which cultural identity can be accomplished through speech, and I think this is a really fascinating area of study. We looked at the relationship between what is said and how it is said, arguing that when using a word the meaning lies in its articulation rather than word itself. The reading looked at the use of the word 'bloody' in Australia culture.

I enjoyed reading your post and think you make a good point about the word fuck. When discussing this topic I was thinking the same thing. Although I personally tend not to swear, I would rarely flinch at someone using this word because it is used so often in our culture. I found Wierzbicker's discussion of the two meanings of 'bloody' interesting – it is used to emphasise bad feelings and unspecified feelings. You could say something is 'bloody marvellous' or you could say 'that bloody dog' and produce completely opposite meanings. As was said in the lecture, 'to recognise what was said is to recognise how the person is speaking.' This same argument holds for the work fuck.'

Wierzbicker, Anna (2002) 'Australian cultural scripts – bloody revisited' Journal of Pragmatics 34, p1167-1209.

Data Presentation - Facebook page: Cancer is funny cause people die

I am scheduled to give my data research presentation this afternoon, and for it I am going to be looking at the controversial Facebook page 'Cancer is funny cause people die'. I thought this would be an interesting topic because it obviously goes against what is considered socially acceptable, but also because it is set online - so some of the things we have looked at so far in SOC250 will have to be applied in a new way.

Here is the link to the page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Controversial-Humor-Cancer-is-funny-cause-people-die/174140266010061

Group Presentation!

Ben, Laura and I completed our group presentation on Garfinkel's breaching experiments last Wednesday - dressed up as a clown, ninja and pirate! Anyway, I just realised I forgot to post the link to our presentation last week, so here it is!

http://eyeonpeople.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/breach-experiments-presentation.html

The Code

This week we looked at the processes through which people make sense of what is going on in the world around them. The part of this topic which stood out to me most was the concept of 'the code'.

From my understanding 'the code' is a set of mutually understood, unwritten rules which are used to attribute meaning to a situation. When looking at the concept of codes from an ethnomethodological perspective, it was indicated in the lecture that conduct produces the code. This code can then be applied both retrospectively to interpret people's actions, and to predict future conduct. There are different codes for different groups of people and different situations. The reading this week spoke about the 'Convict Code' in a halfway house and how this was used by both the staff and the inmates to explain behaviour such as the inmates not 'snitching' on each other.

This got me thinking about what other codes I know of and I remembered the 'Man code' which I have heard referred to by my male friends on numerous occasions. I believe this is a set of rules which will govern interactions between men, but of course, as a female I do not know exactly how this works – I have not 'cracked the code'. However I did google the 'Man code' and found a copy, some parts of which I found quite amusing so I have posted a link to it below! =)

Wieder, D. Laurence. 1974. “Telling the Code.” Pp. 144-172 in Ethnomethodology, edited by

Roy Turner. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

The Man Code, http://www.liquorwits.com/code.html

Ethnomethodology and Breaching Experiments

This week I was actually scheduled to give my group presentation however unfortunately it has been postponed to next week. We were planning to perform breaching experiments in the presentation and I was hoping to discuss the results in my blog, but that will have to be next Thursday!

This week we studied Harold Garfinkel and his famous breaching experiments. Garfinkel was the first person to use the term ethnomethodology, and his research in this area is his most famous work – in particular Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Ethnomethodology is the study of people's methods and how they behave in everyday situations.

According to Lynch (2011) Studies in Ethnomethodology “challenged 'top down' theories which proposed that society was structured around relatively limited sets of rules and overarching values. Garfinkel presented an alternative 'bottom up' picture of society built from innumerable occasions of improvised conduct adapted to particular situations.” Garfinkel asked “How do social actors come to know and know in common, what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it?” He decided that in order to research how social order is made it would be best to start with a framework of stable features and see what can be done to make trouble. This was achieved through his famous breaching experiments.

In these experiments Garfinkel and his students would break the normal rules of a situation and wanted to create a senseless situation. However the interesting result of these experiments was that often the subjects would attempt to add meaning to the experimenter's actions so that it could be understood as a legally possible event. For example, when someone would cheat in a game of noughts and crosses, the subject would “realise” that this game had a different set of rules.

I had a lot of fun looking on the internet for breaching experiment ideas and Youtube clips of people performing them. My favourite idea was taking groceries out of someone's trolley rather than from the shelf in a supermarket – when asked for an explanation one would simply reply “Oh it's just easier to reach this one.” Interestingly when I told my friend about this idea and possibly performing it myself they were horrified and said “but you just DON'T do that!!!!!!!!” To which I replied “but that is the whole point!” They also asked me not to do this myself incase someone reacted in an extreme way and tried to harm me.

Heritage, John. 1984. 'The Morality of Cognition' in Garfinkel and

Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lynch, M (2011) 'Harold Garfinkel obituary – Sociologist who delved into the minutiae of daily life' The Guardian, 13 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/13/harold-garfinkel-obituary