Crabtree (2000) vs. Watson (1993)

Crabtree seems to be expressing similar sentiments as does Watson in this excerpt quoted in An ethnography of a neighbourhood cafe: informality, table arrangements and background noise:

"What... I am recommending is a new sociology of knowledge which does not seek to operate from 'on high', imputing overarching perspectives to groups, or societies 'as wholes', as the Karls Marx and Mannheim (plus countless others) have done, but a sociology of knowledge which addresses peoples' practices, their typifications/categorisations in action, their activities and interactions, their communicative interactions conceived in the broadest sense."

Review of an article about "space" and ethnography

Remarks on the social organization of space and place
by Andy Crabtree, 2000
Published in the Journal of Mundane Behavior, available at www.mundanebehavior.org

Crabtree’s article gives an ethnographic account of a very mundane activity taking place in a space, that of searching a book in the library. One might think he could have chosen a more gripping subject for his article, but in the end its ordinariness serves to prove his point, i.e. there is much to be learned from the mundane. He argues that the vernacular understanding of the word “space,” or the “ecological view” of space, implies something within which an activity is performed, something “designed to constrain and shape our lives.” Crabtree argues that such an understanding of space causes us to miss the reality of exactly how space is socially organized, and further, how it comes to be recognized as an objective reality, i.e. essentially how space relates to the experienced reality of daily life. His example of two individuals hunting for a library book shows that the space of the library is not simply a place in which the hunting of books is to take place, but rather is fundamental to the design of the space and the ability of these activities to be accomplished. This, he argues, is one area where ethnography would come in handy – to highlight the specific ways in which the interactional components (or “competences”) of the space actually function toward achieving the space’s assumed and generally agreed upon aims by observing people functioning “within” it. Ethnographers can elucidate how it is that people go about performing ordinary, mundane activities in relation to the spaces that are supposed to “contain” them. In other words, we should avoid discussing space as if it were an objective reality, and begin uncovering the ways in which it is instead an experienced phenomenon. But by carefully observing the mundane (precisely because its intricacies go unnoticed), we can understand how it is that specific spaces come to be understood by participants as objective ‘places within which activities occur’ through the actions of people in that space, adding back into the mix what the ecological view stripped from our understanding of space, “namely the ‘primal layer’ of embodied phenomenal elements… through which space and place are produced and recognized as objective structures of an objective world in and as of the practical actions of members.”

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20/8/08 - 22/8/08
University of Dundee MFA

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