10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17434
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2038-3460
17434
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Philippe Sormani
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Enrico Caniglia, Andrea Spreafico and Federico Zanettin (eds.), Harvey Sacks. Fare Sociologia, Altravista, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
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Book Reviews
2019-07-16
2023-06-26
2019-07-16
2023-10-05
137-139
TS
Philippe Sormani
2019/07/16
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17434
137
Université de Lausanne
2038-3460
1
en
139
Enrico Caniglia, Andrea Spreafico and Federico Zanettin (eds.), Harvey Sacks. Fare Sociologia, Altravista, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17434/16284
10
Book Review                                                                         137



   Enrico Caniglia, Andrea Spreafico and Federico Zanet-
tin (eds.)
Harvey Sacks. Fare Sociologia, Broni, Altravista, 2017, pp. 164

Philippe Sormani Université de Lausanne

    The pioneering research undertaken by Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) is
probably best known for laying the foundations of conversation analysis
(CA), the transcript-based analysis of mundane conversational interac-
tion. Despite of what its name may still suggest, and what is worth re-
membering, CA was initially developed with a sociological interest in
view, namely to discover and describe the interactive production of social
order as a recognizable phenomenon, as that phenomenon happened to
be encountered, enacted, and expected by its participants. On the basis
of audio recordings of conversations and their repeated inspection, Sacks
and his close colleagues, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, described
how participants spoke, took turns at talk, identified each other in the
process, and manifestly expected (i.e., could be understood to expect) all
this of each other. Over the last decades, and with the help of video cam-
eras and transcription programs, this interactive production of social or-
der has been captured, transcribed, and (re-)analyzed as a multifaceted
phenomenon in vivo, involving verbal, gestural, and material components
in situ, and thus giving rise to “multi-modal CA” (Deppermann 2013).
    Harvey Sacks. Fare Sociologia, the book co-edited by Enrico Caniglia,
Andrea Spreafico and Federico Zanettin, offers an apt opportunity to re-
visit the sociological interest of early CA, both for the Italophone reader
and the STS scholar. Indeed, the book brings together Italian translations
of four important texts by Sacks, each of which is briefly introduced by
the co-editors and co-translators. The first part of the book gathers two
translations of methodological statements by Sacks (1963, 1984), whilst
the second part offers translations of two exemplary studies (1972, 1975).
Where does the “sociological interest” of these studies lie? In a pivotal
footnote to his first publication on methodology, entitled “Sociological
Description,” the 28-year old Sacks (1963, 8, n. 8). offered a concise an-
swer:

    Having produced procedural descriptions of the assembly of a suicide
    classification[,] it may turn out that it is the category and the methodology
    for applying it that constitutes the interesting sociological problem.

    In hindsight, this “informed guess” sounds like an ironic understate-
ment. Indeed, the quoted passage does not only declare the heuristic in-
terest of the methodological subversion (turning Durkheim’s reliance on

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138                                                         Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)

official statistics and the categories drawn upon for “suicide classifica-
tion” into a phenomenon), but it also suggests that declaration to be in-
formed by actual descriptions (hinting at the possibility of a broader
study of categorization methods). The two studies translated for Harvey
Sacks, the presently reviewed volume, deliver such descriptions of cate-
gorization phenomena. “An initial investigation of the usability of conver-
sational data for doing sociology” (1972) offers a systematic analysis of
the category-based self-inquiry which, as it happens, may lead a person to
conclude that (s)he has “no one to turn to.” In doing so, the study turns
the discursive articulation of lay sociological reasoning into an empirical
phenomenon, discursive articulation which happens to be organized in
terms of identity categories (“family members,” “colleagues,” “friends,”
etc.) and their reflexive application (as a speaker, eventually, may self-
categorize as a “suicidal person”). The second study included in the vol-
ume, “Everyone has to lie” (1975), inter alia describes variously observed
answers to “how are you” questions and, in particular, how these answers
are differently designed depending upon the identity categories implied
by speakers (e.g., when addressing each other as “friends”), their sequen-
tial sensibilities (e.g., to a negative answer and the extended sequence of
explanation that it may entail), and other contextual cues. In offering
empirical descriptions of identity categorization at play in conversation
(what Sacks coined “membership categorization”), the two studies con-
tribute(d) to investigating the unacknowledged common-sense proce-
dures of sociological discourse. In doing so, the studies deliver upon eth-
nomethodology’s promise to analyze “everyday life as a phenomenon,”
including professional sociology among other domains of expertise (cf.
Zimmerman and Pollner 1970). For the Italophone reader, each of the
translated texts, methodological or empirical, is introduced by a careful
editor’s note, which explains the sociological interest and continuing rel-
evance of each text, as well as of the analytic project that they contribute
to (for a related volume, see Caniglia and Spreafico 2011).
          What might be the key lesson of early CA, and the discussed
translation(s) in particular, for the STS scholar? In one of his lectures,
Sacks (1992a) gave a bluntly dismissive answer to this kind of naïvely self-
interested question, asked by one of his students (p. 472). Indeed, Sacks’
observational approach of identity categories in action and interaction
first invites us to describe how they are used, methodically used by
whomsoever (including categories such as “the STS scholar”, “the sociol-
ogist” and/or “the Italophone reader”). His approach affords us not only
with an explicit and rigorous methodology, a fact which distinguishes
Sacks’ reported answer from mere arrogance, but also with subtle reflec-
tions on the internal relations between (conversational) phenomena, re-
cordings, data, and analysis from the very outset (e.g., Sacks 1963; 1984;
1992a; 1992b). Despite or precisely because of Sacks’ plea for a “natural
observational science” of social ordering in situ, his legacy (see also, Fitz-


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Book Review                                                                   139
gerald and Housley 2015) is perhaps best read as a call for an unapologet-
ically reflexive STS. To have reminded readers of this critical possibility,
however, is only one welcome consequence of Harvey Sacks. Fare Socio-
logia, the book carefully co-edited by Enrico Caniglia and his colleagues.


References

Caniglia, E. and Spreafico, A. (eds.) (2011) L’etnometodologia oggi: prospettive e
        problemi, parte monografica in “Quaderni di Teoria Sociale”, 11, 2011.
Deppermann, A. (2013) Multimodal Interaction from a Conversation Analytic
      Perspective, in “Journal of Pragmatics”, 46, pp. 1-7.
Fitzgerald, R., and Housley, W. (eds.) (2015) Advances in Membership Categori-
        sation Analysis, London, Sage.
Sacks, H. (1963) Sociological Description, in “Berkeley Journal of Sociology”, 8,
       pp. 1-16.
Sacks, H. (1972) An Initial Investigation of the Usability Oo Conversational Data
       for Doing Sociology, in D. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction,
       New York, Free Press, pp. 31-74.
Sacks, H. (1975) Everyone Has To Lie, in M. Sanches, and B. Blount (eds.), Soci-
       ocultural Dimensions of Language Use, New York, Academic Press, pp.
       57-80.
Sacks, H. (1984) Notes on Methodology, in J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.)
       Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, Cambridge
       University Press, Cambridge, pp. 21-27.
Sacks, H. (1992a) Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 1, London, Blackwell.
Sacks, H. (1992b) Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 2, London, Blackwell.
Zimmerman, D. H. and Pollner, M. (1970) The Everyday World as a Phenome-
      non, in J. Douglas (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life. Towards the recon-
      struction of sociological knowledge, Chicago, Aldine Publishing, pp. 80-
      103.



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