Ethnomethodology at Play

Peter Tolmie, Mark Rouncefield, Peter Tolmie, Mark Rouncefield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317140610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

This book outlines the specific character of the ethnomethodological approach to 'play'; that is, to everyday sport and leisure activities that people generally engage in for enjoyment, at home or as a 'hobby'. With chapters on cooking, running, playing music, dancing, rock climbing, sailing, fly fishing and going out for the day as a family, Ethnomethodology at Play provides an introduction to the key conceptual resources drawn upon by ethnomethodology in its studies of these activities, whilst exploring the manner in which people 'work' at their everyday leisure. Demonstrating the breadth of ethnomethodological analysis and showing how no topic is beyond ethnomethodology's fundamental respecification, Ethnomethodology at Play sets out for the serious reader and researcher the precise contribution of ethnomethodology to sociological studies of sport and leisure and ordinary domestic pastimes. As such this groundbreaking volume constitutes a significant contribution to both ethnomethodology and sociology in general, as well as to the sociology of sport and leisure, the sociology of domestic and daily life and cultural studies.

PART I
Domestic Pleasures

Chapter 1
Cooking for Pleasure

Andy Crabtree, Peter Tolmie and Mark Rouncefield

Introduction: Garfinkel’s Bastards Eat Tarte Tatin

Cooking is a mundane feature of everyday life, done by people around the world as a matter of necessity and, for some at least, as the business of pleasure. It seems surprising therefore that food, eating and cooking has, at least until relatively recently (the 1980s), been largely neglected by Sociology (Beardsworth 1997; Murcott 1983). In anthropological analyses food has long featured in ritual and supernatural features of consumption ((Crowley 1980 (1921); Richards 1932) as well as in Levi-Strauss’ famous culinary triangle – the raw, the cooked and the rotten. For Levi-Strauss (1970) food practices in general, including cooking, represent a primary binary opposition in society between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and also contribute to other oppositions such as ‘the raw and the cooked’ such that cooking represents a cultural transformation of the ‘raw’ and, thereby, defines culture. Where cooking and eating has featured in sociological analysis it is often as an instantiation of some wider social process, such as the ‘civilising process’ (Elias 1969), or class and social structure (Goody 1982) or patriarchy and the subjection of women (Charles and Kerr 1988; Murcott 1983). As Charles and Kerr suggest; ‘Food practices can be regarded as one of the ways in which important social relations and divisions are symbolized, reinforced and reproduced on a daily basis’. The ‘turn to consumption’ has, not surprisingly, surfaced some interest in food and more recently food (especially ‘fast food’) and eating has featured as part of an analysis of the ‘McDonaldization of society’ (Ritzer 2008) or as part of a discussion of societal obsessions with body shape (Coveney 2006; Short 2006).

This chapter, perhaps not surprisingly, approaches the topic differently, explicating the mundane work involved in making a meal and the enjoyment members who do cooking for pleasure find in the enterprise. It focuses specifically on the mundane competences involved in figuring out what to eat and the considerations that are brought to bear upon this most ordinary of daily concerns, including matters of domestic routine, lifestyle, diet, work-home-life balance, etc. We then examine the sourcing of food and the different orders of working knowledge implicated in finding foodstuffs and assembling ingredients. After this comes the core business of ‘alchemy’: the skilful use of heat, knives, pans, spices, herbs and seasoning; the subtle art of working with colour, texture, taste, smell and even sound, to transform base ingredients into edible delights. Finally we turn to the pleasure of eating and the values that members bring to the table and exercise in eating together in the course of ordinary everyday degustation.

The data used in this chapter relates to observations of a professional man in his early 40s, preparing a three-course meal for friends. The man in question is an enthusiastic amateur cook who cooks for pleasure for both his household and for guests on a regular basis. The example provides us with a selection of interesting vignettes, displaying manifest and taken for granted kitchen competence. In this case cooking was being undertaken for the sheer pleasure of it rather than as a necessary obligation, yet the example is replete with features that exhibit the ordinary organization of household activities and the relationships of the people who inhabit them, underscoring the ways in which these matters are not just embedded within ordinary everyday life but are rather yet another canvas upon which the working up of ordinary household considerations get played out.

The examples are organized around a regularly unfolding sequence that relates to (and encompasses) the actual work of cooking:

1. Cooking and eating as a part of the weekly routine. A great deal of what gets eaten, and how what is going to get eaten is arrived at, is bound up with ordinary weekly activities and considerations such as ‘what shall we eat on Sunday?’, ‘what shall we eat the rest of the week?’, ‘who’s going to be here when?’, ‘who routinely eats what?’, ‘what needs to be got out of the freezer?’, and so on.

2. Deciding what to eat right now, where broader considerations get honed down to specific matters of ‘what do people want to eat just now?’, ‘what’s actually to hand?’, or even things such as baking and making things for the sheer pleasure of it or just to pass the time and keep others in the house entertained.

3. Shopping to a purpose. This reflects the fact that, once decisions have been made about what to eat, somehow the decision has to be provisioned by physically bringing the things required together. Much of this inevitably implicates shopping and that itself often implicates the making of a list, though shopping can also be about a more general purpose provisioning for the week with just what to eat right now being framed by what was purchased in the weekly shop.

4. Preparing things for cooking. Once ingredients have been sourced in one way or another and brought to the kitchen they usually need preparing in various ways. The work here can also be about creating the right ambience for cooking to take place. Inevitably the work of preparation often turns out to be interleaved with the work of actually cooking a dish, but in most cases preparation of some kind is a necessary preliminary to the actual heating and assembling of food. Considerations that feature in cooking such as the look of things, their consistency, and their smell, can also play an important part here.

5. Cooking the things prepared. This refers to the actual working upon of prepared foodstuffs in the company of heat such that things are bound together or transformed in some fashion so that they are ready for the actual business of eating.

6. Serving the food. Once food has been cooked, and prior to eating, it needs to be physically moved from the places where it has been cooked and apportioned in various ways so that all the parties to the eating can actually go about the eating of it.

7. Eating the food. Once food is on plates and people are gathered around the table or wherever to eat it, the business of consuming it can occur.

The first three and the last three features of the above sequence have some interchangeability according to circumstance. Reasoning about what to eat and shopping, for instance, can happen at the same time. Preparation and consumption can be comingled with some kinds of dishes, such that all of the four latter components can be going on more or less simultaneously. What does break down separately is the presence of a decision-making process, with the associated work of provisioning those decisions, and the subsequent assembly and consumption of food that brings those decisions to fruition. The organization of the data here is purely bound up with recognizing the specific sequences that were observed on this particular occasion of production.

A) Deciding What to Eat

Discussions about what to eat generally take place within the context of the household routine, being shaped not only by what people fancy eating but also by what is currently available within the house. Here the decision is a more spontaneous affair (Example 1). Where options are relatively open, as they are in this case, negotiations between the parties have the character of ‘specific vagueness’ (Crabtree et al. 1997) about them, with an iterative process of narrowing down until some specific kind of choice is made. Here it moves from things not to even be considered (e.g. marrow), to matters such as meat/not-meat, Indian/Chinese/French, until specific dishes are arrived at, i.e. pumpkin soup, chicken curry and tarte tatin.

Example 1: Deciding what to eat

A: Any – any preferences yourself? Let’s have some candidate dishes. Things we might cook.

P: Is there stuff you detest? So eliminate them completely from the picture.

M: Well I’m not too keen on marrow.

A: Well you’re alright coz it’s not marrow season.

M: I bloody hate marrow.

A: I don’t mi- At this point in time anything’s up for grabs. If you want Chinese we can do Chinese. If you want Indian we can do Indian.

M: I prefer Indian.

A: You prefer Indian?

M: How are you on Indians?

P: Oh I like Indian.

A: So errr: So hows about we do er- some curried pumpkin soup.

M: Yeah! Sounds good.

A: Which is a nice starter and goes well with a curry. … we could have chicken curry …

…

A: What about pudding? (heading back into living room)

M: I don’t really like puddings (laughing).

A: Ahh no. They’re too sweet aren’t they? They’re vile actually

M: Don’t you do /( )

P: /I quite like-

M: Tarte tatin

A: I do. I can do tarte tatin. I do a fantastic tarte tatin if you want it. Tarte tatin and a curry?

M: Sounds alright to me.

P: Yeah.

B) Shopping to Purpose

The meal calls for things that have to be actively sourced from outside of the home. That means there will have to be a shopping expedition, involving some measure of forward planning, constituted around the work of assembling a shopping list. In Example 2 we see the ways in which this kind of work unfolds. One feature is about projection: knowing what the dish to be cooked will call for. This can involve consultation of recipes, but it can also be grounded in ordinary recollection of what it takes to make a dish. Another feature is verification: checking whether you have the required ingredients, in enough quantity, and whether they are ‘good enough’. This can itself lead to another feature, the ongoing revisability of a proposed menu as its production is thought about in greater detail. Thus we see A move here from having apples in the tarte tatin to pears, and deciding to buy onions as this will be less unpleasant than digging onions in the rain. These elaborations also move into thinking about the surrounding work of preparation and other meal accompaniments, such that A is moved to not only consider whether beer is needed but to also then ensure it goes in the fridge. Indeed, assembly of the meal and its surrounding paraphernalia has already begun by this stage with the bringing in of the pumpkin from outside, and is further realized by A getting a tub of tag (curry base sauce) out of the freezer. Notice also how the work of preparing a list here is informed through and through by ‘how we routinely do shopping lists around here’. So we see A tear a sheet off the pad on the notice board where some things needing purchasing have already been recorded. A then uses this as a place for adding things. All of this itself attests to another common part of the planning process: the active making of a record that can then provide a situational prompt beyond the confines of the home.

Example 2: Making a shopping list

A getting tub of tag from the freezer and putting on side by cooker: We’ll want some chicken. I’ll nip down to the butchers and see if he’s open, and if he’s not I’ll nip up to the next village, and grab something

P: Okay

A: Er, we’ll grab some chicken breasts and er I’ll nip up to the allotment and grab a couple of things, some onions. What else do we need?

A: So we need some puff pastry, we need two apples, Pears! Pe- pear tarte tatin.

M:...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Overview: Garfinkel's Bastards at Play
• Part I: Domestic Pleasures
• Part II: Having a Hobby
• Part III: ‘Getting Out of the House'
• Part IV: Doing Stuff Together
• Bibliography
• Index