Mandarin ethnomethodology or mutual interchange

Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (EoE) claim that studies of epistemics in interaction (how participants display orientations to their own and others’ states of knowledge) have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and by now familiar statements from Garfinkel and Sacks regarding the pursuit of ‘ordinary everyday activities’ and the avoidance of ‘formal analysis’. Drawing on Egon Bittner’s work, we further suggest that the EoE group shares properties and problems common to social movements claiming the mantle of radicalism. Because of their particular focus on CA and Harvey Sacks’ early work, we also demonstrate that Sacks was not, as asserted, preoccupied with the singularity of occasions. Rather, from his earliest available wo...