This narrative recounts my improvisational use of breaching experiments when I was a high school student in the late 1960s. While I had no knowledge of ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel’s use of breaching experiments as a strategy for illuminating the taken-for-granted features of social interaction, during my last two years of high school I regularly engaged in breaching activities similar to what Garfinkel advocated for research purposes. Having become alienated from my earlier social moorings, I delighted in violating normative expectations in social interaction with high school peers, teachers, and administrators in order to assert an identity as a colorful and enigmatic young man. I describe five breaching incidents and the responses of my interactional partners, analyzing my use of breaching experiments as a form of what James Scott has referred to as “weapons of the weak.”
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Fall 2021
Research Article|
October 01 2021
Garfinkeling in Real Life: The Candid Sociology of “Neon Leon”
Leon Anderson
Leon Anderson
Leon Anderson is professor emeritus of sociology at Ohio University and Utah State University. He is the author of Deviance: Social Constructions and Blurred Boundaries, co-author with David Snow of Down on Their Luck, and co-author with John Lofland, Lyn Lofland, and David Snow of the 4th edition of Analyzing Social Settings. Leon’s current writing interests include sociologically informed fiction and creative nonfiction. email: leon.anderson@usu.edu
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Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (4): 369–379.
Citation
Leon Anderson; Garfinkeling in Real Life: The Candid Sociology of “Neon Leon”. Journal of Autoethnography 1 October 2021; 2 (4): 369–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.4.369
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