Collection of short essays

22 September 2024 shrese Articles 0

An ethnomethodological description of racial harassment

This is an ethnomethodological description of a 9 second long video extract, involving three members (M1-3) in a city’s street. Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA, see Hester and Eglin 1997, drawing from Sacks’ work) can help us making sense of what is happening in this video, by paying attention to, and only attention to, what the members are saying and doing and the properties of the video.

Figure 1: M1 and M2’s gloved hand

In this description I will look at the categories that emerge and re-emerge during the encounter, in a sequential manner. Membership categories are “situationally relevant identities” occupied by persons, and membership categorisation devices (MCDs) provide “the organisational relevance that collects together and organises the membership categories and their relevant actions” (Fitzgerald and Au-Yeung, 2019, pp.14, 3). Recognizing that category work occurs in a multilayered environment, I will consider the standardized relational pair ‘Harasser/Harassed’ (H/H, see finding 8) and its afferent MCD ‘Aggression’ as omni-relevant, as they remain “relevant throughout the interaction” (Fitzgerald and Au-Yeung, 2019, p.8). Using MCA, I found the following:

1. Using “common-sense appearances of the social world” (Francis and Hester 2004, p.26), we know that CNN (bottom right figure 1) refers to a US-based news network. Therefore, this video is a ‘news item’, a category associated with various expected common sense actions, or predicates (Fitzgerald and Au-Yeung, 2019), such as: this is worth reporting. Tying with the ‘news’ category, the video can also be observed as a ‘social media video relayed by national news’ captured with a smartphone (recognizable attributes: format, quality, blurry sides). This category takes relevance and meaning under the MCD ‘Aggression’. Indeed, ‘evidence of an altercation/crime’ is a predicted attribute of the category.

2. Throughout their category work M1 and M2 assemble the predicates of various category pairs (CPs) in ways that constantly evoke the omni-relevant H/H CP (O-CP) and MCD ‘Aggression’ (O-MCD) (findings 3-9).

3. From the name MOHAMED (top right figure 1), the category ‘Arab’ is inferred. The juxtaposition MOHAMED/STREET VENDOR suggests that Mohamed belongs to the category ‘Food street vendor’, which is confirmed by observable elements of the scene (plastic bottles of sauces, transparent gloves…). Therefore, M2 is associated to the name MOHAMED and the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘Vendor’, and he (gender assumed) is holding the camera. An MCD associated to the ‘Vendor’ category is ‘Trade’. Applying the consistency rule and its corollary the hearer’s maxim (Francis and Hester 2004) then 1) if, in the MCD ‘Trade’, M2 is a ‘Vendor’, then M1 is a ‘Customer’ and 2) we can hear M1 and M2 as constituting the CP ‘Vendor/Customer’ (V/C). M1 is fully visible on the video and could reasonably be qualified as a white man, probably in his 60s. Later on, after asked to leave, M1’s question “Why should I go?” (4) could signal a return to the V/C CP, with its predicates around legitimacy and mobility (a customer has legitimacy to be served and to go as they see fit while the vendor’s obligations are to serve and stay put), which, in turn, can also be seen as predicates bound to the O-CP.

4. M1’s opening question (1, “Are you here illegally?”) departs from the MCD ‘Trade’ to create a new category, ‘Illegal immigrant’. Associated to the implicit ‘Legal national’ category, they constitute the CP ‘Illegal/Legal’ (I/L). Some categories are “inference rich”, i.e., when we know in which category a member is, we can predict some of their attributes, obligations, entitlements, and activities (Francis and Hester 2004, p.39). For example, ‘Illegal immigrants’ tend to be asked to justify their presence in a certain location, or perceived as suspects of crime/fraud. Again, the O-CP imparts sense to M1’s activity of accusation and threat related to the vulnerability of undocumented people.

5. Following M1’s question, M2 tells M1 to leave (2; thus refusing to construct the CP ‘Questioner/Answerer’, Q/A). M2’s need of physical distance (the instruction “Go!”), repeated line 6, could be considered a priority item associated to the O-MCD. A priority item is an action “that can take priority in the ongoing interaction, without regard to what has been occurring prior to them being used” (Fitzgerald 2020, p.92), and shows the precedence of the activities bound to the O-CP over the Q/A CP.

6. M1’s comment “It’s a free country, it’s not Egypt here” (5) makes visible new categories: ‘Free country’, observably opposed to ‘Egypt’. This ‘Free country/Dictatorship’ (FC/D) CP of the MCD ‘Political regime’ has activities bound to each category, such as what you can or cannot do in public spaces. Following the viewer’s maxim (Francis and Hester 2004, p.42) we can see M1’s activity of not leaving when someone asks him to go as what it is: a category-bound activity done by a member of the FC category. The entitlement bound to the FC category extends to “I am free to harass you”, shifting the FC category to the O-MCD.

7. M1’s comment (5) brings back the ‘Arab’ category. Now the category takes particular relevance to the production of the situation and builds a CP tied with the FC/D: ‘Freedom loving Westerners/Freedom hating Arabs’ (FLW/FLA), part of the MCD ‘Racism’.

8. In turn, M2 mentions ‘the police’ and tells again M1 to leave (6). This is where the O-CP and O-MCD are most explicitly produced by the members. Asking someone to leave repeatedly and mentioning the police, while this person refuses to leave, is an activity bound to the category ‘Harassed’. Viewer’s maxim allows us then to put M2 in the ‘Harassed’ category, while the hearer’s maxim suggests that M1 occupies the ‘Harasser’ category in the ‘Harasser/Harassed’ CP, which, given previous findings 4 and 7, can now be located in the MCD “Racist aggression”.

9. Finally, M3 arrives at the scene and engages with M1, gesturing in a way that seems to tell M1 to leave, creating the ‘Intervener’ category. M3’s activity recognises the interaction between M1 and M2 for what it is, an interaction that needs intervening, i.e., an aggression. By doing so, M3 produces and confirms the O-MDC. M1’s false interrogative while leaving the scene (10, “What?”) echoes a previous one (4, “Why should I go?”) as an activity of denial work to neutralise what has happened before (harassment) and avoiding its consequences.

MCA allowed us to uncover a diversity of methods through which three members interacted to produce a locally organised situation of a racist aggression and resistance to it. M1 turned out to be a man called Stuart Seldowitz, a former Obama adviser, who was recently arrested and charged with aggravated harassment, hate crime and two counts of stalking towards a food cart vendor in New York.

Video source: (00:54 to 01:03) https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/us/seldowitz-ex-obama-official-islamophobic-comments/index.html

REFERENCES

  • Fitzgerald, R. 2020. Sacks: Omni-relevance and the layered texture of interaction. In: Smith, R., Fitzgerald, R., and Housley, W. eds. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations. New York: Routledge.
  • Fitzgerald, R. and Au-Yeung, S.H. 2019. Membership Categorisation Analysis. In: P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J.W. Sakshaug, & R.A. Williams (Eds.), SAGE Research Methods Foundations. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036754839 [Accessed: 8 December 2023].
  • Francis, D.W. and Hester, S. 2004. An invitation to ethnomethodology: language, society, and social interaction. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.
  • Hester, S. and Eglin, P. eds. 1997. Culture in action: studies in membership categorization analysis. Washington, DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis [u.a.].