Ethnographies of Reason

Eric Livingston is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England, Australia

Winner: EM/CA Section's Distinguished Publication Award 2009 'Ethnographies of Reason is an extraordinary book. In a series of simple, beautifully written chapters with many worked examples, reasoning is disclosed as exquisitely skilled practical action that is embedded in, and exploits, physical and contextual constraints, intersections and juxtapositions. This is a profound and riveting study of everyday reason that opens doors into previously quite unexamined social and psychological phenomena.' John Heritage, UCLA, USA 'Ethnographies of Reason is surely one of the most important social science books published in the last fifty years. Livingston shows how to investigate a wide range of skills and the reasoning that accompanies those skills, how to get into the mind- and body-set of doing something, and how those practices are intrinsically social. It should reinvigorate work in machine intelligence and engineering, and philosophical analysis, as well as in empirical studies in sociology and anthropology.' Martin H. Krieger, University of Southern California, USA

• Contents: Preface; Introduction: Reasoning in the wild; Formal reasoning; Psychological experiments. Exercises and Examples: Tangrams; Jigsaw puzzles; A first ethnography; Phenomenology; A toolic world, part 1; Mapping the infinite plane; Lawlike properties of the prismatic field; An exercise in origami; An embodied correspondence; Straightedge and compass constructions. Projects and Techniques: Sociologies of the witnessable order; Found objects; The stack; The doing of things; Precise description; Indirection; Sketch work; Structures of inquiry and corpus-relevant skills; Emergent themes and analogies of practice. Themes and Orientations: Themes, orientations and research directives; Reflexivity; The primacy of the social; The ordinariness of practical action and its production; Praxeological objects; The characterization problem. Epilogue; Appendices; Index of examples.