This paper presents an ethnographic account of surgical operations as encounters of two disciplined bodies — a parcelled `patient-body', and an aggregated `surgeon-body'. It describes the practices of making bodies operable, of cooperating and of creating anatomical visibility by means of highly skilled manipulations and optical technology. The discussion relates features of surgical practice to two issues raised in science studies: (1) Ritual aspects of scientific work; how does a medical science deal with the life-world esteem for its object?; and (2) The relation of experience and representation; how do patients' bodies come to embody the properties of anatomical pictures? A constructivist interpretation is offered: the anatomical body is an accomplishment of the sculptural practice of operations.
The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the ''silent'' dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative ''data.'' I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice
The article takes on a less developed aspect of the sociology of the stranger: the normalized non-relations people in urban settings establish in their effort to stay strangers for one another. How is their "civil inattention" accomplished in practice? What is the social orderliness of "asocial" relations? In order to answer these questions the article uses the elevator as a sociological research instrument allowing for a highly detailed investigation in structural problems of public encounters: bodily navigation, contact avoidance, feigned preoccupation, and the blocking of the automatism by which co-present bodies start interactions. The setting used for the investigation also raises questions about how the artifact and the bodies present are integrated into the interaction order. The "heteromobile" of the elevator offers specific sociotechnical scripts for interaction. While the human actors work hard at doing nothing, their bodies seem to take over their agency. The specific challenge of elevator riding for the enactment of indifference is the vanishing of actors: undoing presence.
ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag expliziert Gütekriterien der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Er geht von der Prämisse aus, dass Qualitätsmerkmale in diesem Segment empirischer Sozialforschung nur unter konsequentem Rekurs auf die spezifischen Funktionsbedingungen interpretativer und rekonstruktiver Verfahren zu bestimmen sind. Fünf Kriterien werden vorgeschlagen: Gegenstandsangemessen ist eine Weise der Herstellung des Forschungsgegenstandes, die das empirische Feld ernst nimmt und Methoden, Fragestellungen und Datentypen einer fortlaufenden Justierungsanforderung unterwirft. Empirische Sättigung reflektiert die Güte der Verankerung von Interpretationen im Datenmaterial. Theoretische Durchdringung markiert die Qualität der Theoriebezüge, in die das Forschen eingespannt ist, und arbeitet an deren Irritationspotential. Textuelle Performanz bezeichnet die Leistung, die Texte als Güte konstituierende Kommunikation gegenüber Rezipientinnen der Forschung zu erbringen haben. Originalitätschließlich ist das Kriterium, an dem die Einlösung des Neuigkeitsanspruchs wissenschaftlichen Wissens zu prüfen ist.
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