An intellectual remembrance of Harold Garfinkel

imagining the unimaginable, and the concept of the "surveyable society"

Douglas W. Maynard

pp. 209-221

in: George Psathas, Martin Endreß (eds), In memoriam of Harold Garfinkel, Human Studies 35 (2), 2012.

Abstract

In October 2011, a commemoration of Harold Garfinkel’s life and achievements was held at the University of California, Los Angeles, where Garfinkel had been a professor for the duration of his career. I presented a version of this intellectual remembrance at that event. My purpose was and is to recount aspects of a collaborative research experience with Garfinkel when he visited my home department (Sociology) at the University of Wisconsin during the spring semester of 1990, and to convey something of his remarkable presence and intellectual personage. Assuming Garfinkel is known mostly through his nonpareil writings and contributions to the social sciences, I mean to provide a different view, something a little closer and more personal but still about his ultimate and deeply sociological concerns.

Cited authors

Garfinkel Harold