Garfinkeling in Real Life

Abstract

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.”