Going non-categorial: the work of technically-accurate-category-neutral descriptions in responding to accusations

Smith, Robin

2025. Going non-categorial: the work of technically-accurate-category-neutral descriptions in responding to accusations. Fitzgerald, Richard, Housley, William, Au-Yeung, Shing and Smith, Robin, eds. New Directions in Membership Categorisation Analysis, BRILL, pp. 27-41.

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Abstract

This chapter examines how contextures in the making, particularly those featuring accusations, can be unsettled or contested through “technically-accurate-category-neutral” descriptions. Building on Harvey Sacks’ foundational offer of an ‘aesthetic for social life’, the analysis describes how parties to a scene, ‘the accused,’ work to avoid the recognition of morally-implicative categorisations by ‘going non-categorial’; that is, by producing minimal descriptions of ‘elements’ of the scene, whilst not recognising their Gestalt coherence. Beyond the identification of this apparently general practice, the chapter demonstrates how categorisation practices are inextricable from, and central to the accomplishment of, the perception of a scene and how membership categorisation practices are best understood as radically-local achievements in and of a given contexture, which includes the relation between categories, devices, and the ‘rules of application.’ This, shown for another first time, is intended to further the direction of travel away from the potential reification of membership categories and advance a Gestalt-oriented MCA. The article, then, reconsiders the classic notion of category ‘selection’ in terms of category generation and recognition, and reasserts and updates an ethnomethodological view of ‘membership categorisation.’

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Publisher:	BRILL
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2025 09:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181653

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