SOC 210 Critical Summary 3: Society in Action, Harold Garfinkel

Society in Action
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Institutional Affiliation
Society in Action
Synopsis
Harold Garfinkel highly contributed to the study of micro-sociology. He largely focused on the specific techniques and skills that people employ in a while in an attempt to present them in social encounters within the society. According to Garfinkel, social behavior is much more than innate; rather human beings learn to be social creatures given a specific social set up, culture and society (Fenstermaker, 2016). This is to say that, society plays a greater role in socializing beings more than what the innate behavior can modify an individual. Garfinkel coins a term "ethnomethology" to explain his approach. Ethnomethology can be defined as the methodologies used for studying a specific group of people who make day-to-day social interactions. One of the greatest studies he undertook is the examining of "ethnomethologies" engrossed in gender-self presentations by members of society(Heritage, 2013).
Garfinkel study involved a young woman who was branded a name, Agnes. Garfinkel observes that Agnes was a young woman with a figure that a woman of those days would have. She was attractive as Garfinkel puts (Heritage, 2013). However, Agnes was born a boy, and she presented herself in the society as a boy until she was 16 years old when she runs away from her home. Agnes had a male genital despite the fact that she had a figure of a woman. Agnes presented herself as a female after she ran away from her home.
Agnes was in the process of seeking a gender reassignment surgery was Garfinkel met her. But this was not what bothered Garfinkel as such; he was interested in knowing how Agnes presented herself as female after having acted as a male for her first 16 years of age. Garfinkel realizes that to understand such a scenario, methodological attention to other various tiny details was required (Fenstermaker, 2016). Agnes was approved for the surgery and her male genital was successfully removed. Agnes would fully be a woman from then. According to Agnes, the presence of male genital in her body was a natural error which she now happy that it has been corrected (Heritage, 2013).
Garfinkel uses the case of Agnes to draw conclusions that gender is learned irrespective of the physiology. He is confident that gender is something that should be learned by members of the society. Garfinkel uses the findings of this study to imply that even if an individual is born clearly a man or female, he or she should learn to be the opposite gender (Heritage, 2013). He notes that biology does not determine the gender of an individual. Garfinkel further says that people are gender impersonators just like Agnes, people can learn how to get along (Jones, 2015).
Garfinkel parts with Agnes and after a couple of years, he meets her again. Agnes was now a fully functional woman who was married and had children. At this time, Garfinkel had already published the findings of his study that involved Agnes as the key whose research findings were largely concluded from. As they interacted, Agnes makes a shocking confession to Garfinkel. She tells him that at her age of 12 and 13, she took some pills that were being taken by her mother who was sufferin...