Agar's Language Shock Summary

In Agar’s Language Shock (1994), a sociologist named Harold Garfinkel explains the importance of social understanding. Social understanding is how we perceive the world, ourselves, it is our general basic understanding of everyday life. Garfinkel introduced a study called Ethnomethodology which believes you can discover the normal social norms of society by disrupting them (Agar, 1994, pg. 169). As Garfinkel suggested, I immersed myself in society by breaking the social norm and purposely falling in front of UT campus students as they walked by. Although my act may have seemed irrational to many, my findings on Garfinkel’s method were golden. Social norms are the unwritten rules society has laid out, establishing what we are used to seeing and how we behave. For example, it is normal that when a person meets someone for the first time you shake their hand. However, every country and culture has its own set of what to do and what not to do in public. More conservative countries have established norms as a way of life, like Muslim countries where shoulders and knees of …show more content…
The only concern they had in mind was satisfying hunger. During passing period there was a rush of students trying to get to their next class on time. Usually when the mind is preoccupied it is easy to become oblivious to your surroundings. That being said, I believe that is the reason I didn’t receive as much of response outside as I did in the Union. As stated in Miner’s Nacirema (1956), “The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave….he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs” (pg. 503). Which relates to why UT students did not have as big as reaction as I anticipated. Due to the University of Texas’s diverse culture it is no surprise when abnormality occurs such as the “Cocks Not Glocks”