Open Air Museum of Reasoning: Eric Livingston’s Descriptive Analysis

Abstract

The paper, based on Eric Livingston’s book “Ethnographies on Reason”, considers a problem of descriptive analysis. Descriptive analysis is understood as a way of description of the social order phenomena that presuppose a constant juxtaposition of the proposed description with the real practices in actual situation of activity. That means that sociological description must be instructive in character, that is, it have to teach reader how to analyze a social practices’ ordinariness and observability. This approach allows to make a subject of sociological analysis even such an unaccustomed for sociological view things as checkers or origami.