CULTURE:RULE FOLLOWING OR ENACTMENT?
Sociologist Harold Garfinkel has demonstrated that the most routine and taken-forgranted
aspects of social reality are in fact skillful accomplishments. When we travel on a
subway car, visit a neighbor, or act as a normal person walking down the street, we employ
numerous social skills of which we are only dimly aware. Just as a tightrope walker might think
nothing of running across a high wire to collect his or her possessions at the end of rehearsal,
oblivious to the skill that this involves, so too in the most mundane accomplishments of daily
life.