ABSTRACT
Given that individuals can correctly be described as incumbents of an indefinite number of membership categories (e.g. from the membership category devices of class, occupation, race, ethnicity, colour, sex, gender, nationality, religion, language, etc.), it is always possible to ask why any particular category is used on any particular occasion, or why that now? Sometimes, membership categorisation practices can be understood along purely descriptive lines. Membership categorisations such as ‘woman’ and ‘black,’ for example, are often very useful for identifying people when their sex/gender or race are unknown to a hearer/reader. But membership categorisation practices often do much more than facilitate identification, and often don’t function to facilitate identification at all. Routinely, membership categorisation practices must be understood as pragmatic, above and beyond the pragmatism involved in accomplishing a contextually relevant and successful reference to persons. Descriptions of persons are practical actions and, equally importantly, they are routinely constituents of other courses of practical action as well. Descriptions of persons figure importantly in, e.g., making an accusation, offering a justification, dismissing a critic, claiming an entitlement, explaining the appeal of an ideology or explaining rates of behaviour. This latter realization has, as a consequence, that membership categorisation practices 145can and should be studied in conjunction with, and as an aspect of, the study of a wide variety of members’ methods of practical action and practical reasoning. This is just one way of conceiving ethno-methodological and conversation-analytic ambitions as complementary, if not profoundly overlapping.
