ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I return to and extend Sacks’s remarks on the ‘eerie significance’ and ‘peculiar usability’ of categories of space and place by members for the organisation of their ordinary activities. Sacks does not develop a sustained focus on this particular ‘collectivity’ of categories, but he does return to it, at a number of points, to address the ways in which members demonstrably use place categorisation to achieve various organisations of talk (for example, in the telling of the well-known ‘Bullock’s Store’ story). In tracing this thread as it surfaces at the various points in the Lectures, I aim to demonstrate how an attention to place categories in talk might yield insights into how members ‘do incongruities’ and how the perception of the commonplace scene in and through the course of a given activity might be further considered as an ‘assembled activity’. This, in turn, might also provide insight into the categorial machinery that provides for the by-product of spatial and mobile order and is one way in which we might be able to better specify members’ production and orientation to ‘context’.
