ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 opens with the argument that “making the familiar strange” is as important to the sociological imagination as structural analysis and interpretive understanding, yet has not received nearly as much sustained attention in the literature. Following, there is a short discussion of a historically prominent method for making the familiar strange: the phenomenological epoché, which refers to “bracketing” naïve belief in existence in order to see the obvious and familiar with fresh eyes. Drawing on sociological critiques of Edmund Husserl—especially those developed by Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Schutz—it is shown that the assumed “direct” and “immediate” access to the world delivered by the epoché necessarily remains socially conditioned experience. Thus, phenomenological methodology is not a viable starting point for social defamiliarization, the term adopted to describe making the familiar strange as a methodological tool for social science. The introduction then reviews past attempts to describe social defamiliarization, including passages from C. Wright Mills, Zygmunt Bauman, Peter Berger, Harold Garfinkel, Richard H. Brown, Dorothy E. Smith, and Andrew Abbott, before outlining the book.
