Ethnomethodology as A "Nomad Science"
Ethnomethodology as a "Nomad Science," Revisited
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
A note on this piece: I wrote the original version of this post in December 2011, not long after my first serious encounter with Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Fifteen years and a great deal of fieldwork later, I want to reopen it—not because the original intuition was wrong, but because I now have the conceptual and empirical tools to say something more precise than I could say then.
I have long been drawn to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and especially to A Thousand Plateaus, one of the more radical works of social philosophy I have encountered. In "Treatise on Nomadology," Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between what they call royal or State science and nomad or itinerant science. Royal science seeks stable forms, reproducible relationships, and knowledge capable of being formalized and transported. Nomad science stays closer to materials, practices, particular circumstances, variation, and processes of becoming. It follows phenomena rather than requiring them to conform in advance to an abstract model.
Crucially, this is not simply a story in which nomad science is good and royal science is bad, nor are they two completely separate worlds of knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the traffic between them. Their example of cathedral building, which first drew me to this comparison in 2011, is still the clearest illustration. The practical knowledge of itinerant stonemasons and builders existed in their embodied engagement with materials, tools, forces, and the particular problems of a given structure. It was not an inferior approximation of an abstract engineering science waiting to be discovered—it was knowledge embedded in practice. Only later was it captured: formalized, standardized, and absorbed into the bureaucratic and professional control of the state's architects and boards. That capture and transformation, rather than simple theft, is the movement I want this essay to track.
In 2011, I wanted to say that sociology, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, was a royal science in something like this sense—that professional social science took the practical knowledge, folk wisdoms, and situated moralities of ordinary people and abstracted them into a professional and administratively useful discipline. I still think there is something right in that intuition. But stated as I stated it then, it was too sweeping, and I want to correct it rather than simply let it stand.
The problem with conventional social science is not that it merely steals what ordinary people already know. Durkheim, Weber, Bourdieu, and generations of demographers, epidemiologists, and other social scientists have identified real patterns—mortality disparities, segregation, organizational inequalities, demographic transformations—that no single participant could apprehend from inside a particular situated position. Abstraction makes some realities visible that would otherwise remain extraordinarily difficult to see.
The more precise claim, I think, is this: institutions require knowledge capable of escaping the situation of its production, and something happens to experience in the course of that escape.
A person's crisis, when it enters a 911 call, becomes a dispatch category. A person's suffering, when it enters a hospital, becomes a diagnosis, a chart, a disposition code. A person's biography, when it enters a homelessness service system, becomes an eligibility determination, a vulnerability score, a case note. Something is preserved in each of these transformations, something may be amplified, and something is lost.
Once produced in these forms, knowledge can travel. It can be stored, retrieved, compared, counted, circulated among people who were never present at the original event, aggregated into organizational statistics, and used to make decisions about subsequent cases. This process—not simple theft, but capture and transformation—is much closer to the problem I was reaching for in 2011 without yet possessing the vocabulary to describe it.
Garfinkel's ethnomethodology remains, for me, one of the sharpest instruments available for examining the other end of this process: the practical production of recognizable social worlds before they become abstracted into portable representations.
Ethnomethodology begins with the proposition that the recognizable orderliness of social life is continuously accomplished by members through practical methods embedded within the circumstances in which they act. People recognize what is happening, make themselves intelligible to one another, invoke categories, repair misunderstandings, construct accounts, interpret documents, coordinate activities, and establish what will count as the relevant features of situations.
Ethnomethodology therefore approaches practical competence with an unusual degree of respect. Members are not merely imperfect sociologists whose commonsense understandings await replacement by superior scientific explanations. Their practical competencies are themselves phenomena requiring investigation.
The ethnomethodologist asks: What must participants know how to do for this particular social world to be recognizable and orderly in the first place?
This is where the idea of ethnomethodology as a nomad science becomes interesting. Ethnomethodology attempts to follow the organization of phenomena as members produce them. Rather than beginning with a theoretical system and searching for instances of it, ethnomethodological inquiry seeks to discover the endogenous organization of actual practices. Its passion is for the constitutive practices through which particular social realities become observable, reportable, accountable, and intelligible.
Conversation analysis made this commitment radically empirical. At any particular moment in an interaction, what happens next has not yet happened. Each action establishes possibilities and constraints for subsequent action, while subsequent actions display how previous ones have been understood. Social order becomes observable in its production. What appears retrospectively as structure can be examined prospectively as an unfolding practical accomplishment.
But there is a complication I avoided in 2011, and I do not want to avoid it now: ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have themselves become professionalized. They have journals, transcription conventions, canonical texts, training lineages, and increasingly stabilized expectations about what counts as competent analysis.
If ethnomethodology is a nomad science, what happens when nomad science itself becomes institutionally established?
This cannot be answered simply by appealing to ethnomethodology's founding spirit. A field can become institutionally stabilized—credentialed, peer-reviewed, professionally transmitted—while retaining methodological practices designed to prevent it from legislating its findings in advance. Conversely, research conducted in the name of participation, everyday experience, or liberation can still impose external categories upon the people it claims to represent. The important distinction may therefore concern less where knowledge is institutionally located than how knowledge relates to the practices from which it emerges.
What I did not have in 2011, and what my subsequent years of research have increasingly given me, is an account of some of the mechanisms through which situated knowledge becomes institutional knowledge.
Charles Goodwin's work on professional vision provides part of that account. Professionals learn particular ways of seeing through coding schemes, highlighting practices, and material representations that transform complex perceptual fields into professionally recognizable objects. Dorothy E. Smith's work on texts and institutional coordination provides another part. Texts make locally produced realities reproducible and capable of entering relations of coordination extending far beyond the situations in which they originated. Documents, in other words, allow realities to travel.
Put together, these processes suggest something the 2011 essay could only gesture toward: not a binary opposition between nomad knowledge and royal knowledge, but an investigation of the actual technologies through which one can become the other:
situated experience → practical recognition → professional vision → categorical formulation → textualization → documentary stabilization → circulation → organizational knowledge → administrative action
And administrative action returns to the world. Categories created from previous situations become resources for interpreting subsequent ones. Records shape later decisions. Classification systems organize perception. Organizational knowledge helps constitute the environments within which people must subsequently act.
This transformation—and what it means for the people whose situations are being transformed—has increasingly become a central concern of my work. My research on emergency communication, organizational records, homelessness, street outreach, and institutional life repeatedly returns to the same problem: how locally accomplished realities become institutionally recognizable, documentarily stabilized, and consequential.
I am now developing these ideas into a longer theoretical paper, tentatively titled Ethnomethodology as Nomad Science: Situated Knowledge, Documentary Capture, and the Politics of Sociological Abstraction. The 2011 post was the germ of that project. This revision records what fifteen years of subsequent fieldwork, scholarship, and reflection have done to that germ.
Ethnomethodology remains indispensable because it directs us back toward the practical accomplishment of social reality before that reality disappears into the categories through which institutions know it. But the larger project must also follow those accomplishments after they leave the immediate situation—into professional categories, documents, databases, organizations, policies, and institutional decisions.
The question I would ask today is therefore different from the one I asked in 2011. It is no longer simply whether knowledge is local or abstract, practical or formal, nomadic or royal.
It is how one becomes the other—and what happens to people when it does.
Revised September 2026 from the original post of December 28, 2011.
I am very interested in the writings of the French social theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, especially their glorious book A thousand Plateaus, which is one of the most radical social philosophical texts i have ever encountered.
In the influential chapter "A Treastise on Nomadology" Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between "nomad science" and "royal science". Royal Science is the official state-sanctioned knowledge gathered, managed, and cashed in upon by the State and the powers that be. It is based upon the theft of the skills and insights that ordinary people and workers have about the stuff in their everyday lives. Consider how state-sponsored architects and boards of engineers took the knowledge of cathedral building from the roaming bands of stone workers and formalized it for the bureaucratic control of the state.
Formal social science robs lay people of their folk wisdoms, practical rationalities and situated moralities and sets about to "formalize" them into "scientific" knowledge. The world-wide social science movement creates analytic knowledge and seeks ways to apply it to make institutions more "effective" and "rational". It gives advice to the bureaucrats and professionals so that they might "manage" the social structure more productively. The passions of the formal analytic social science movement are bureaucratic efficiency, constant laws, abstract generalizations and statistical metrics.
In contrast to this, Garfinkel's Ethnomethodology is a "discovering" science which seeks to study the locally achieved orderliness of the world as an accomplishment of members of society. It does not seek to transform the lived reality of the social world by interpreting it or theorizing about it.
Ethnomethodology is not interested in abstracting the practical knowledge that people have about the world as it happens. Ethnomethodology's passion is for constitutive practices as they are found in real moments of everyday life and seeks to describe how they are used by real people in concrete instances of social life. It sees in the social world complexity, emergence and becoming. It has no interest in using this knowledge to run the world more effectively.
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