Ethnographies of Reason

Winner: EM/CA Section's Distinguished Publication Award 2009 'Ethnographies of Reason is an extraordinary book. In a series of simple, beautifully written chapters with many worked examples, reasoning is disclosed as exquisitely skilled practical action that is embedded in, and exploits, physical and contextual constraints, intersections and juxtapositions. This is a profound and riveting study of everyday reason that opens doors into previously quite unexamined social and psychological phenomena.' John Heritage, UCLA, USA 'Ethnographies of Reason is surely one of the most important social science books published in the last fifty years. Livingston shows how to investigate a wide range of skills and the reasoning that accompanies those skills, how to get into the mind- and body-set of doing something, and how those practices are intrinsically social. It should reinvigorate work in machine intelligence and engineering, and philosophical analysis, as well as in empirical studies in sociology and anthropology.' Martin H. Krieger, University of Southern California, USA