Human Stud&s 12: 185-209, 1989.
© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Harvey Sacks - Lectures 1964-1965
An Introduction/Memoir
EMANUEL A. SCHEGLOFF*
The publication of these lectures begins a process which will eventually
make publically available all, or virtually all, of the lectures by Harvey
Sacks on conversation and related topics in social science. Most of the
lectures in this larger corpus were originally delivered to classes at the
University of California - first to sociology classes at the UCLA campus,
and then (after 1968) to classes in the School of Social Science at the
Irvine campus of the University.
Although Sacks produced copious analytic notes, many of which served
as materials for his lectures, what is presented here are the lectures
themselves, transcribed from tape recordings. Almost all of Sacks'
lectures were initially transcribed by Gall Jefferson, although most of the
material in the present publication, in that it antedates either her contact
with Sacks and this work, or her undertaking to transcribe the lectures,
was initially transcribed by others. With one exception (Sacks, 1987
[1973]), it is also Jefferson who has edited the lectures into the form in
which they have been published, including the lectures published here. 1
As noted in her introductory notes to the several "lectures" and in Appen-
dix II, the contents of the present publication have been pieced together
from several sets of lectures which Sacks gave during the 1964-65
academic year, to make a more coherent and readable text. These early
"sets" of lectures are full of gaps, and it is not always clear just when some
lecture was given. Accordingly, the reader should bear in mind that this
* My thanks to Paul Drew, John Heritage, Michael Moerman and Melvin Pollner
for sensitive responses to a draft version of this introduction, and for suggestions
which I have in some cases adopted without further acknowledgement.
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