BOOK REVIEW Respecifications for Teaching Ethnomethodology Andrew P. Carlin St. Columb’s College More Studies in Ethnomethodology By Kenneth Liberman, with a Foreword by Harold Garfinkel, State University of New York Press: Albany, NY, 2013, $90. Harold Garfinkel’s notion corpus status characterizes the relation between eth- nomethodology and formal analysis. Ken Liberman’s excellent new book instantiates corpus status within ethnomethodology itself: Liberman’s innovative approach is to respecify phenomenology in the service of ethnomethodology’s program, but in so doing he elevates phenomenological and respecified forms of ethnomethodology into competitive rather than complementary enterprises. Garfinkel is omnipresent: from the title; Foreword (p. ix); Liberman’s utterly engrossing Introduction (pp. 1–9); and invoked throughout the text, which assails readers with Garfinkelian reference points. The ongoing citations to Garfinkel’s nachlass can be interruptive and the book is vulnerable to the ‘‘ethnography of sentences’’ critique that Liberman attributes to Garfinkel (p. 183). Liberman transcribed Garfinkel’s lectures under discussion, which apparently formed the bases for this highly enjoyable book (p. ix), and he exploits these materials to great effect. Consequently, future considerations of Garfinkel’s work must refer to this book as it is insufflated with Garfinkel’s formulations. Assiduous in crediting Garfinkel’s ideas, he does not connect the term ‘‘docile texts’’ (pp. 49, 179, 190), which Garfinkel coined for the description of Jeffersonian transcripts of conversation (Cuff, 1994:4), and Liberman here uses to describe manuscripts used by Tibetologists as substitutes for observing scholar-monks’ debating practices. The coincidences between these descriptions and their critical connotations of ‘‘desk research’’ are telling. In getting to ‘‘‘the looks of the world’ for parties engaged in the affairs of ordinary life’’ (p. 50) Liberman shows refreshing disregard for accepted formulations with genuine humor. Of a total of ten chapters, Chapter Four was previously published; Five, Six, and Seven were delivered as conference presentations, using his ethnographic investigations of philosophical debates in Tibet (Liberman, 2004), yet these do not read as recycled discussions. These three chapters are mutually informing though approachable as discrete studies, and accrue cumulative ‘‘weight’’ Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 321–323, ISSN: 0195-6086 print/1533-8665 online.  2014 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1002/SYMB.89