Gary Alan Fine : From Small Groups to Peopled Ethnography

This chapter considers the work of Gary Alan Fine (born 1950), probably the most prolific contemporary cultural ethnographer and one of the key contributors to the sociology of small groups. Fine’s intellectual journey has been punctuated by a series of ethnographic works, from his earlier studies on the Baseball Little League to his recent research on ‘futurework’ and the way prevision is culturally structured, socially organized, and legitimated. Alongside empirical work, and through an interdisciplinary perspective including social psychology, sociology and anthropology (with particular reference to folklore and language studies), Fine has theoretically developed the symbolic interactionist tradition by showing how shared meanings come into existence, are selected and become shared ways of thinking and the fundamental role that everyday interaction in small groups plays in such a process. Gary Alan Fine’s work highlights the constructed nature of social worlds by emphasizing the set of meanings through which social actors define such worlds and their limits. As we travel by, we shape the map in which they are located and through which we recognize ourselves. As Herbert Blumer maintained, we ‘act toward things on the basis of the meaning that things have’ for us, and such a meaning ‘is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows’ (Blumer 1969:2). Building on these interactionist premises, Fine devoted his work to the clarification of the process through which meanings emerge, a process whose underspecification is evident also in Blumer's double formulation (‘deriving from’ or ‘arising out of’). Therefore, Fine not only looks at everyday interaction as the locus in which social structures comes (re)produced and enlivened through the enactment of cultural forms, but also posits small groups, with their continued interaction, as the social unit acting as a filter in the collective construction of meanings, frames (Goffman, 1974), narratives, scripts, and all sorts of stories (rumours, urban legends, gossip, jokes ...) – that is, the basic bricks through which we make sense of experienced reality – that together build up to a shared culture, a culture shared beyond the boundaries of small groups and specific communities alike. Through his ethnographic works, Fine has analysed such a process at play in a deeply diverse range of social worlds: from pre-adolescent baseball teams (Fine 1987a), to ‘soft’ communities of competitive chess players (Fine 2015) or amateur mushroomers (Fine 1998); from cultural networks of role-playing gamers (Fine 1983) or self-taught artists (Fine 2004), to professional communities such as those of restaurant cooks (Fine 1996) and weather forecasters (Fine 2007). Furthermore, in line with the traditions of cultural sociology and folklore studies, Fine has directly taken into consideration ‘contemporary legends’ as cultural templates that come differently practiced in interaction by different groups and communities – by black vs. white Americans, for instance (see Fine & Turner 2004) – thereby manifesting broader societal aspects and effects. After some biographical notes aimed at introducing Gary Alan Fine’s composite theoretical and methodological background and resulting perspective, the chapter considers his whole opus, to suggest that Fine's crucial contribution lies in the ability to recognize the actual presence of social structures as it is translated into specific cultural forms anchored to small group interaction. We close with an overall appreciation of Fine’s contribution to the symbolic interactionist tradition, focusing in particular on his furthering of our understanding of the emotional and the cognitive aspects of interaction as connected to larger cultural processes and structural elements of social life.