Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order by Erving Goffman; Peter K.

Manning
Review by: Randall Collins and Joel Aronoff
The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 135-143
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Midwest Sociological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4105739 .
Accessed: 20/06/2014 04:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and Midwest Sociological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Sociological Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Sociological Quarterly 14 (Winter 1973):135-143

SymposiumReview
Relations in Public: Microstudiesof the Public Order. By Erving Goffman. New

York: Basic Books, 1971, 396 pp. $7.95.

PETER K. MANNmG,
smiths' College

Michigan State University and London University Gold-

A recent review by a political scientist

in the New York Times Book Review
(Berman, 1972), offers a paen to Erving
Goffman-"One of the greatest writers
alive today . . . comes closer than any

living writer to being the Kafka of our

time." (Whether we need another Kafka
may be beside the point, but the terms
of reference are certainly unequivocal.)
This reception in fields outside sociology
is not uncommon.Philosophershave used
Goffman's mode of analysis as a general
model of social science explanation
(Louch, 1966), or have seen it as the
most promising sociological attempt to
understand the contextual nature of explanations of human conduct (Harr6,
1970). His reputation in anthropologyis
sterling and growing. Ironically (I think
Goffman might enjoy entertaining this
thought), his reputationwithin sociology
is not as unchallenged as it is in such
diverse fields as game theory and simulation, specifically of international conflicts (Schelling and his students have
drawn on Goffman'swork in recent publications); linguistics and communication
theory; psychiatry and political science.
Sociologists, on occasion and usually
sotto voce (again, something Goffman at
least sometimes must enjoy), have been
heard to dismiss Goffman as merely
anecdotal, banal, untestable and/or
vague. Or he may be dismissed as "only
an ethnographer."Grudgingly, it is admitted that he is an enormously gifted
writer whose own very rare skills, how-

ever, make his analysis virtually unique

(a comment that applies as well, I suppose, to the writings of Mann, Freud,
Marx and Weber). It is said: "Goffman
can write in that fashion, but who else
can?" How does one account for the
welcome Goffman has received in other
disciplines and the ambivalence with
which he is greeted within sociology? In
a note of this length, only a few speculations can be advanced. I suggest that
Goffman stands between two traditions
in sociology and that this anomalous
position and his attempt to bridge the
analysis of situations and structures accounts for his present reputation.
Two themes dominate the analysis of
everydaylife in our times. Keen observers
have attempted to shape an analysis of
the constraining, deadening, enervating
and benignly aggressive progress of the
"disenchantmentof the world;" on the
other hand, they have attempted to
explicate the fate of the alienated, anxious, desperate, terrorized (and terrorizing) and deracinated existential man.
A considerableanalytic dilemma is posed
by the juxtapositioning of these two
themes. Perspectives appropriate to the
first set of problems appear wholly inadequate to the second set of problems
as each has been conventionally defined.
They appear to demand almost mutually
exclusive conceptual paraphernalia.Few
analysts have drawn the problem in a
fashion that permits a theoretical synthesis in which the fragmented pieces

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

QUARTERLY
136 THESOCIOLOGICAL
of the analytic puzzle are assembled. I
believe Goffman has done this. Goffman portrays the muted terror and anguish, the quiet desperation of organizational men and their clients as a product
of the ritualized hierachically patterned
worlds in which they find themselves
(or is the ritualized existence in which
they live a consequence of their fears,
uncertainties and seeming wish to minimize and control the risks of human
relationships?). Are they the "desperate
characters"of Paula Fox's tour de force
novel of the same name, locked into
dreary and frightening routines, but unwilling or unable to imagine more creative or rewarding alternatives? (cf. Sennett's Uses of Disorder, 1970). One
thinks in this connection of the penetrating work of Crozier (1971), who has
cut through the webs of conceptual
obfuscation to examine groups of office
workers coping proximally with an environment which must present itself as
problematic, inchoate, and threatening.
He remindsus, perhapswith less tragically ominous tone than does Goffman, of
the continuing need to interdigitate the
metaphor of structure with the fleeting
goings and comings of individuals. (The
final paragraph of Coffman's Relations
in Public is an almost epigrammatic
summary of this concern.)
Coffman it seems is an anomaly, for
as Collins and Tiryakian have pointed
out, he attempts to weave together the
torn strands of analysis perhaps last best
synthesized by Weber. His work, like
that of Simmel, Mauss and then later
Durkheim, and Goffman's mentor and
later colleague at the University of Chicago, Everett Hughes, is an attempt to
bridge situations and structures. This
focal point illuminates the dilemmas of
sociological explanation. The failure to
develop this synthesis accounts for the
all too frequent appearance of polemic
articles claiming that sociology is becoming merely psychology, that it must
return to its original structuralroots and
concerns, or that sociology has forgotten
men and must return to fundamental

psychologicalor social psychologicalprinciples.

Goffman draws from Simmel and
Mauss a concern for the forms of human
relationships,the symbolic cloaks within
which we wrap ourselves. But his concern for what he sees as the man underneath or behind these cloaks leads him
to explicate concerns most associated
with continental thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Husserl and Sartre: matters of
mood, expression, feeling, passion. It
is precisely this element that is strikingly lacking in Mead's rationalistic
social-psychologicalframework(cf. Manis
and Meltzer, ed., 1972; Lyman and
Scott, 1970; and Manning, forthcoming, on the need to articulate this element into a social psychological framework). Not only does Goffman himself
represent a bit of an anomaly, his work
mediates contradictions between us/
them, me/we, inside/outside by employing through his analyses the concept
of situated, setting-specific conduct. In
so doing he has occasionally emersed
the situation in personal moods(Stigma)
and other times, in Behavior in Public
Places and in Relations in Public to a
lesser degree, he has emersed the self.
His focus, although becoming more an
ethnography of the micro-propertiesof
situations (Collins, below) and less a
sociology of everyday life (Aronoff),
continues to be the interactionalcontext
as reflexively revealed in exchanges.
Coffman, however, is not the existentialist supreme, for he attends to the primary quality of the situation as a structural entity, rather than the men there
located:
Social situations, at least in our
society, constitute a reality sui
generis as he used to say, and therefore need and warrant analysis in
their own right, much like that
accorded other basic forms of social
organization (Goffman, 1964:134).
and:
I assume that the proper study of
interactionis not the individual and
his psychology, but rather the syn-

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Symposium Review
tactical relations among the acts of
different persons mutuallypresent to
one another. . . Not, then, men and

their moments. Rather moments and

their men (Goffman, 1967:3).
Nor is he the naturalistsome have portrayed (cf. Lofland, forthcoming), for
he is less the observer and more the
taxonomist,especially in this latest work.
In Relations in Public there are portions
that suggest nothing so much as the
position of Von Weise and Becker,
Vierkandt, and Gurvitch. Finally, Goffman is not sui generis, as much as he
might like his readers to believe that.
He eschews most of the conventional
means of supplying intellectualbiography
and credentials (note the dedication of
the book) i.e., via footnotes and bibliography (friendship networks and ritual
debts better account for the appearance
of footnotes than does the content of
the sources cited), but he springs from
a British tradition of social anthropology
with its Africa-derivedconcern for ritual,
symbols, and deference. One does have
to admit to a final irony. Goffman is a
man who, as Collins suggests, does not
much delight in his times and would
perhaps have been more at ease in Victorian England. In that sense he is a
man out of his time who nonetheless
speaks eloquently to it.
REFERENCES
Ball, D. W.
1971 "The definition of the situation'. ."
Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour 2, No. 1.
Berman, M.
1972 "Weird but brilliant light on the
way we live now." New York Times
Book Review (February).
Crozier,M.
1971 The World of the Office Worker
(trans. by D. Landan). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goffman, Erving
1967 "Introduction' to Interaction Ritual.
Chicago: Aldine.
1964 "The Neglected Situation" in J.
Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.) The
Communication.
Ethnography of
American Anthropologist 66 [6],
part 2.

137

Harr6, R.
1970 "Foreward"to Lyman and Scott (be
low).
Lofland, J.
Forthcoming "The Sociology of Erving
Goffman" in Jack D. Douglas,
ed. Existential Sociology.
Louch, A. R.
1966 Explanation and Human Action.
Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Lyman, S. and M. Scott
1970 A Sociologyof the Absurd. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Manis, Jerome and Bernard Meltzer, eds.
1972 Symbolic Interaction (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Manning, Peter K.
Forthcoming "Existential Sociology" Sociological Quarterly.
Sennett, Richard
1970 The Uses of Disorder. New York:
Random House.

RANDALL COLLINS,

University of California, San Diego

Erving Goffman is potentially the most
important sociological theorist to appear
since World War II. His influence on the
emergence of current phenomenological
sociology has been crucial, although rarely acknowledged. In many respects,
Goffman'sperspective is wider and more
powerful

than those who have come

after him. His backgroundis the Chicago

School in one of its most productive periods, and Goffman'searly work drew on
a wealth of fieldwork (including his
own) on occupations, stratification, and
organizations, which he united with his
own special insights into the subjectivity
of the individual actor. Goffman stands
at the nexus of the different levels of
sociological analysis, and his work, taken
seriously and properly developed, provides the missing link upon which the
success of an explanatory sociology depends.
So far, it has not really paid off. There
are several reasons for its relative failure.
Some of these have to do with the state
of the larger discipline. Goffman has

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

138

THE SOCIOLOGICAL

QUARTERLY

failed to make much of a dent in the

theoreticalcomplacencyof quantitativelyoriented sociology, nor in the rigid abstractionsof the systematic theorists.This
is not surprising coming from his enemies; what is more peculiar is the reaction of his friends. The symbolic interactionists have treated Goffman mainly
as a practitionerof the labelling approach
to deviance. The social phenomenologists
and ethnomethodologistssee him as an
early forerunner in the close study of
interaction, but as too sloppy and too
little concerned with the philosophical
and linguistic niceties of their current
interests. Goffman's reputation rests
mainly on a popularistic audience which
admires him for "telling it like it is" in
the phony relationshipsof everyday life.
None of this is very close to Goffman's
real concerns. The popularistic view
(which seems to be shared by positivists
who wish to dismiss him) only demonstrates how little attention has been paid
to what Goffman is actually saying.
Goffman is the very antithesis of the
iconoclast or the encounter-grouper;insofar as there are value-preferencesin his
work, they are in defense of the artificialities of social ritual. The scholarly
reactions are not much more perceptive.
What is not appreciated is that Goffman
is fundamentally a theorist in the main
line of sociological theory, who has attempted to do his theorizing in close
conjunction with empirical materials.
This is a pretty rare combination,which
helps explain the misperception of him.
For what has been left out is nothing
less than Goffman's unique capacity for
solving the strategic problem now before
us: to link together macro and micro
levels in such a way as to give the former
a real causal basis and the latter a real
explanatory relevance.
Sociologicaltheory has been suspended
between two main traditions, the positivist and the idealist. The former includes the line of general systems exemplified by Comte, Spenser,Pareto, and
Parsons. These invoke the ideal of hard
science, which makes it seem necessary

to ground sociology in some exterior

framework apart from the shifting currents of individual subjectivity. The
trouble is that the objective systems
thereby posited lose the real individual
actor. This in turn undermines their
claim to scientific validity, since in fact
there is no observablereality to "society"
at all except the perceptions and behaviors of concrete individuals. Instead
of a real subject for sociological science,
we get an imaginaryone.
The idealist tradition derives from
German neo-Kantian philosophy. In
American sociology, we have had a series of imports, first by Cooley, Mead,
and Thomas; later, a more phenomenological or existential version by Schutz,
Garfinkel,and Berger. This remedies the
weaknesses of the abstractpositivist systems, but carries severe limitationsof its
own. Idealist
sociology emphasizes
hermeneutic interpretation rather than
causal explanation, and tends to reject
the scientific ideal just as vehemently as
the positivists reject subjectivism. But
it resembles abstract system-buildingin
carrying on theorizing at a very high
level of abstraction.
Idealist sociology has presented very
general conceptions of the individualand
the processes by which he constructssubjective reality. It has advanced our understanding of social determinism in a
very general sense, and has progressively
refined the social model of consciousness
from the early formulationsof role-taking
and internal conversation in Mead and
Cooley, to the highly sophisticated examination of linguistic and paralinguistic
communication in Cicourel and other
modern researchers. But we deal with
a highly universal actor ratherthan with
men behaving differently in a variety of
situations; we get no lead to the variations in reciprocally linked interpersonal
behaviors that make up the main body
of sociological interests. Where empirical
research is done in this tradition, it has
usually been under the rubric of social
problems, where description and interpretationhave been acceptablesurrogates

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Symposium Review
for real explanatorygeneralizations.(The
situation is more or less parallel in the
empirical research done in the positivist
camp, albeit with very different methods
and a correspondingeffort to avoid the
taint of subjectivity.)
It should be obvious that sociology
can never pay off as an explanatory
science until the two levels of analysis
are satisfactorily synthesized. This has
been approached a number of times in
the past. Within the positivist camp,
Durkheim came the closest, especially in
his last work on religion. His analysis of
ritual behavioras the technique by which
men constructboth emotional bonds and
reified cognitive categories to express
their social relationships opened up a
very powerful line of advance upon
both levels simultaneously.On the idealist side of the Rhine, Weber came closest
to a working synthesis, incorporating
idealist philosophy as at least an introduction into his historical studies informed by Marxian positivism.
Neither of these syntheses was worked
out in their authors' lifetimes. As happens so often in intellectual history, their
followers have tended to become sidetracked. Talcott Parsons, who was one
of the first Americansto visit the European sociological scene after World War
I, saw some of the possibilities. His
grand synthesis was a self-conscious effort to solve the problem of integrating
the two levels of analysis. It has not
proven quite adequate. For Parsons only
pays lipservice to Weber's actionorientation, and even manages to pull
back from Durkheim's most advanced
scheme; his fundamental loyalties turn
out to be to Pareto and Freud. For Parsons, the individual gets integrated into
the social system via the dual mechanisms of roles (as the building blocks of
larger institutions) and values (as replicas of a society-wide value system residing in each member'shead). Durkheim's
collective conscience becomes reinterpreted as a set of values internalized in
childhood; with this internal gyroscope,

139

we need no longer look at the realityconstructingin adult interaction.

But Durkheim was much more powerful than this. His own German sojourn
brought him enough idealism to understand the importance of the continuous
flow of communicationwhich makes up
our moment-to-moment reality. The
French crowd psychologistsprovided him
with a hint about the mechanism; his
teacher Fustel de Coulanges had provided the significant historical examples
he needed to make it sociologically operable. For Durkheim, the collective conscience was an ephemeral thing; hence
the necessity of ritual work to recreate
it again and again. The intellectual
milieu of the time helps remind us of
what Durkheimintended. Georges Sorel's
eulogy of the ephemeral moment of the
revolutionarymyth is an essentially parallel constructionfrom a different political position. From here, it is only a short
step to seeing the world as full of
multiple collective consciences, little
pockets of reality tied to patterns of
ritual interaction whose determinants
Durkheim was just beginning to explicate when he died.
Goffman is the major inheritor of the
Durkheimian tradition in its pure form.
He learned it at Chicago from W. Lloyd
Warner, himself a major Durkheimian
social anthropologist. (Warner has also
been too little recognized as a theoretically-based researcher, although his
empirical work has been justifiably criticized for failure to see enough plurality
and conflict in his studies of stratification. But his Durkheimiananalysisin the
last-and least known-volume of the
Yankee City series, The Living and the
Dead (1959) is far and away the best
treatment of American civic ritual, both
secular and religious, and includes a
brilliant analysis of why traditionalistic
groups like wars.)
Goffman has followed in this serious
theoretical-and-empirical tradition, beginning by applying the Durkheimian
technique to materials of stratification,
occupations,and organizations.His early

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

140

THE SOCIOLOGICALQUARTERLY

papers and The Presentation of Self in

Everyday Life give us the famous dramaturgical model. This is an effort to see
the self in modem society as a little god
to be treated with due ritual respect. The
insight follows directly from Durkheim's
demonstrationthat gods reflect the form
of social organization; and that in an
individualisticsociety "the sanctity of the
individual" and "the rights of man"
emerge directly from predominantforms
of interaction. This provides Goffman
with an analytical frameworkfor dealing
brilliantlywith the politeness, deference,
demeanor, and stage settings of everyday life. Moreover, his model links up
the dynamics of individual behaviorwith
the "structures"of stratificationand organizations,seen in terms of situationsof
deference upholding hierarchies of privileged backstages. Moreover, the theory
is thoroughlygrounded in empiricaldata;
Goffman's frontstage/backstage model,
for example, draws directly upon observations of formal and informal relationships in work organizations.
This is a powerful achievement. It
links ritual to the exercise of power, and
opens the way to seeing the conditions
that divide up society into multiple realities. We come closer to the way things
are: the world is a series of little cults
of belief enacted where men come together with their particularinterests. We
have moved a long way fromthe ideology
of Comte and Parsons, with their one
big belief system crowding all the others
off the stage. The way is open to seeing
common values and emotional solidarity
precisely where they exist and no further,
by locating them in observable interactions. What remains is to incorporate
this into a larger view of the conflicts
which divide men into different ritual
groups, and the resources that enable
them to construct their particular realities and impose them upon others.
Goffman has not done this. Given his
commitmentsas a Durkheimianfunctionalist-i.e., as a defender of the proprieties
of bourgeois order-this is not surprising.
Goffman's subsequent work, however,

tends to slide back down from the theoretical advances which he had already
made. From his early potential as the
synthesizer of structural and individual
levels, he has moved progressively into
a smailU
r arena of specialization in the
microproperties of face-to-face interaction. The strategic retreat took him
through a series of notable contributions
to the field of deviance, beginningwith a
Durkheimian analysis of the effects of
conditions of high social density (i.e.
total institutions) on the individual'sexperience of moral reality. Along with a
series of his former students-Marvin
Scott, Sacks, Sudnow, Scheff-Goffman
virtually created the study of everyday
life, now a thriving field. But the original theoretical orientation has gone, to
be replaced among most subsequentpractitioners by the abstractionsof idealism.
In the last decade, Goffman himself
seems to be defining the meaning of his
own work increasingly within the context created by his followers. Perhaps
one inevitably reconstructs one's own
creative contributions to intellectual
reality according to the reception they
receive. This is shown in his latest
work, Relationsin Public, a kind of compendium of research findings which
Goffman treats as comprising his current position.
The book consists of a series of chapters on various topics already familiar in
the Goffman repertoire.They summarize
empirical research and theoretical refinements on approximately the same
materials treated eight years earlier in
Behavior in Public Places. Cumulative
development is apparent in many areas.
Thus, the individual as a vehicular unit
in sidewalk traffic has been studied with
some care, and Goffman formulates the
complexities of routing and eye signals
involved. (A synthesis with Stinchcombe's treatment of the freeway as a
social system would now seem just over
the horizon.)
Goffman concludes from a taxonomy
of the different interaction units an individual may make up, that the concept

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Symposium Review
of "an individual"itself is becoming too
gross, and must be decomposed into a
series of specialized terms depending on
the particular analytical context. This
leads us to a typology of the territories
of the self, including personal space (as
studied for example by Sommer), use
space, turns, informational and conversational preserves; a considerationof the
markers used to communicate one's
claims, and of the territorial violations
that can occur.
There are two chapters on short conversational interchanges, treated in an
explicitly Durkheimian framework. One
large category is made up of supportive
interchanges: mainly access rituals such
as greeting and farewell salutations,
which Goffman shows are finely tailored
to the niceties of the relationships they
serve to uphold. The other major type
consists of remedial interchanges: accounts, apologies,requestsfor leave, body
gloss as a means of restoring ritual coherence in personal relationships. Goffman also returns to a favorite theme:
that a code of ritual propriety opens the
possibility (and is a prerequisite for)
symbolic challenges ("run-ins"), which
in turn leads to a furtherset of expressive
signals for showing that one is not
threatening a run-in.
This is followed by a treatment of
tie-signs: ritual markers of relationships,
ranging from handholding to "grooming
talk" (a nice term taken from the mutual lice-pickingthat goes on among pairbonded monkeys). Toward the end of
this chapter we get a great deal of spygame type of materialsto illustrateproblems of concealing relationships, apparently left over from Goffman's more
popularisticventure in Strategic Interaction. The popularisticnote becomes even
stronger in the lengthy concluding chapter on normal appearances.It begins by
cogently placing homo sapiens in the
perspective of animal ethology, and then
goes on through a considerationof alarms
to a scattering of remarks about crime
in the streets and other topical issues.

141

(The publisher has chosen to emphasize

this last angle in advertising the book, as
if it were a manual on how to walk
through New York without getting
mugged.)
The most original chapter in the book
is the appendix on "The Insanity of
Place," previously published as a paper
in Psychiatry.It is far and away the best
treatment yet of a "mental illness" as
social behavior. Goffman analyzes the
dynamics of mania as a progressive
wrecking and reordering of ordinary
ritual proprieties and the social network
they uphold; in this ritual world, the
doctor cannot remaina neutralbystander,
but must join either the patient's faction
or the family's. We have come a long
way from the early abstractionsand simplifications of labelling theory.
Many things have been accomplished
in the last decade in this house Coffman
has built. But much remains inconclusive.
We have a great deal more taxonomy
than explanation. Most of the examples of rituals are taken from oldfashioned British upper-middle-classpoliteness, which Goffman uneasily tries to
pass off as somehow still the middle-class
norm.* Yet he himself mourns the disappearanceof such niceties as hat-tipping
(with eyes averted from unintroduced
ladies), and occasionally he takes note
of the very different sort of norms in
Arab culture of the south of France.
Goffman does not like the contemporary
decline in formality very much, and he
prefers to deny its significance rather
than to treat it as an historical phenomenon to be explained.
It is here that Goffman shows what
has been lost from the Durkheimiantra*One example, surely drawn more from
memory than from current observation:
"Middle-class children in our society are
taught to preface every statement to an adult
with a request of by-your-leave and to terminate every encounter, if not every interchange, with some version of thank you."

(p. 138)

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

142

THE SOCIOLOGICALQUARTERLY

dition. For Durkheim was interested

above all in scientific explanation, and
variationsin phenomenawere sought out
precisely because it is by comparingtheir
conditions that one may get a grip on
their causes. To do so for Goffman's
materials would be to move backward
in time and link up with his early work,
where power and stratificationwere more
readily available as part of the explanatory context. For it seems that the sharp
sex-role dominance reflected in Arab
etiquette, the idealized bowing and
scraping of haut bourgeois society, the
casualness of America in the Vietnam
age-all of these have their basis in changing resources of power and privilege. To
tie these together would be to bring the
microstudy of everyday life back to its
relevance for the larger enterprise of
sociology.
The main trouble with Goffman's
later work is that he has come to underestimate the importance of his materials.
From a revolutionary theorist in the
grand tradition,he has become the baron
of a prosperingbut remote province. But
interpersonal interaction is not just another specialty: it is, quite literally, all
the real empirical material there is in
sociology. Societies, states, organizations,
families-none of these is anything but
men interacting. Organizational charts
and answers to questionnaires are only
second-hand ways of summarizingwhat
goes on in these interactions. Abstract
theoretical schemes have gone astrayprecisely from failure to realize this; they
have "systems"do things that individuals
don't do at all, even in reciprocalinteractions of any degree of ramification.
Larger theories will return to usefulness
to the extent that we can ground them in
exactly those models of what really goes
on in interaction.Power, dominance,solidarity, belief-all of the explanatoryprinciples are to found in the ritualized
contingencies of our daily encounters.
When we have adequately understood
this, sociology will be on the verge of
becoming a science.

JoEL ARONOFF,

MichiganState University
In commenting on Erving Goffman's
new book I am assuming that Goffman,
his methods, as well as the subject matter of the book, are so well known that
I can turn instead to the specific request
in my invitation to join this symposium.
Because I am a social psychologist who
does cross-culturalfield work, as well as
experimentalsmall-groupresearch,I was
asked to comment in personal terms on
what I hope to learn from a new book
by Goffman, and to evaluate what I
found.
In particular,I am a member of that
academic generationfor whom Goffman's
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
came as an illumination,a glimpse into
what a vibrantapproachto social science
might be. The call from a social scientist
for a social psychology that dealt with
real people living all the nuances of a
real life was almost a religious test to
join an approach that one entered at his
own peril. Looking at the new fields he
helped develop, we can recognize how
well he succeeded.
Unfortunately,there is a social regularity in which Goffman now has joined.
Perhaps the best way to put it would be
to recall the career of Erich Fromm,
whose first few books taught much but
whose later books confused, until you
came to realize that there was nothing in
them. Prominentmen sometimescome to
feel that they must keep knocking them
out no matter how little they have to
say. Reading Goffman now reminds me
of when I tried to keep up with Fromm,
until I realized that there was nothing
there.
So it is with Relations in Public.
There is little that needs to be said from
any special vantage point of a social
psychologist. This is simply a poor book.
I regret the time I spent reading it and
advise prospective readers to spend their
time more wisely. It combines all the
flaws of a typical Goffmanbook and even

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Symposium Review
his fancy for unusual juxtaposition in
strings of nouns, which he does in order
to shock the reader into an awareness of
the undersideof life, is done mechanically
and without any new sensibility. Goffman is now a formula and even his grotesque is kitsch.
To be brief. Goffman represents himself as developing new theoretical insights about public social interaction,and
in his struggle with the "unknownraw
phenomena,"he is "forced" to develop
new terminology. While new words are
needed when new phenomena are discovered, the neologisms in this book all
denote the most commonplace of variables. Still worse, as he presents the well
known, his references are seldom to the
people who brought the variable to attention but, instead, for the most part
are direction to recent abstruse papers.
For example, he calls the joint appearance and interaction of individuals in
public a "with,"and takes care to argue
that he is referring to an interactional
rather than a social-structuralunit. While
that sounds promising, initially, as he
proceeds with his standard method (the
accumulationof brief anecdotes) his examples fit perfectly the standard definitions of the dyad, group or family. For
scholarly clarificationhe cites Harold B.
Barclay, Buurri al Lamaab (Ithaca,
N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1964),
which may be a perfectly fine book, but
is hardly the origin of these notions. And
so on for nearly 400 pages. Indeed, in
this book Goffman proves the commonplace so well, that after reading it one
wants to say "This is so very important
that we should devote a whole field of

143

Social Science to it. Why don't we call

it Sociologyl"It is simply an introductory
Sociology text, presented in the form of
catchy words and interesting anecdotes.
It is not what I had hoped to find.
The value of the book is twofold. First,
the compendium of vivid examples of
the standard variables can be helpful to
every instructor, and earns a place on
everyone's shelf along with "Teaching
Tips" and the "Instructor'sManual." I
am grateful and will borrowmany for my
introductory classes. Second, Goffman
seems to read a lot. In fact he must
read every term paper in every graduate
seminar in the country. His references
are often very interesting and, because
they are so abstruse,direct you to papers
that, without him, would mostly be
missed.
It has often been said that he is our
specially-trainednovelist, prospecting the
raw, and often seamy, phenomenaof life.
With the same extra talent of our geologically-trainedastronauts,with this special
skill it is said that he brings back rocks
that others have missed. My greatest regret, in this catalogue of complaints, is
that he jumps from example to example
without clarifying even the raw phenomena of any of them. He strings together examples of the same process, yet
gives each a separate name, as if each
separate instance is a different variable.
In so doing, his lists are false clarity, for
by this technique he hides rather than
reveals the dimension. If this is our
specially-trainednovelist, I would much
prefer to have read Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or even Willa Cather.

This content downloaded from 119.15.93.148 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:35:46 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions