Word: goffman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sympathetic Smile. Such behavior indicates a considerable dependence on the complicity of the audience, which is expected to accept the performance at its face rather than at its true value. In considerate society, the audience seldom lets the performer down-in part, as Goffman repeatedly notes, because the roles of performer and audience interlock. A man rushing for the bus dons a sheepish smile to indicate his awareness of how silly he looks. His observers reward his performance-that is, the smile-by smiling sympathetically back. With this response, they become performers, and the bus chaser becomes the audience...
...penalties for breaking the rules can be serious. Even minor infractions provoke them. Goffman has described the restrictions imposed on suitable behavior in the rain. A man in a trench-coat will naturally pass muster. So will one who is coatless, as long as he suggests by his deportment-hunched shoulders, an impromptu newspaper umbrella-that he is alive to his predicament. So will arm-locked young lovers, sublimely indifferent to their drenching. But someone who walks along unprotected and apparently unaware of the downpour is likely to evoke a startled and uneasy response...
...reason, says Goffman, is that he offends the hidden code of behavior to which all "normal" people subscribe. The man oblivious to the rain is guilty not just of a trivial impropriety, but of the greater sin of social unpredictability. No one can guess with any assurance what ceremony he will next profane. No one can be sure of his respect of public order, without which society would regress to the jungle. Goffman is still exploring the patterns of behavior at social gatherings, which he believes have all the systematic qualities of a language. He is also at work...
Broken Rules. Goffman's search for the key to this nonverbal language began at the University of Chicago. Born 46 years ago, in Mannville, Alberta, the son of a dry-goods merchant, he graduated from the University of Toronto and went to Chicago for dissertation work in sociology. There he came under the influence, which he fully acknowledges, of Charles Horton Cooley and G. H. Mead, whose theories on personal interaction, small groups and the social character of the self still inform sociology courses. An energetic and devoted scholar who avoids formal social gatherings, Goffman is currently a research...
...before joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Goffman spent a year of research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His experiences there, recorded in Asylums, strongly affected his developing theories on social behavior. Goffman's understanding of mental patients borrows more from the unwritten rules of social occasions than from psychiatric theory. In his opinion, many inmates are simply people who have so flagrantly broken the rules of seemly behavior that they have been dismissed from the game. "I know of no psychotic misconduct," Goffman has written, "that cannot be matched precisely in everyday...