Word: goffman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Transgressing the Order. "More than to any family or club," writes Goffman in his book Behavior in Public Places, "more than to any class or sex, more than to any nation, the individual belongs to gatherings, and he had best show that he is a member in good standing. Just as we fill our jails with those who transgress the legal order, so we partly fill our asylums with those who act unsuitably-the first kind of institution being used to protect our lives and property; the second, to protect our gatherings and occasions...
...Goffman has developed this proposition in six books.* They have cemented his reputation as one of the most illuminating-and disturbing-cartographers of that shadowy terrain where man plays at being a social animal without fully understanding exactly what he is doing. Some sense of the disquieting Goffman perspective can be gained from his elliptical revisions of prevailing human values, which are sown Like land mines through his books. Social man is not an entity but "a dramatic effect"; all social encounters are theatrical performances. In a marriage proposal, the suitor, who may think that he is swearing his love...
Tranquil Sleep. The same unsettling effect is produced by the Swiftian irony that Goffman brings to his appraisal of the human scene. To him, a hanging is a social event, circumscribed, just like a one-day sale or a picnic, by rules calculated to make the performance go smoothly. For this reason, he says, a "table of drops" based on body weight was worked out by long experience "so that the length of the free fall would neither leave the man to wriggle nor tear off his head." The true stagecraft of a funeral, says Goffman, is found "backstage," away...
...Goffman's thesis-he declines to call it a theory-rests on a fundamental assumption: all rational human beings share, without necessarily knowing that they do, a desire for public order. Society is founded on an unspoken mutual trust. The pedestrian assumes, without thinking, that the driver has no motive for running him down. Instead of fatally beating a fellow passenger who has borrowed his newspaper, the commuter can be expected to limit his objections to words or gestures directed at recovering his property...
...dissembled by Goffman, any social occasion takes on the convoluted determinism of a chess game, in which the moves vary widely but follow strict and unforgiving rules. For example, a man in an office answers his phone. While he is talking, what should his office visitor do? The rules forbid listening. They also forbid just sitting there doing nothing, which could support the suspicion that he is listening. So the visitor studiously exhibits what Goffman calls "civil inattention." Unable to avoid overhearing one side of the phone conversation, he feigns another activity-gazing out the window, ostentatiously lighting and puffing...