Word: goffman
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They contend that the carnival is an ideal place to study what Sociologist Erving Goffman (TIME, Jan. 10, 1969) calls the total institution-a self-contained organization or society that raises barriers against the outside world...
Rough. Although Delancey Street's orientation toward the future sets it apart from Synanon, the new organization is carrying on one old Synanon tradition: subjecting members to rituals of a kind that Sociologist Erving Goffman calls "degradation ceremonies." New male residents are required to shave their heads; women are compelled to go without makeup for as long as six months. All residents must take part in "the circus," Delancey Street's version of the Synanon "game." Under the leadership of a "ringmaster," members indulge in three-hour bouts of name-calling and mutual criticism. Admits Family Member George...
...friends will overreact to her new shoes: "Oh, let's see them. Oh, they're cute." In conversation, a remark from a bore, no matter how stupefying, may force his companions "to give a sign that he is qualified to speak." A good thing too, says Goffman, for "without such mercies, unsatisfactory persons would bleed to death from the conversational savageries performed on them...
That is the gist of Goffman's newest book, Relations in Public (Basic Books; $7.95). Its subject is microsociology, or group behavior on a small scale-as when people pass each other on the street or wait together at supermarket checkout counters. Such encounters, says Goffman, frequently consist of rituals: either "supportive interchanges" like "Hello" or "remedial interchanges" like "Excuse me." In each case, one person provides "a sign of connectedness to another," while the other shows "that the message has been received, that the affirmed relationship actually exists as the performer implies, that the performer has worth...
...readers of Goffman, such behavior often recalls Eric Berne's Games People Play. Berne's games, however, are part of a neurotic search for emotional involvement, while Goffman's rituals represent only a normal attempt to save face. Because of this concentration on image making, some of Goffman's critics find him trivial and limited. "People just do not go around with their attention constantly focused on how they are being regarded," objects Berkeley Sociologist Herbert Blumer. All the same, Blumer considers Goffman "an innovative scholar" who "can take human interplay which appears humdrum and show...