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  INTERACTION RITUAL

  INTERACTION RITUAL

  ESSAYS IN FACE-TO-FACE BEHAVIOR

  ERVING GOFFMAN

  WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JOEL BEST

  First published 1967 by Transaction Publishers

  Published 2017 by Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

  New material this edition copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis.

  Copyright © 1967 by Erving Goffman.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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  Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2005048515

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goffman. Erving.

  Interaction ritual: essays in face-to-face behavior / Erving Goffman ; with a new introduction by Joel Best.

  p.cm.

  Originally published; Chicago; Aldine Pub. Co., c 1967. With new introd.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Contents; On face-work—The nature of deference and demeanor—

  Embarrassment and social organization—Alienation from interaction—

  Mental symptoms and public order—Where the action is.

  ISBN 0-202-30777-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Social interaction. 1. Title.

  HM111.G64 2005

  302—dc22

  2005048515

  ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30777-0 (pbk)

  CONTENTS

  Aldinetransaction Introduction

  Introduction

  On Face-Work

  The Nature Of Deference And Demeanor

  Embarrassment and Social Organization

  Alienation from Interaction

  Mental Symptoms And Public Order

  Where The Action Is

  “On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction” is reprinted with permission from Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, Volume 18, Number 3, August 1955, PP- 213-31. Copyright © 1955 by the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, Inc.

  “Embarrassment and Social Organization” is reprinted with permission from The American Journal of Sociology, Volume 62, Number 3, November 1956, pp. 264-74.

  “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” is reprinted with permission from American Anthropologist, Volume 58, June 1956, pp. 473-502. Copyright © 1956 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.

  “Alienation from Interaction” is reprinted with permission from Human Relations, Volume 10, Number 1, 1957, pp. 47-59.

  “Mental Symptoms and Public Order” is reprinted with permission of the Walter Reed Army Institute or Research.

  “Where the Action Is” was prepared with the assistance of a grant from the Youth Development Program of the Ford Foun-ation and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley, under a grant from the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, Welfare Administration, U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in cooperation with the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. Support was also re-ceived from the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, and from the Center For International Affairs, Harvard University. Edwin Lemert has provided detailed criticisms for which I am very grateful. Comments on Nevada casino gambling are based on a study in progress.

  The first four papers were published while I was a member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies, National Institute of Mental Health, and I am grateful for the Laboratory’s support. For support in bringing this collection of six papers together for publication, I am grateful to the Center For International Affairs, Harvard University.

  ALDINETRANSACTION INTRODUCTION

  Interaction Ritual was a pivotal work in the illustrious career of Erving Goffman. Between 1959 and 1963, Goffman published five books that vaulted him from near obscurity into the front ranks of American sociology. Three of these have endured as classic works in the field: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), and Stigma (1963).

  The enthusiasm for Goffman’s early books reflected the growing disenchantment with the dominant, nor-mal-science strains of postwar sociology, particularly the grand theories of Talcott Parsons on the one hand, and the growing fascination with the quantitative analysis via survey research and experimentation on the other. This sociological establishment had come under fire from such prominent critics as G. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and Pitirim Sorokin in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (1956). Sociologists were searching for alternative approaches.

  And Goffman certainly offered an alternative. His subject matter was unique. In sharp contrast to the natural tendency of many scholars to tackle big, important topics (and thereby produce what would presumably be acclaimed as big, important works), Goffman was a minimalist, working on a small scale, and concentrating on the most mundane, ordinary social contacts, on “everyday life.” His methods were equally peculiar. While Goffman had done some ethnographic research—first on a Scottish island, and later in a large mental hospital—he had surprisingly little interest in systematically describing these scenes. His goal was to spot elementary processes that underpinned all social life. To be sure, he’d occasionally use an example taken from his field work, but he was much more likely to draw upon a broad range of written sources—studies by sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists, but also autobiographies, novels, and newspaper stories.

  As a result, his work was difficult to classify. Although his early work often centered on aspects of the self, it didn’t fall into any of the familiar genres of social psychology, not the survey researchers’ efforts to understand attitudes, nor the experimentalists’ studies of small groups, nor the symbolic interactionists’ abstract theorizing. Rather, Goffman saw the self as embedded in particular situations. Fbr Goffman, the self was primarily motivated by a desire to be well regarded—both by others and by oneself—and every interaction offered occasions for eliciting that regard.

  Goffman’s work can be seen as offering a series of alternative takes or perspectives on these processes, each centered around a different concept. Most famously, of course, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life offered a dramaturgical perspective, an argument that interaction could be seen as performances before audiences. But other works concentrated on other facets of interaction: the two essays in Encounters (1961) portrayed interaction in terms of first games, and then roles; Behavior in Public Places (1963) highlighted the importance of involvement; just as Strategic Interaction (1969) focused on strategy, and Frame Analysis (1974) on frames. Much of his later work, such as Relations in Public (1971), or the papers found in Forms of Talk (1981), tended to concentrate on conversational sequences.

  There was a playfulness to this exploration of alternative perspectives. Goffman’s point was not that interaction was either a drama or a game or a frame, but rather that each of these concepts offered a potentially useful standpoint or angle from which one might view—and come to understand something about—social life. The response of other sociologists to these different orientations varied: the ideas of dramaturgy, stigma, and frame
continue to attract many adherents; others, such as role distance, found early favor but seem to have fallen from memory; and still others, such as involvement and strategic interaction, never really caught on.

  Interaction Ritual can be understood in this context. The book has two halves. First, it collects several early, previously published papers on social interaction, including “On Face-Work,” “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” and “Alienation from Interaction.” (Regrettably left out were Goffman’s first two published articles: “Symbols of Glass Status” [published in the British Journal of Sociology in 1951]; and “On Cooling the Mark Out” [published in Psychiatry in 1952]. Both are fabulous pieces that display Goffman’s ability to find and develop a unique slant, but neither has social interaction as its focus.)

  The second half, of course, is the lengthy, original essay: “Where the Action Is.” When the book appeared, this was seen as its principal contribution. While it was useful to have several of Goffman’s early papers collected together, “Where the Action Is” offered yet another Goffmanic angle on interaction. The essay draws upon Goffman’s last major ethnographic project—obser-vations of Nevada casinos. However, this scene is not described very systematically; we get only brief snippets about casinos as places for either play or work. Instead, Goffman treats gambling as one variety of the fateful encounters he calls “action.”

  Action—like so many others of Goffman’s concepts—serves as a way to characterize the emotional investments actors have in interaction. Long before the major journals began publishing pieces on the sociology of emotion, Goffman explored the emotional tones that governed interaction. In Goffman’s view, selves are emotionally vulnerable—easily damaged, betrayed, discreditable, embarrassed, and so on. He recognized that this vulnerability had both tragic and comic overtones. Tragedy occurs when individuals suffer rejection, when their claims for respect are spurned by others, or even doubted by themselves. But Goffman also sees that these events have comic potential: it may be embarrassing, but it can also be funny when balloons of pretension are popped, and pretense stands exposed.

  But, in addition to their vulnerability, Goffman saw selves as exuberant. If all interactions offered risks—of failure, exposure, and rejection—they also held out the promise of rewards if those hazards could be circumvented. In Goffman’s minimalist world, both tragedies and triumphs were small-scale. If tiny flubs could call one’s self into question, small joys—such as a wager won—could reaffirm one’s worth.

  Interaction Ritual straddles this divide. In a sense, the early chapters—like most of Goffman’s great early books—give more weight to vulnerability, and the risks to the self. In contrast, “Where the Action Is” emphasizes excitement and exuberance. But it was Goffman’s genius to recognize—and to help us realize—that both themes are facets of all our lives, that rituals of respect shape even the most mundane contacts between people.

  Joel Best

  University of Delaware

  Introduction

  The study of face-to-face interaction in natural settings doesn’t yet have an adequate name. Moreover, the analytical boundaries of the field remain unclear. Somehow, but only somehow, a brief time span is involved, a limited extension in space, and a restriction to those events that must go on to completion once they have begun. There is a close meshing with the ritual properties of persons and with the egocentric forms of territoriality.

  The subject matter, however, can be identified. It is that class of events which occurs during co-presence and by virtue of co-presence. The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into the situation, whether intended or not. These are the external signs of orientation and involvement—states of mind and body not ordinarily examined with respect to their social organization.

  The close, systematic examination of these “small behaviors” has begun to develop, stimulated by impressive current studies of animals and of language, and supported by the resources available for the study of interaction in “small groups” and the psychotherapies.

  One objective in dealing with these data is to describe the natural units of interaction built up from them, beginning with the littlest—for example, the fleeting facial move an individual can make in the game of expressing his alignment to what is happening—and ending with affairs such as week-long conferences, these being the interactional mastodons that push to the limit what can be called a social occasion. A second objective is to uncover the normative order prevailing within and between these units, that is, the behavioral order found in all peopled places, whether public, semi-public, or private, and whether under the auspices of an organized social occasion or the flatter constraints of merely a routinized social setting.* Both of these objectives can be advanced through serious ethnography: we need to identify the countless patterns and natural sequences of behavior occurring whenever persons come into one another’s immediate presence. And we need to see these events as a subject matter in their own right, analytically distinguished from neighboring areas, for example, social relationships, little social groups, communication systems, and strategic interaction.

  A sociology of occasions is here advocated. Social or-ganization is the central theme, but what is organized is the co-mingling of persons and the temporary interactional enterprises that can arise therefrom. A normatively stabilized structure is at issue, a “social gathering/’ but this is a shifting entity, necessarily evanescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures.

  The first five papers in this book appear in the order of their original publication with only a few editorial changes; the sixth, comprising almost half of the volume, is published here for the first time. I’m afraid there is not much that is botanical about them. But they do focus on one general issue that remains of interest to the ethnographer and will always have to receive some consideration.

  I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another. None the less, since it is individual actors who contribute the ultimate materials, it will always be reasonable to ask what general properties they must have if this sort of contribution is to be expected of them.

  What minimal model of the actor is needed if we are to wind him up, stick him in amongst his fellows, and have an orderly traffic of behavior emerge? What minimal model is required if the student is to anticipate the lines along which an individual, qua interactant, can be effective or break down? That is what these papers are about. A psychology is necessarily involved, but one stripped and cramped to suit the sociological study of conversation, track meets, banquets, jury trials, and street loitering.

  Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.

  * * *

  * I have made an attempt along these lines in Behavior in Public Places (New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1966).

  On Face-Work*

  An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction

  Every person lives in a world of social encounters, in-volving him either in face-to face or mediated contact with other participants. In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line—that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself. Regardless of whether a person intends to take a line, he will find that he has done so in effect. The other participants will assume that he has more or less willfully taken a stand, so that if he is to deal with their response to him he must take into consideration the impression they have possibly formed of him.

  The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes—albei
t an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself.1

  A person tends to experience an immediate emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him; he cathects his face; his “feelings” become attached to it. If the encounter sustains an image of him that he has long taken for granted, he probably will have few feelings about the matter. If events establish a face for him that is better than he might have expected, he is likely to “feel good”; if his ordinary expectations are not fulfilled, one expects that he will “feel bad” or “feel hurt.” In general, a person’s attachment to a particular face, coupled with the ease with which discontinuing information can be conveyed by himself and others, provides one reason why he finds that participation in any contact with others is a commitment. A person will also have feelings about the face sustained for the other participants, and while these feelings may differ in quantity and direction from those he has for his own face, they constitute an involvement in the face of others that is as immediate and spontaneous as the involvement he has in his own face. One’s own face and the face of others are constructs of the same order; it is the rules of the group and the definition of the situation which determine how much feeling one is to have for face and how this feeling is to be distributed among the faces involved.

  A person may be said to have, or be in, or maintain face when the line he effectively takes presents an image of him that is internally consistent, that is supported by judgments and evidence conveyed by other participants, and that is confirmed by evidence conveyed through impersonal agencies in the situation. At such times the person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them.