Interaction Ritual Read online

  Invasions of privacy which have an instrumental tech-nical rationale can be paralleled with others of a more purely ceremonial nature. Thus “acting out” and “psychopathic” patients are ones who can be counted on to overreach polite bounds and ask embarrassing questions of fellow-patients and staff, or proffer compliments which would not ordinarily be in their province to give, or prof-fer physical gestures of appreciation such as hugging or kissing, which are felt to be inappropriate. Thus, on Ward B, male staff members were plagued by such statements as “Why did you cut yourself shaving like that,” “Why do you always wear the same pants, I’m getting sick of them,” “Look at all the dandruff youve got.” If seated by one of the patients, a male staff member might have to edge continuously away so as to keep a seemly safe distance between himself and the patient.

  Some of the ways in which individuals on Ward A kept their distance were made clear in contrast to the failure of Ward B’s patients to do so. On Ward A the rule that patients were to remain outside the nurses’ station was observed. Patients would wait for an invitation or, as was commonly the case, stay in the doorway so that they could talk with those in the station and yet not presume upon them. It was therefore not necessary for the staff to lock the station door when a nurse was in the station. On Ward B it was not possible to keep three of the patients out of the station by request alone, and so the door had to be kept locked if privacy was to be maintained. Even then, the walls of the station were effectively battered down by continuous banging and shouting. In other words, on Ward A the protective ring that nurses and attendants drew around themselves by retreating into the station was respected by the patients, whereas on Ward B it was not.

  A second illustration may be cited. Patients on Ward A had mixed feelings about some of their doctors, but each patient knew of one or two doctors that he or she liked. Thus, while at table, when a favorite doctor passed by, there would be an exchange of greetings but, ceremonially speaking, nothing more. No one would have felt it right to chase after the doctors, pester them, and in general invade their right of separateness. On Ward B, however, the entrance of a doctor was very often a signal for some of the patients to rush up to him, affectionally presume on him by grasping his hand or putting an arm around him, and then to walk with him down the corridor, engaging in a kidding affectionate conversation. And often when a doctor had retired behind a ward office door, a patient would bang on the door and look through its glass window, and in other ways refuse to keep expected distance.

  One patient on Ward B, Mrs. Baum, seemed especially talented in divining what would be an invasion of other people’s privacy. On a shopping expedition, for example, she had been known to go behind the counter or examine the contents of a stranger’s shopping bag. At other times she would enter a stranger’s car at an intersection and ask for a lift. In general she could provide the student with a constant reminder of the vast number of different acts and objects that are employed as markers by which the borders of privacy are staked out, suggesting that in the case of some “mental disorders” symptomatology is specifically and not merely incidentally an improper keeping of social distance.

  Analysis of deferential avoidance has sometimes been held back because there is another kind of ceremonial avoidance, a self-protective kind, that may resemble deferential restraint but is analytically quite different from it. Just as the individual may avoid an object so as not to pollute or defile it, so he may avoid an object so as not to be polluted or defiled by it. For example, in Ward B, when Mrs. Baum was in a paranoid state she refused to allow her daughter to accept a match from a Negro attendant, appearing to feel that contact with a member of a group against which she was prejudiced would be polluting; so, too, while kissing the doctors and nurses in an expansive birthday mood, she gave the appearance that she was trying but could not bring herself to kiss the attendant. In general, it would seem, one avoids a person of high status out of deference to him and avoids a person of lower status than one’s own out of a self-protective concern. Perhaps the social distance sometimes carefully maintained between equals may entail both kinds of avoidance on both their parts. In any case, the similarity in the two kinds of avoidance is not deep. A nurse who keeps away from a patient out of sympathetic appreciation that he wants to be alone wears one expression on her face and body; when she maintains the same physical distance from a patient because he has been incontinent and smells, she is likely to wear a different expression. In addition, the distances an actor keeps out of deference to others decline when he rises in status, but the self-protective ones increase.16

  Avoidance rituals have been suggested as one main type of deference. A second type, termed presentational rituals, encompasses acts through which the individual makes specific attestations to recipients concerning how he regards them and how he will treat them in the on-coming inter-action. Rules regarding these ritual practices involve specific prescriptions, not specific proscriptions; while avoidance rituals specify what is not to be done, presentational rituals specify what is to be done. Some illustrations may be taken from social life on Ward A as maintained by the group consisting of patients, attendants, and nurses. These presentational rituals will not, I think, be much different from those found in many other organizations in our society.

  When members of the ward passed by each other, salu-tations would ordinarily be exchanged, the length of the salutation depending on the period that had elapsed since the last salutation and the period that seemed likely before the next. At table, when eyes met a brief smile of recognition would be exchanged; when someone left for the weekend, a farewell involving a pause in on-going activity and a brief exchange of words would be involved. In any case, there was the understanding that when members of the ward were in a physical position to enter into eye-to-eye contact of some kind, this contact would be effected. It seemed that anything less would not have shown proper respect for the state of relatedness that existed among the members of the ward.

  Associated with salutations were practices regarding the “noticing” of any change in appearance, status, or repute, as if these changes represented a commitment on the part of the changed individual which had to be underwritten by the group. New clothes, new hairdos, occasions of being “dressed up” would call forth a round of compliments, whatever the group felt about the improvement. Similarly, any effort on the part of a patient to make something in the occupational therapy room or to perform in other ways was likely to be commended by others. Staff members who participated in the hospital amateur theatricals were com-plimented, and when one of the nurses was to be married, pictures of her fiancé and his family were viewed by all and approved. In these ways a member of the ward tended to be saved from the embarrassment of presenting himself to others as someone who had risen in value, while receiving a response as someone who had declined, or remained the same.

  Another form of presentational deference was the practice of staff and patients pointedly requesting each and every patient to participate in outings, occupational therapy, concert-going, meal-time conversation, and other forms of group activity. Refusals were accepted but no patient was not asked.

  Another standard form of presentational deference on Ward A was that of extending small services and aid. Nurses would make minor purchases for patients in the local town; patients coming back from home visits would pick up other patients by car to save them having to come back by public transportation; male patients would fix the things that males are good at fixing and female patients would return the service. Food came from the kitchen already allocated to individual trays, but at each meal a brisk business was done in exchanging food, and outright donations occurred whereby those who did not care for certain foods gave them to those who did. Most members of the ward took a turn at conveying the food trays from the kitchen cart to the table, as they did in bringing toast and coffee for the others from the sidetable. These services were not exchanged in terms of a formal schedule worked out to ensure fairness, but ra
ther as an unplanned thing, whereby the actor was able to demonstrate that the private objectives of the recipient were something in which others present sympathetically participated.

  I have mentioned four very common forms of presentational deference: salutations, invitations, compliments, and minor services. Through all of these the recipient is told that he is not an island unto himself and that others are, or seek to be, involved with him and with his personal private concerns. Taken together, these rituals provide a continuous symbolic tracing of the extent to which the recipient’s ego has not been bounded and barricaded in regard to others.

  Two main types of deference have been illustrated: presentational rituals through which the actor concretely depicts his appreciation of the recipient; and avoidance rituals, taking the form of proscriptions, interdictions, and taboos, which imply acts the actor must refrain from doing lest he violate the right of the recipient to keep him at a distance. We are familiar with this distinction from Durkheim’s classification of ritual into positive and negative rites.17

  In suggesting that there are things that must be said and done to a recipient, and things that must not be said and done, it should be plain that there is an inherent opposition and conflict between these two forms of deference. To ask after an individual’s health, his family’s well-being, or the state of his affairs, is to present him with a sign of sympathetic concern; but in a certain way to make this presentation is to invade the individual’s personal reserve, as will be made clear if an actor of wrong status asks him these questions, or if a recent event has made such a question painful to answer. As Durkheim suggested, “The human personality is a sacred thing; one dare not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.”18 I would like to cite two ward illustrations of this inherent opposition between the two forms of deference.

  On Ward A, as in other wards in the hospital, there was a “touch system.”19 Certain categories of personnel had the privilege of expressing their affection and closeness to others by the ritual of bodily contact with them. The actor places his arms around the waist of the recipient, rubs a hand down the back of the recipient’s neck, strokes the recipient’s hair and forehead, or holds the recipient’s hand. Sexual connotation is of course officially excluded. The most frequent form that the ritual took was for a nurse to extend such a touch-confirmation to a patient. Nonetheless, attendants, patients, and nurses formed one group in regard to touch rights, the rights being symmetrical. Any one of these individuals had a right to touch any member of his own category or any member of the other categories. (In fact some forms of touch, as in playful fighting or elbow-strength games, were intrinsically sym-metrical.) Of course some members of the ward disliked the system, but this did not alter the rights of others to incorporate them into it. The familiarity implicit in such exchanges was affirmed in other ways, such as symmetrical first-naming. It may be added that in many mental hospitals, patients, attendants, and nurses do not form one group for ceremonial purposes, and the obligation of patients to accept friendly physical contact from staff is not reciprocated.

  In addition to these symmetrical touch relations on the ward, there were also asymmetrical ones. The doctors touched other ranks as a means of conveying friendly support and comfort, but other ranks tended to feel that it would be presumptuous for them to reciprocate a doctor’s touch, let alone initiate such a contact with a doctor.20

  Now it should be plain that if a touch system is to be maintained, as it is in many hospitals in America, and if members of the ward are to receive the confirmation and support this ritual system provides, then persons other than doctors coming to live or work on the ward must make themselves intimately available to the others present. Rights of apartness and inviolability which are demanded and accorded in many other establishments in our society must here be forgone, in this particular. The touch system, in short, is only possible to the degree that individuals forego the right to keep others at a physical distance.

  A second illustration of the sense in which the two forms of deference act in opposition to each other turns upon the point of social participation. On Ward A there was a strong feeling of in-group solidarity among all nonmedical ranks—nurses, attendants, and patients. One way in which this was expressed was through joint participation in meals, card-games, room-visits, TV parties, occupational therapy, and outings. Ordinarily individuals were ready not only to participate in these activities but also to do so with visible pleasure and enthusiasm. One gave oneself to these occasions and through this giving the group flourished.

  In the context of this participation pattern, and in spite of its importance for the group, it was understood that patients had the right of disaffection. Although it was felt to be an affront to group solidarity to come late for break-fast, late-comers were only mildly chided for doing so. Once at table, a patient was obliged to return the greetings offered him, but after this if his mood and manner patently expressed his desire to be left alone, no effort would be made to draw him into the meal-time conversation. If a patient took his food from the table and retired to his room or to the empty TV lounge, no one chased after him. If a patient refused to come on an outing, a little joke was made of it, warning the individual what he would miss, and the matter would be dropped. If a patient refused to play cards at a time when this would deny the others a necessary fourth, joking remonstrances would be made but not continued. And on any occasion, if the patient appeared depressed, moody, or even somewhat disarrayed, an effort was made not to notice this or to attribute it to a need for physical care and rest. These kinds of delicacy and restriction of demands seemed to serve the social function of keeping informal life free from the contamination of being a “treatment” or a prescription, and meant that in certain matters the patient had a right to prevent intrusion when, where, and how he wanted to do so. It is apparent, however, that the right to withdraw into privacy was a right that was accorded at the expense of those kinds of acts through which the individual was expected to display his relatedness to the others on the ward. There is an inescapable opposition between showing a desire to include an individual and showing respect for his privacy.

  As an implication of this dilemma, we must see that social intercourse involves a constant dialectic between presentational rituals and avoidance rituals. A peculiar tension must be maintained, for these opposing requirements of conduct must somehow be held apart from one another and yet realized together in the same interaction: the gestures which carry an actor to a recipient must also signify that things will not be carried too far.

  Demeanor

  It was suggested that the ceremonial component of con-crete behavior has at least two basic elements, deference and demeanor. Deference, defined as the appreciation an individual shows of another to that other, whether through avoidance rituals or presentational rituals, has been discussed and demeanor may now be considered.

  By demeanor I shall refer to that element of the indi-vidual’s ceremonial behavior typically conveyed through deportment, dress, and bearing, which serves to express to those in his immediate presence that he is a person of certain desirable or undesirable qualities. In our society, the “well” or “properly” demeaned individual displays such attributes as: discretion and sincerity; modesty in claims regarding self; sportsmanship; command of speech and physical movements; self-control over his emotions, his appetites, and his desires; poise under pressure; and so forth.

  When we attempt to analyze the qualities conveyed through demeanor, certain themes become apparent. The well-demeaned individual possesses the attributes popularly associated with “character training” or “socialization,” these being implanted when a neophyte of any kind is housebroken. Rightly or wrongly, others tend to use such qualities diagnostically, as evidence of what the actor is generally like at other times and as a performer of other activities. In addition, the properly demeaned individual is someone who has closed off many avenues of percep
tion and penetration that others might take to him, and is therefore unlikely to be contaminated by them. Most importantly, perhaps, good demeanor is what is required of an actor if he is to be transformed into someone who can be relied upon to maintain himself as an interactant, poised for communication, and to act so that others do not endanger themselves by presenting themselves as inter-actants to him.