philip k. bock - the importance of erving goffman to psychological anthropology

The Importance of Erving Goffman to Psychological AnthropologyAuthor(s): Philip K. BockSource: Ethos, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 3-20Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640563 .

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The Importance of Erving

Goffman to Psychological

Anthropology

PHILIP K. BOCK

In the fall of 1963, the American Anthropological Association met in San Francisco, California.' One of the highlights of that convention was to be the presentation by Erving Goffman of a paper on "The Neglected Situation." Many anthropologists were familiar with his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), or with his early articles, and the small room in the Fairmont Hotel was crowded as he began his talk. I was standing toward the back of the hall and I recall being annoyed by the murmurs that threatened to drown out his voice. The moderator passed him a note and Goffman paused just as the rumor reached me: "President Kennedy has been shot."

The room emptied quickly. My memories after that are unclear. I recall walking the San Francisco streets, looking for a newspaper, still hoping that the rumor would prove false. The convention continued, but after the death of the president was announced, a feeling of unreality pervaded the proceedings. Participants spoke of their "numbness," the feeling of "going through the motions" without conviction that Goffman analyzed in Encounters (1961b) as aware- ness of "role distance."

PHILIP K. BOCK is Presidential Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mex- ico, Albuquerque, and editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research.

3



4 ETHOS

Most Americans can remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, and I had many occasions to think of the events of Novem- ber 1963. How fitting that the smooth functioning of a focused gath- ering devoted to a lecture on "The Neglected Situation" should be

disrupted on that Friday and radically "re-framed" by events taking place thousands of miles away. What better demonstration that our social action is situated within numerous hierarchical and overlap- ping frames, any one of which can suddenly become salient, affect-

ing thought, action, emotion, and the interpretation of ongoing events (see Goffman 1974).

I continued to follow Goffman's work closely. At first I was in-

trigued by his elaboration of the role concept, and I incorporated some of his ideas about social roles and behavior regions into my own approach to the formal description of social structure (Bock 1964). His brilliant analysis of "spoiled identity" in Stigma (1963a) also impressed me, and I tried to teach my ethnology students how attention to problems of information control and identity management could enrich their understanding of social life.

By the early 1960s, other anthropologists were also attempting to

"apply Goffman" to ethnographic problems. The most notable of these was Gerald Berreman. In his monograph, Behind Many Masks

(1962), he discussed the ways in which his field experience in a Hi-

malayan village was altered when he had to change from a Hindu to a Moslem interpreter. Berreman expected that the Hindu vil-

lagers would become more reticent in the presence of the Moslem and he was thus surprised to find many of his informants becoming much more open and talkative. Reflecting on this experience, he found Goffman's ideas about "face," "front," and "backstage" use-

ful, and he suggested that ethnographers pay greater attention to the

selves that they and their informants try to present to one another. American psychological anthropology of the early 1960s was

dominated by the cross-cultural correlational method, developed at Yale by Whiting and Child (1953) and brought by John and Bea-

trice Whiting to the Laboratory of Human Development at Har- vard. They and their students used an approach that, I have argued, derives directly from the work of Kardiner and Linton on "basic

personality structure" (Bock 1980b: 150), combined with the corre-

lational methods of G. P. Murdock and applied to data from the

Human Relations Area Files. In this approach, causal hypotheses linking "antecedent" conditions of childhood experience to "con-



IMPORTANCE OF ERVING GOFFMAN 5

sequent" beliefs and customs present in a society are tested by examining a sample of cultures described in the Files.

Mediating the antecedent/consequent relationship was a set of assumptions about learning processes (Hullian) and personality dynamics (Freudian). In one well-known study by Whiting, Kluck- hohn, and Anthony (1958), exclusive mother-child sleeping arrangements (especially when combined with a long postpartum taboo on resumption of parental intercourse) were shown to be asso- ciated with painful initiation rites for males at puberty. Mediating this correlation were the familiar dynamics of the Oedipal situation-anxiety and hostility, accentuated by the special experiences of childhood.

Unfortunately, as in most studies using this approach, no data whatsoever were presented (or even available) concerning individuals or their social interaction. Rather, for a given sample of ethnographic cases an association was demonstrated between extended periods of nursing with infants sharing the mother's bed (often ex- cluding the father for one to three years) and male puberty rites involving "tests of manliness" and painful genital operations. Even if we accept this correlation as valid (and there are serious problems of sample bias; see Bock 1967), the mediating processes are entirely hypothetical. Some theorists who accept this approach emphasize the need to "break" a boy's (presumed) excessive identification with his mother, while others emphasize the functions of such initiation rites in establishing male solidarity. (Each group can point to ethnographic facts and partial correlations supporting its position.)

Although the research I have just described is not a kind of work to have greatly interested Goffman, there are at least three ways in which his emphasis on "the neglected situation" has (or should have) influenced this research tradition. First, the Whitings (especially in the "Six Cultures" study) and their later collaborators increasingly placed stress on what they called the "learning environment in which the child grows up" (Whiting and Whiting 1974:4). Many of their later studies used direct observations of situated individual behavior and included at least a record of who else was present (parents, other adults, or children) at the time the observations were made. This increased sensitivity to situational variables may not be directly traceable to Goffman's influence, but it represents a healthy acknowledgment that behavior in public places has both interactive and reflexive meaning.



6 ETHOS

Second, Goffman has taught us to examine various forms of interaction, especially rituals, from dramaturgical and ethological viewpoints. We now tend to analyze initiation rites in terms of iden-

tity management, asking about the dramatic means by which a clus- ter of terrified little boys is transformed into a solidary group of

proud young men. How is the "show" staged? With what kinds of "teamwork" and "collusion"? And for whose benefit (see Turner

1974:200-201)? We are especially curious about the "dark secrets" of manhood and their function in producing a new self (see Herdt

1981). The third influence derives from the phenomenological streak in

Goffman's work, especially in Asylums (1961 a), which has made

many of us curious about the situations in which classifications and

labelings are carried out (see MacCannell 1983). After all, it is acts of categorization that produce the apparent correlations between variables such as child-training practices and adult beliefs or customs. Who decides that a given society "has," say, a long postpartum sex taboo, or a painful initiation rite, or a type of toilet-training likely to produce a high level of "anal socialization anxiety"? This

question involves something different from the problem of "ethno-

graphic authority" (Clifford 1983). It calls for us to examine the

"backstage" processes of reading behavioral records, accounts, or interview protocols, and reducing their often ambiguous language to categories, scales, and computer codes. When we allow ourselves to remember, we all know that the "dirty work" of social analysis is

frequently done by exploited personnel under various pressures

(and with varying degrees of knowledge of the hypotheses being

tested). It is further complicated when-as in at least some studies I know of-graduate students' wives are employed (at minimal

wages) to do much of this work. Here is a "neglected situation," indeed!

SITUATION AND BEHAVIOR

As is well known, Goffman's work emerged (and then diverged) from the social anthropology of Lloyd Warner and the occupational sociology of Everett C. Hughes at the University of Chicago. I have referred to this approach as "positionalism" (Bock 1980b:189),

viewing it as a refinement of social class analysis that took seriously Marx's emphasis on the "conditions of work." Chicago students in-




vestigated the specific effects of occupational positions on the behavior and consciousness of their incumbents. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman used many of these empirical studies (for example, of morticians and musicians, cab drivers and furniture salesmen) for his own purposes, incorporating them into his dramaturgical approach.

The importance of this work to psychological anthropology can best be appreciated when we first recognize two persistent assumptions that have limited research and understanding. One of these is the "uniformity assumption," that iA, the notion that all or most members of a society, be it as small as Western Samoa or as large as Great Russia, must share a common, typical, "basic," or "modal" personality. The persistence of this assumption in the face of all kinds of counterevidence is truly remarkable. It is easily traced back to ancient national and ethnic stereotypes that have been translated into the jargon of personality theory. In the hands of naive anthropologists it also involves a confounding of sociocultural patterns with psychological ones, and the reification of both (see Bock 1983).

The founders of the Culture and Personality school in American anthropology-Benedict, Sapir, Mead-were by no means naive (Bock 1980b:57-82, 1984), but despite themselves, they frequently fell into the error of neglecting intrasocietal variability and of assum- ing a high degree of psychological sharing. Cora DuBois's useful corrective concept of "modal personality" was not sufficiently rad- ical to break down the uniformity assumption. It required the crit- ical analysis of Anthony Wallace, who had worked within the modal personality tradition, to point out the serious fallacy involved in much of this research (Wallace 1961 :Ch. 4).

Wallace phrased his critique in terms of the empirical "distribu- tion of psychological characteristics" in society; but Goffman's positionalism offered a further challenge to the uniformity assumption. If our behavior and self-concept respond as rapidly and radically to changes in our position within interaction situations as Goffman indicates (especially in Asylums and Stigma), it is nonsense to generalize about the shared personality characteristics of members of any size social group. This does not make psychological anthropology (or social psychology) impossible; it simply means that we must always attend to situational variables. Significant commonalities in the behavior of groups of persons, whether they are "nationals," colonists, peasants, bureaucrats, or mental patients, are more likely to be due



8 ETHOS

to their shared social position than to group personality or national character.

A similar argument reveals the flaw in the "continuity assumption" (see Lindesmith and Strauss 1950). This is the notion that adult personality is necessarily determined by early childhood experience. Although the kinds of longitudinal studies that might validate hypotheses based on this assumption are sadly lacking (and often conflicting when they do exist), true believers in such continuity are still found in abundance. Goffman and other interactionists alert us to the fact that apparent consistencies in behavior and character are due to repeated involvements in similar interaction games as much as to any underlying dispositions established in the early months or years of life.

Goffman's own skepticism about depth psychology is quite clear; yet there is a close affinity between his outlook on human action and that of Sigmund Freud.2 I have gone so far as to write that Goffman is to everyday interaction as Freud is to the individual psyche. Each of them took seriously the "ordinary" phenomena within his chosen domain, interpreting speech, behavior, and fantasy as signs of un- spoken processes and conflicts. The title of Goffman's first book seems, to me, a thinly veiled allusion to Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In the opening pages of Behavior in Public Places (1963b), Goffman acknowledged, in a rather left-handed manner, the mutual relevance of psychiatry, anthropology, and his distinc- tive sociological perspective. The descriptive work of psychiatrists who are concerned with behavior that is "inappropriate to the situation" can be useful, he felt, even though they attribute such deviance to intrapsychic factors rather than examining the social norms that create "deviance" (see Jackson 1978).

Goffman is frequently cited in the psychiatric literature, usually in relation to his concept of the "total institution" (for example, Douvan 1974:23), or (with Szasz and Scheff) as a proponent of "labeling theory" (for example, Begelman 1971:38; Roman 1971 ). I am not able to evaluate his actual influence on psychiatric practice, though it appears that his work has stimulated some rethinking of institutional arrangements and staff/patient relationships (for example, Rockwell 1971; Stannard 1973).3

The growing interest in the concepts of "self" and "identity" has also led to increasing use of (or at least references to) Goffman's early works. For example, in Ethos, the journal of the Society for Psy-




chological Anthropology, during the five years from 1980 through 1984 (vols. 8-12), more than 10 percent of the published articles cited works by Goffman. Some of these citations were only passing references to a concept or idea, but others showed how deeply his approach has penetrated the thinking of anthropologists. For example, in the special issue devoted to "Self and Emotion" (Levy and Rosaldo 1983), Edward L. Schieffelin described the public situations within which the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea express grief, anger, or shame. Expression of anger and shame rest on shared assumptions about legitimacy and reciprocity. "Thus Kaluli emo- tions, however privately experienced . . . are socially located and have a social aim. To this degree they are located not only in the person, but in the social situation and interaction which, indeed, they help construct" (1983:190-191). In his analysis of Kaluli situations of shaming, Schieffelin draws on Goffman's Interaction Ritual (1967). He particularly uses the concepts of "face" and "line," in- dicating the importance of the "flow of events in the encounter" (Schieffelin 1983:188) to understanding the social basis of emotion:

Shame is revealed here as a situation as much as a private emotion: both its exis- tence and meaning are products of interaction, not loss of reputation or a sense of right and wrong. Like grief, shame involves a sense of vulnerability; but unlike grief, which has a claim to social support, shame has none. It represents a situation, or a state, of powerlessness and rejection. The legitimacy of one's basic posture of assertion or of appeal [that is, the "line" one has adopted] has been removed. [Schieffelin 1983:189; cf. Nachman 1984]

Goffman has been used in similar ways by cultural anthropologists in 5 of the 12 articles that make up a recent collection on "Mind, Self, and Emotion" (Shweder and LeVine 1984). In that volume, Shweder and Bourne, for instance, comment that it is "tempting to argue that Western individualism has its origins in the institution of privacy." However, they continue,

It is sobering to acknowledge that our sense of personal inviolatability [sic] is a violatable social gift, the product of what others are willing to respect and protect us from, the product of the way we are handled and reacted to, the product of the rights and privileges we are granted by others in numerous "territories of the self' (Goffman 1971). [Shweder and Bourne 1984:194]

There are, of course, different kinds of privacy, and the need of the self for a backstage area (especially in this electronic age), is a point that Goffman made in several contexts. My own field experience in a Mexican pueblo (see Bock 1980a) made me particularly aware of



10 ETHOS

the distinction between visual and auditory privacy. The villagers displayed, I thought, a high degree of sensitivity to visual intrusions:

high walls face the streets for security, but when a house was occu-

pied, doors and curtains were frequently left open on the assumption that no proper person would deliberately look in. (Until I learned to obey this norm, my curious glances were met with shock or sur-

prise.) Auditory privacy was another matter entirely: the sounds of voices or music and the noise of fireworks might invade one's audi-

tory space at any time, and the villagers appeared to take little no- tice. (After numerous interruptions of work and sleep, it was with considerable satisfaction that, at 2 A.M. on my final night in the

pueblo, I set off a barrage of large rockets that I had accumulated for the occasion.)

DRAMATIC REALIZATION

Privacy is a matter of great concern to the Mehinaku Indians of central Brazil. They have been studied for nearly 20 years by Thomas Gregor, a psychological anthropologist trained at Colum-

bia University. In his first book, Mehinaku (1977), Gregor drew on

Goffman's early work in order to describe "The Drama of Daily Life" in the villages. He showed th6 Indians as self-conscious role

players and he discussed how the layout and architecture of their

villages-the men's house, the residences, paths, and open areas-

contribute to the "theatrical" quality of Mehinaku life.

The Mehinaku villager must... be skilled in performance and stagecraft. The basis of this requirement is that Mehinaku social life is highly observable, the gossip network extremely effective, and privacy very scarce. In such an environment a man's identity as a good citizen may be jeopardized by a reality that is difficult to conceal. His laziness, his unwillingness to share food, his failure as a hunter or fish-

erman, his activities as a thief or adulterer, his distrust of his fellows, or even his sexual inadequacy-all can quickly become public knowledge.... The openness of the community to the flow of information may thereby endanger vital social re-

lationships. [Gregor 1977:358]

The preoccupation of Mehinaku adults with extramarital sex was

clear. Gregor (1977:93) described the "alligator places" (yaka epuga) near the villages where a lover lies in wait for his sweetheart, some-

times for hours, until she can slip away from her chores for a quick

tryst. Adultery is considered the spice of life ("pepper" is the Me-

hinaku metaphor); but it may be severely punished, so lovers face

the dramaturgical problem of appearing faithful to their spouses-



IMPORTANCE OF ERVING GOFFMAN 1 1

difficult in this small community, especially if one attempts intercourse in a hammock a few inches away from one's sleeping hus- band!

In his recent book, Anxious Pleasures (1985), Gregor writes in great detail about the sexual lives of the Indians. He has dropped the dramaturgical framework of the first book (indeed, there are no references whatever to Goffman), substituting a Freudian analysis; but I shall draw mainly on Anxious Pleasures to suggest the continuing relevance of Goffman's situational approach to psychological issues. As Gregor observes,

The public life of Mehinaku society is men's life. Acted on the plaza, the men's space, it is composed of men's oratory, men's songs, men's rituals, men's wrestling matches. Women have a culture that parallels that of men, but its public displays are pale reflections of a masculine image. [1985:110-111]

Mehinaku women endure much obscene teasing. The most important men's rituals, those involving the sacred flutes and bull- roarers, function in part to intimidate the women, who are forbidden to see the flutes on pain of gang rape. Although this punishment has not actually been carried out for over 40 years, it is still feared by the women, and assertive females can be put in their place merely by rumors that they may have seen the sacred flutes (Gregor 1985:110).

As in many other tribal societies, however, there exists a myth that, in ancient times, women "were matriarchs, the founders of what is now the men's house and creators of Mehinaku culture" (Gregor 1985:112). In a violent revolution, men usurped these institutions and dominated the women; but other myths, customs, and above all men's dreams, reveal their persisting anxieties: "fear of their own sexual impulses and fear of women" (1985:115). Gregor illustrates the theme of "punishment for sexual wishes" by the myth of Katsi, a man who, against repeated warnings, had intercourse with a beautiful, sensual woman who was really a lizard spirit. As a consequence, his penis grew so long that he had to weave four large bags in which to carry it about with him; it was given the name "Ka- pukwa," and took on a life of its own.

At night, when everyone was asleep, Kapukwa woke up. He slithered out of his sacks and along the floor of the house. He opened the door, snaked across the plaza, and entered each of the village houses. He slid up the house poles, wound his way along the hammock cords, and slipped into the vaginas of the sleeping women. But none of the women knew that Kapukwa was having sex with them.



12 ETHOS

Finally, one man saw what Kapukwa was doing. He told his friends, and on the following night, they were ready with clubs. When Kapukwa emerged from his house, they attacked, beating him on the head with heavy sticks. With each blow he shrank back, until Katsi was left with a tiny, tiny penis. [1985:133]

The final sentence of the myth is accompanied by a gesture: "the narrator holds up a thumb and forefinger to frame a space of about one quarter of an inch-the size of Katsi's shriveled and mutilated

penis" (Gregor 1985:135). Gregor believes that "the story of Katsi and Lizard Woman suggests that a man's sexual impulses may lead to harm to his penis and even to castration" (1985:135), and he pre- sents two other myths on the same theme.

It is not my intention to deny the castration fears that are ex-

pressed by these myths; however, I believe that situational analysis complements a psychodynamic approach. In particular, Goffman's

concept of "gender displays" (1979:1-2) can help us to understand what is at stake in the ritual events that characterize Mehinaku so-

ciety. To be sure, the men's anxieties and their antagonism to

women, including their belief in the dangerous qualities of menstrual blood, have an unconscious basis (Bettelheim 1954; also, Bock 1967). But as Goffman pointed out,

The expression of subordination and dominance through . . . situational means is more than a mere tracing or symbol or ritualistic affirmation of the social hierarchy. These expressions considerably constitute the hierarchy, they are the shadow and the substance. [ 1979:6]

The selected photos and drawings in Gregor's Anxious Pleasures are

not really suitable for interpretation in the ways that Goffman used

candid and posed pictures in Gender Advertisements (1979); however, if we examine the six pictures in which Mehinaku adults of both

sexes are shown together, it appears that some of Goffman's gener- alizations may apply cross-culturally-at least through the eyes and

camera of an American ethnographer. In Figure 21 of Anxious Pleasures, a large male with extended arm

is shown giving instructions to a group of women dancers in the

background (Gregor 1985:111; cf. Goffman 1979:54). The native

drawings reproduced by Gregor on pp. 122-127 show various ritu-

als of the pequi harvest season, during which men and women take

turns attacking one another, both symbolically and physically. For

example, in the Kiriri ritual, women pour foul liquids on the men

who are imitating crickets, and the drawing shows one attacking woman as much larger than any of the men (p. 123), whereas in the




drawing of Hopa (the scorpion ritual), the attacking men (who squirt water from their mouths) are twice as large as the fleeing women (p. 126; cf. Goffman 1979:28).4

A more general point here is that, among the Mehinaku (as in the United States), male dominance is expressed in the idiom of adult/ child interaction: "ritually speaking, females are equivalent to sub- ordinate males and both are equivalent to children" (Goffman 1979:5). In the Amazon village, men show their superiority by ex- cluding women from the clubhouse, by confining them to the residences when the sacred flutes are paraded, and by repeated teasing, insulting, and ordering about. These ritual degradations (to which children are subjected by all adults) are backed by the threat of physical force in the form of wife beating and gang rape. The women are permitted periodic retaliation, but though they are "a force to be reckoned with," it is clear to all that, "in the battle of the sexes, women are the losers" (Gregor 1985:110, 130).

STRUCTURAL RESTATEMENT

In my own theoretical work, I have consistently used the recurrent situation as the fundamental unit in a formal description of social structure (see Bock 1986). Where others have taken the role, the relationship, or the "actone" (Harris 1964) as basic units, I have fol- lowed Goffman in selecting the more complex situation, which I define as the expected occurrence of a class of roles within a setting. Settings are formed by the intersection of a dimension of social space with a dimension of social time. Contrastively defined roles, areas of space, and periods of time are described in linear formulas and in two-dimensional displays, yielding a highly economical account of social structure that removes a great deal of ambiguity from the formal descriptions. (There is, of course, a cost for this gain in precision.)

I will not here attempt to present my "descriptive model" in any detail, much less to defend it. However, I would like to offer a brief demonstration of its use in "structural restatement" (Bock 1986:45- 49), so the reader can judge whether it is worth the effort to master the notation and follow the arguments in my monograph.

I shall use a brief anecdote told me by a graduate student several years ago as data. This student was an expert skier and supported himself by giving instruction at a local ski resort. When "on the slopes," he was a figure of unquestioned authority and high prestige;



14 ETHOS

however, to make extra money, he also worked in the evenings as a busboy in the dining room of the lodge. He reported (truthfully, I believe) that when he attempted to serve diners who had been his students earlier that day, they became extremely flustered: on first recognizing him, many of them would actually rise from their seats and try to help him pour water or clear the table!

Goffman would have loved this story. He might have used it to illustrate a breakdown in role segregation with a consequent loss of "idealization" (1959:34) due to the divergent values assigned to my student's two performances. In my formal description of this situation I would first focus on the transactions between persons in the two relationships, instructor/student and busboy/diner. Using the set of "fundamental role attributes" that I have proposed for the purpose (Bock 1986:37), I would define these relationships contrastively as follows:

R1, [gives orders; receives money]/R2; R3, [provides care; shows deference]/R4.

My formal model requires that these relationships be situated in their respective interaction settings (see Table 1): "on the slopes" during the daytime contrasts with "in the lodge" at night. The two- dimensional display shows these settings as part of a larger situation-matrix (M), and indicates a few of the other role, space, and time units that would be used in a fuller description of the ski resort. At least some of these units would be relevant to any instance of face- to-face interaction for, as I have argued elsewhere (Bock 1966), human behavior takes place in actual situations but also with reference

TABLE 1 SITUATED ROLE RELATIONSHIPS

Daily Cycle >

M: The Ski Resort T1, Daytime T2, Evening

Ski Area > SI, The Slopes R1/R2 S2, Lift Area S3, Snack Bar, and so on

The Lodge > S4, Dining Room R3/R4 S5, Kitchen S6, Lobby S7.n, Guest Rooms (1-n)




to past or future situations, real or imagined (cf. Goffman 1967:98; Brittan 1973:90).

In the structural restatement of our anecdote, a feature of my "extended model" (1986:31-40) can be used to display the role conflict that led to the diners' discomfort. "P-notation" allows us to specify the actual set of persons, p(Rm), or the particular individuals, pi(Rn) who perform a given role. The notation may also be extended to units of space and time when it is desired to specify particular places, p(Si), or periods, p(Tj), rather than categories. In this case, the formal statement would be something like:

Sl/Tl:pi (Rl, Ski Instructor)/p(R2, Students); S4/T2:pi (R3, Busboy)/p(R4, Dinner Guests); but, pi(Rl) = pi(R3), and prestige of Rl > R2 = R4 > R3!

The peculiarity of the interaction in the second situation (S4/T2) is understandable only with reference to the structure of the relationships in the previous situation (S 1/T 1); both of these are encom- passed within the total situation-matrix (M). Any person perform- ing the role of busboy, p(R3), takes on a mildly stigmatized social identity and may be treated as a nonperson; but if his personal identity becomes salient (as in the anecdote), his recognition as a per- former of a role with contrasting attributes (high prestige) produces cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, and a type of situational emotion ("shame"?) similar to that described for the Kaluli by Schieffelin (1983:189; see above, p. 7).

In the fully elaborated version of my model (Bock 1986:65-73), entire classes of situations are described as surface structures gen- erated from underlying deep structures via transformation and in- sertion rules. Particular interactions can then be shown as realiza- tions of a limited number of unconscious structures that impose con- straints on what can be done, just as unconscious grammatical forms constrain our speech, making possible communication among persons who share the same "code." The formalization of these con- straints on interaction permits an economical and rather elegant statement of the structure of situations and institutions. If I am cor- rect, learning a social structure

involves the acquisition of a few "deep structures" and the rules for generating a wide range of more specific, recurrent situations. Human beings are "designed" to learn such structures, and they interpret their experience, for the most part, by referring it to shared expectations which mav be economically represented by ma-



16 ETHOS

trices. It is at this level that, I believe, the analogy between language structure and social structure can be most productively pursued. [Bock 1986:73]

LECTURE AND TEXTURE

In closing, I want to return to the anecdote with which I began this paper. Goffman's lecture on "The Neglected Situation" was

published the year following the San Francisco meetings in a special issue of American Anthropologist (Gumperz and Hymes 1964). The

printed version contains no reference to the Kennedy assassination or to the interruption of its author's presentation. This is not un-

usual, for as Goffman pointed out in his introduction to "The Lec- ture" ( 1981:161), situational features are omitted "in almost all con- versions from talk to print." Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising that a person as situation-conscious as Erving Goffman would com-

pletely neglect the opportunity to examine issues that he would later

analyze in terms of "framing" (1974) and "footing" (1981:124- 159). Can we recover some of these features from the printed text? Let us begin with Goffman's definition:

A lecture is an institutionalized extended holding of the floor in which one speaker imparts his views on a subject, these thoughts comprising what can be called his "text." The style is typically serious and slightly impersonal, the controlling intent

being to generate calmly considered understanding, not mere entertainment, emo- tional impact, or immediate action. Constituent statements presumably take their warrant from their role in attesting to the truth, truth appearing as something to be cultivated and developed from a distance, coolly, as an end in itself. [1981:165]

Before he is through, Goffman has made us aware of the various

issues of framing, noise, accessibility, and so on, that are usually out

of consciousness. He also points out an important presupposition that "supports the notion of intellectual authority in general: that

through the statements of a lecturer we can be informed about the world" (1981:195). At the same time, his delicate irony undercuts this assumption, deconstructing his own text.

The printed version of "The Neglected Situation" is brief-fewer than four full pages. Its style is informal though not quite conver-

sational: "I'm sure these two currents of analysis-the correlational and the indicative-could churn on forever (and probably will), a

case of scholarly coexistence" (1964:133). I find it impossible to re-

construct with any confidence what kinds of changes have been

made from the typescript used for the original talk, though the single




footnote referring the reader to the just-published Behavior in Public Places (1963b) was almost surely a later addition.

Goffman seems to be addressing an audience that was just becoming aware of the "ethnography of communication" as a possible field of studies. He cautions them that "once you cross the bridge [from speaking to social conduct], you become too busy to turn back" (1964:134). The truth of this observation became increasingly apparent with the establishment in the next few years ofsociolinguistics- a new discipline that responded to Goffman's rhetorical question, "Where but in social situations does speaking go on?" (1964:134).

Goffman's own speaking about the "neglected situation" first "went on" in a situation that was disrupted by national events; the printed version, however, is framed by a situation-matrix that has its nucleus in Berkeley, not in Dallas. Of the 12 contributors to The Ethnography of Speaking, 7 indicated University of California-Berkeley as their institutional affiliation, and earlier meetings under the aus- pices of the Kroeber Anthropological Society are alluded to in the preface to that volume (Gumperz and Hymes 1964:v). The Berkeley connection is also betrayed by a peculiar clause in Goffman's article-one that beautifully illustrates the interpenetration of situation, content, and medium. The full sentence reads: "It can be argued that social situations, at least in our society, constitute a reality suigeneris as He used to say, and therefore need and warrant analysis in their own right, much like that accorded other basic forms of social organization" (1964:134).

I cannot recall whether "as He used to say" was in the original spoken version or whether Goffman substituted a proper name for the indexical pronoun. In either case, this passage shows that the speaker was "alive" to his audience for, in 1963, meeting in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, any group of anthropologists would surely have known that the "He" who spoke of culture as "a reality sui generis" had to be the late Alfred L. Kroeber (d. 1960). But they could not have known, any more than you could, that this third- person pronoun was capitalized!

LEARNING FROM GOFFMAN

To conclude: The legacy of Erving Goffman is extremely important to psychological anthropology as it tries to escape from invalid assumptions about the uniformity and continuity of human behav-



18 ETHOS

ior, as it attempts to understand the public character of emotion and

affect, and as it searches for more effective ways to relate the abstrac- tions of social structure to real persons acting out their relationships in concrete situations. Whether we work in modern urban society or in the villages of India, New Guinea, Mexico, or the Amazon, we must never neglect the situation or its larger institutional frame. To

paraphrase Terry Eagleton (who was writing of Shakespeare), "It is not a matter of learning from [Goffman] in any simple way: our formulation of the problem is not his, and our experience of it is therefore different. But to understand his attempts to grapple with the difficulties is inevitably to deepen our own understanding, and to recognize new ways forward" (Eagleton 1967:11).

NOTES

'An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Memorial Conference on the work of

Erving Goffman, University of York, England, July 1986. James Sebring offered useful com- ments on the article.

2Randall Collins (1980:184) appears to agree.

3According to the Social Science Citation Index, during the 1970s, Goffman's work was cited about equally in psychiatric, sociological, and anthropological journals, with increasing references in linguistic and communication journals later in the decade.

4These size differences may, however, be attempts to render perspective, for in some other

drawings, on pp. 125 and 127, distance is indicated by interposed forms. The only photo of a

father and daughter together is on p. 175.

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philip k. bock - the importance of erving goffman to psychological anthropology

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