review by randall collins and joel aronoff - relations in public microstudies of the public order by...

Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order by Erving Goffman; Peter K. ManningReview by: Randall Collins and Joel AronoffThe Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 135-143Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Midwest Sociological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4105739 .

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The Sociological Quarterly 14 (Winter 1973):135-143

Symposium Review

Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. By Erving Goffman. New York: Basic Books, 1971, 396 pp. $7.95.

PETER K. MANNmG, Michigan State University and London University Gold- smiths' College

A recent review by a political scientist in the New York Times Book Review (Berman, 1972), offers a paen to Erving Goffman-"One of the greatest writers alive today . . . comes closer than any living writer to being the Kafka of our time." (Whether we need another Kafka may be beside the point, but the terms of reference are certainly unequivocal.) This reception in fields outside sociology is not uncommon. Philosophers have used Goffman's mode of analysis as a general model of social science explanation (Louch, 1966), or have seen it as the most promising sociological attempt to understand the contextual nature of ex- planations of human conduct (Harr6, 1970). His reputation in anthropology is sterling and growing. Ironically (I think Goffman might enjoy entertaining this thought), his reputation within sociology is not as unchallenged as it is in such diverse fields as game theory and simula- tion, specifically of international conflicts (Schelling and his students have drawn on Goffman's work in recent pub- lications); linguistics and communication theory; psychiatry and political science. Sociologists, on occasion and usually sotto voce (again, something Goffman at least sometimes must enjoy), have been heard to dismiss Goffman as merely anecdotal, banal, untestable and/or vague. Or he may be dismissed as "only an ethnographer." Grudgingly, it is ad- mitted that he is an enormously gifted writer whose own very rare skills, how-

ever, make his analysis virtually unique (a comment that applies as well, I sup- pose, to the writings of Mann, Freud, Marx and Weber). It is said: "Goffman can write in that fashion, but who else can?" How does one account for the welcome Goffman has received in other disciplines and the ambivalence with which he is greeted within sociology? In a note of this length, only a few specu- lations can be advanced. I suggest that Goffman stands between two traditions in sociology and that this anomalous position and his attempt to bridge the analysis of situations and structures accounts for his present reputation.

Two themes dominate the analysis of everyday life in our times. Keen observers have attempted to shape an analysis of the constraining, deadening, enervating and benignly aggressive progress of the "disenchantment of the world;" on the other hand, they have attempted to explicate the fate of the alienated, anx- ious, desperate, terrorized (and terroriz- ing) and deracinated existential man. A considerable analytic dilemma is posed by the juxtapositioning of these two themes. Perspectives appropriate to the first set of problems appear wholly in- adequate to the second set of problems as each has been conventionally defined. They appear to demand almost mutually exclusive conceptual paraphernalia. Few analysts have drawn the problem in a fashion that permits a theoretical synthesis in which the fragmented pieces



136 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

of the analytic puzzle are assembled. I believe Goffman has done this. Goff- man portrays the muted terror and an- guish, the quiet desperation of organizational men and their clients as a product of the ritualized hierachically patterned worlds in which they find themselves (or is the ritualized existence in which they live a consequence of their fears, uncertainties and seeming wish to mini- mize and control the risks of human relationships?). Are they the "desperate characters" of Paula Fox's tour de force novel of the same name, locked into dreary and frightening routines, but un- willing or unable to imagine more creative or rewarding alternatives? (cf. Sen- nett's Uses of Disorder, 1970). One thinks in this connection of the pene- trating work of Crozier (1971), who has cut through the webs of conceptual obfuscation to examine groups of office workers coping proximally with an en- vironment which must present itself as problematic, inchoate, and threatening. He reminds us, perhaps with less tragical- ly ominous tone than does Goffman, of the continuing need to interdigitate the metaphor of structure with the fleeting goings and comings of individuals. (The final paragraph of Coffman's Relations in Public is an almost epigrammatic summary of this concern.)

Coffman it seems is an anomaly, for as Collins and Tiryakian have pointed out, he attempts to weave together the torn strands of analysis perhaps last best synthesized by Weber. His work, like that of Simmel, Mauss and then later Durkheim, and Goffman's mentor and later colleague at the University of Chi- cago, Everett Hughes, is an attempt to bridge situations and structures. This focal point illuminates the dilemmas of sociological explanation. The failure to develop this synthesis accounts for the all too frequent appearance of polemic articles claiming that sociology is becoming merely psychology, that it must return to its original structural roots and concerns, or that sociology has forgotten men and must return to fundamental

psychological or social psychological prin- ciples.

Goffman draws from Simmel and Mauss a concern for the forms of human relationships, the symbolic cloaks within which we wrap ourselves. But his concern for what he sees as the man under- neath or behind these cloaks leads him to explicate concerns most associated with continental thinkers such as Kierk- egaard, Husserl and Sartre: matters of mood, expression, feeling, passion. It is precisely this element that is strik- ingly lacking in Mead's rationalistic social-psychological framework (cf. Manis and Meltzer, ed., 1972; Lyman and Scott, 1970; and Manning, forthcoming, on the need to articulate this element into a social psychological framework). Not only does Goffman himself represent a bit of an anomaly, his work mediates contradictions between us/ them, me/we, inside/outside by employ- ing through his analyses the concept of situated, setting-specific conduct. In so doing he has occasionally emersed the situation in personal moods(Stigma) and other times, in Behavior in Public Places and in Relations in Public to a lesser degree, he has emersed the self. His focus, although becoming more an ethnography of the micro-properties of situations (Collins, below) and less a sociology of everyday life (Aronoff), continues to be the interactional context as reflexively revealed in exchanges. Coffman, however, is not the existential- ist supreme, for he attends to the pri- mary quality of the situation as a structural entity, rather than the men there located:

Social situations, at least in our society, constitute a reality sui generis as he used to say, and there- fore need and warrant analysis in their own right, much like that accorded other basic forms of social organization (Goffman, 1964:134).

and: I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syn-



Symposium Review 137

tactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another. . . Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men (Goffman, 1967:3).

Nor is he the naturalist some have por- trayed (cf. Lofland, forthcoming), for he is less the observer and more the taxonomist, especially in this latest work. In Relations in Public there are portions that suggest nothing so much as the position of Von Weise and Becker, Vierkandt, and Gurvitch. Finally, Goff- man is not sui generis, as much as he might like his readers to believe that. He eschews most of the conventional means of supplying intellectual biography and credentials (note the dedication of the book) i.e., via footnotes and bibli- ography (friendship networks and ritual debts better account for the appearance of footnotes than does the content of the sources cited), but he springs from a British tradition of social anthropology with its Africa-derived concern for ritual, symbols, and deference. One does have to admit to a final irony. Goffman is a man who, as Collins suggests, does not much delight in his times and would perhaps have been more at ease in Vic- torian England. In that sense he is a man out of his time who nonetheless speaks eloquently to it.

REFERENCES Ball, D. W.

1971 "The definition of the situation'. ." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 2, No. 1.

Berman, M. 1972 "Weird but brilliant light on the

way we live now." New York Times Book Review (February).

Crozier, M. 1971 The World of the Office Worker

(trans. by D. Landan). Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press.

Goffman, Erving 1967 "Introduction' to Interaction Ritual.

Chicago: Aldine. 1964 "The Neglected Situation" in J.

Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.) The Ethnography of Communication. American Anthropologist 66 [6], part 2.

Harr6, R. 1970 "Foreward" to Lyman and Scott (be

low). Lofland, J.

Forthcoming "The Sociology of Erving Goffman" in Jack D. Douglas, ed. Existential Sociology.

Louch, A. R. 1966 Explanation and Human Action.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lyman, S. and M. Scott 1970 A Sociology of the Absurd. New York:

Appleton-Century-Crofts. Manis, Jerome and Bernard Meltzer, eds.

1972 Symbolic Interaction (2nd ed.). Bos- ton: Allyn and Bacon.

Manning, Peter K. Forthcoming "Existential Sociology" Soci-

ological Quarterly. Sennett, Richard

1970 The Uses of Disorder. New York: Random House.

RANDALL COLLINS, University of California, San Diego

Erving Goffman is potentially the most important sociological theorist to appear since World War II. His influence on the emergence of current phenomenological sociology has been crucial, although rare- ly acknowledged. In many respects, Goffman's perspective is wider and more powerful than those who have come after him. His background is the Chicago School in one of its most productive pe- riods, and Goffman's early work drew on a wealth of fieldwork (including his own) on occupations, stratification, and organizations, which he united with his own special insights into the subjectivity of the individual actor. Goffman stands at the nexus of the different levels of sociological analysis, and his work, taken seriously and properly developed, provides the missing link upon which the success of an explanatory sociology de- pends.

So far, it has not really paid off. There are several reasons for its relative failure. Some of these have to do with the state of the larger discipline. Goffman has




failed to make much of a dent in the theoretical complacency of quantitatively- oriented sociology, nor in the rigid abstractions of the systematic theorists. This is not surprising coming from his ene- mies; what is more peculiar is the reac- tion of his friends. The symbolic inter- actionists have treated Goffman mainly as a practitioner of the labelling approach to deviance. The social phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists see him as an early forerunner in the close study of interaction, but as too sloppy and too little concerned with the philosophical and linguistic niceties of their current interests. Goffman's reputation rests mainly on a popularistic audience which admires him for "telling it like it is" in the phony relationships of everyday life.

None of this is very close to Goffman's real concerns. The popularistic view (which seems to be shared by positivists who wish to dismiss him) only demon- strates how little attention has been paid to what Goffman is actually saying. Goffman is the very antithesis of the iconoclast or the encounter-grouper; in- sofar as there are value-preferences in his work, they are in defense of the arti- ficialities of social ritual. The scholarly reactions are not much more perceptive. What is not appreciated is that Goffman is fundamentally a theorist in the main line of sociological theory, who has attempted to do his theorizing in close conjunction with empirical materials. This is a pretty rare combination, which helps explain the misperception of him. For what has been left out is nothing less than Goffman's unique capacity for solving the strategic problem now before us: to link together macro and micro levels in such a way as to give the former a real causal basis and the latter a real explanatory relevance.

Sociological theory has been suspended between two main traditions, the positivist and the idealist. The former includes the line of general systems ex- emplified by Comte, Spenser, Pareto, and Parsons. These invoke the ideal of hard science, which makes it seem necessary

to ground sociology in some exterior framework apart from the shifting cur- rents of individual subjectivity. The trouble is that the objective systems thereby posited lose the real individual actor. This in turn undermines their claim to scientific validity, since in fact there is no observable reality to "society" at all except the perceptions and behaviors of concrete individuals. Instead of a real subject for sociological science, we get an imaginary one.

The idealist tradition derives from German neo-Kantian philosophy. In American sociology, we have had a series of imports, first by Cooley, Mead, and Thomas; later, a more phenomenological or existential version by Schutz, Garfinkel, and Berger. This remedies the weaknesses of the abstract positivist systems, but carries severe limitations of its own. Idealist sociology emphasizes hermeneutic interpretation rather than causal explanation, and tends to reject the scientific ideal just as vehemently as the positivists reject subjectivism. But it resembles abstract system-building in carrying on theorizing at a very high level of abstraction.

Idealist sociology has presented very general conceptions of the individual and the processes by which he constructs sub- jective reality. It has advanced our un- derstanding of social determinism in a very general sense, and has progressively refined the social model of consciousness from the early formulations of role-taking and internal conversation in Mead and Cooley, to the highly sophisticated ex- amination of linguistic and paralinguistic communication in Cicourel and other modern researchers. But we deal with a highly universal actor rather than with men behaving differently in a variety of situations; we get no lead to the variations in reciprocally linked interpersonal behaviors that make up the main body of sociological interests. Where empirical research is done in this tradition, it has usually been under the rubric of social problems, where description and interpretation have been acceptable surrogates




for real explanatory generalizations. (The situation is more or less parallel in the empirical research done in the positivist camp, albeit with very different methods and a corresponding effort to avoid the taint of subjectivity.)

It should be obvious that sociology can never pay off as an explanatory science until the two levels of analysis are satisfactorily synthesized. This has been approached a number of times in the past. Within the positivist camp, Durkheim came the closest, especially in his last work on religion. His analysis of ritual behavior as the technique by which men construct both emotional bonds and reified cognitive categories to express their social relationships opened up a very powerful line of advance upon both levels simultaneously. On the idealist side of the Rhine, Weber came closest to a working synthesis, incorporating idealist philosophy as at least an introduction into his historical studies in- formed by Marxian positivism.

Neither of these syntheses was worked out in their authors' lifetimes. As hap- pens so often in intellectual history, their followers have tended to become side- tracked. Talcott Parsons, who was one of the first Americans to visit the Euro- pean sociological scene after World War I, saw some of the possibilities. His grand synthesis was a self-conscious effort to solve the problem of integrating the two levels of analysis. It has not proven quite adequate. For Parsons only pays lipservice to Weber's action- orientation, and even manages to pull back from Durkheim's most advanced scheme; his fundamental loyalties turn out to be to Pareto and Freud. For Par- sons, the individual gets integrated into the social system via the dual mecha- nisms of roles (as the building blocks of larger institutions) and values (as repli- cas of a society-wide value system resid- ing in each member's head). Durkheim's collective conscience becomes reinter- preted as a set of values internalized in childhood; with this internal gyroscope,

we need no longer look at the reality- constructing in adult interaction.

But Durkheim was much more powerful than this. His own German sojourn brought him enough idealism to understand the importance of the continuous flow of communication which makes up our moment-to-moment reality. The French crowd psychologists provided him with a hint about the mechanism; his teacher Fustel de Coulanges had provided the significant historical examples he needed to make it sociologically op- erable. For Durkheim, the collective conscience was an ephemeral thing; hence the necessity of ritual work to recreate it again and again. The intellectual milieu of the time helps remind us of what Durkheim intended. Georges Sorel's eulogy of the ephemeral moment of the revolutionary myth is an essentially parallel construction from a different political position. From here, it is only a short step to seeing the world as full of multiple collective consciences, little pockets of reality tied to patterns of ritual interaction whose determinants Durkheim was just beginning to explicate when he died.

Goffman is the major inheritor of the Durkheimian tradition in its pure form. He learned it at Chicago from W. Lloyd Warner, himself a major Durkheimian social anthropologist. (Warner has also been too little recognized as a theo- retically-based researcher, although his empirical work has been justifiably criti- cized for failure to see enough plurality and conflict in his studies of stratification. But his Durkheimian analysis in the last-and least known-volume of the Yankee City series, The Living and the Dead (1959) is far and away the best treatment of American civic ritual, both secular and religious, and includes a brilliant analysis of why traditionalistic groups like wars.)

Goffman has followed in this serious theoretical-and-empirical tradition, beginning by applying the Durkheimian technique to materials of stratification, occupations, and organizations. His early




papers and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life give us the famous drama- turgical model. This is an effort to see the self in modem society as a little god to be treated with due ritual respect. The insight follows directly from Durkheim's demonstration that gods reflect the form of social organization; and that in an individualistic society "the sanctity of the individual" and "the rights of man" emerge directly from predominant forms of interaction. This provides Goffman with an analytical framework for dealing brilliantly with the politeness, deference, demeanor, and stage settings of everyday life. Moreover, his model links up the dynamics of individual behavior with the "structures" of stratification and organizations, seen in terms of situations of deference upholding hierarchies of priv- ileged backstages. Moreover, the theory is thoroughly grounded in empirical data; Goffman's frontstage/backstage model, for example, draws directly upon ob- servations of formal and informal relationships in work organizations.

This is a powerful achievement. It links ritual to the exercise of power, and opens the way to seeing the conditions that divide up society into multiple real- ities. We come closer to the way things are: the world is a series of little cults of belief enacted where men come together with their particular interests. We have moved a long way from the ideology of Comte and Parsons, with their one big belief system crowding all the others off the stage. The way is open to seeing common values and emotional solidarity precisely where they exist and no further, by locating them in observable interactions. What remains is to incorporate this into a larger view of the conflicts which divide men into different ritual groups, and the resources that enable them to construct their particular real- ities and impose them upon others.

Goffman has not done this. Given his commitments as a Durkheimian function- alist-i.e., as a defender of the proprieties of bourgeois order-this is not surprising. Goffman's subsequent work, however,

tends to slide back down from the theoretical advances which he had already made. From his early potential as the synthesizer of structural and individual levels, he has moved progressively into a smailU r arena of specialization in the microproperties of face-to-face interaction. The strategic retreat took him through a series of notable contributions to the field of deviance, beginning with a Durkheimian analysis of the effects of conditions of high social density (i.e. total institutions) on the individual's ex- perience of moral reality. Along with a series of his former students-Marvin Scott, Sacks, Sudnow, Scheff-Goffman virtually created the study of everyday life, now a thriving field. But the original theoretical orientation has gone, to be replaced among most subsequent prac- titioners by the abstractions of idealism.

In the last decade, Goffman himself seems to be defining the meaning of his own work increasingly within the context created by his followers. Perhaps one inevitably reconstructs one's own creative contributions to intellectual reality according to the reception they receive. This is shown in his latest work, Relations in Public, a kind of compendium of research findings which Goffman treats as comprising his current position.

The book consists of a series of chapters on various topics already familiar in the Goffman repertoire. They summarize empirical research and theoretical re- finements on approximately the same materials treated eight years earlier in Behavior in Public Places. Cumulative development is apparent in many areas. Thus, the individual as a vehicular unit in sidewalk traffic has been studied with some care, and Goffman formulates the complexities of routing and eye signals involved. (A synthesis with Stinch- combe's treatment of the freeway as a social system would now seem just over the horizon.)

Goffman concludes from a taxonomy of the different interaction units an individual may make up, that the concept




of "an individual" itself is becoming too gross, and must be decomposed into a series of specialized terms depending on the particular analytical context. This leads us to a typology of the territories of the self, including personal space (as studied for example by Sommer), use space, turns, informational and conver- sational preserves; a consideration of the markers used to communicate one's claims, and of the territorial violations that can occur.

There are two chapters on short con- versational interchanges, treated in an explicitly Durkheimian framework. One large category is made up of supportive interchanges: mainly access rituals such as greeting and farewell salutations, which Goffman shows are finely tailored to the niceties of the relationships they serve to uphold. The other major type consists of remedial interchanges: accounts, apologies, requests for leave, body gloss as a means of restoring ritual co- herence in personal relationships. Goff- man also returns to a favorite theme: that a code of ritual propriety opens the possibility (and is a prerequisite for) symbolic challenges ("run-ins"), which in turn leads to a further set of expressive signals for showing that one is not threatening a run-in.

This is followed by a treatment of tie-signs: ritual markers of relationships, ranging from handholding to "grooming talk" (a nice term taken from the mu- tual lice-picking that goes on among pair- bonded monkeys). Toward the end of this chapter we get a great deal of spy- game type of materials to illustrate problems of concealing relationships, appar- ently left over from Goffman's more popularistic venture in Strategic Interac- tion. The popularistic note becomes even stronger in the lengthy concluding chapter on normal appearances. It begins by cogently placing homo sapiens in the perspective of animal ethology, and then goes on through a consideration of alarms to a scattering of remarks about crime in the streets and other topical issues.

(The publisher has chosen to emphasize this last angle in advertising the book, as if it were a manual on how to walk through New York without getting mugged.)

The most original chapter in the book is the appendix on "The Insanity of Place," previously published as a paper in Psychiatry. It is far and away the best treatment yet of a "mental illness" as social behavior. Goffman analyzes the dynamics of mania as a progressive wrecking and reordering of ordinary ritual proprieties and the social network they uphold; in this ritual world, the doctor cannot remain a neutral bystander, but must join either the patient's faction or the family's. We have come a long way from the early abstractions and sim- plifications of labelling theory.

Many things have been accomplished in the last decade in this house Coffman has built. But much remains inconclusive. We have a great deal more taxonomy than explanation. Most of the examples of rituals are taken from old- fashioned British upper-middle-class politeness, which Goffman uneasily tries to pass off as somehow still the middle-class norm.* Yet he himself mourns the dis- appearance of such niceties as hat-tipping (with eyes averted from unintroduced ladies), and occasionally he takes note of the very different sort of norms in Arab culture of the south of France. Goffman does not like the contemporary decline in formality very much, and he prefers to deny its significance rather than to treat it as an historical phenom- enon to be explained.

It is here that Goffman shows what has been lost from the Durkheimian tra-

*One example, surely drawn more from memory than from current observation: "Middle-class children in our society are taught to preface every statement to an adult with a request of by-your-leave and to ter- minate every encounter, if not every inter- change, with some version of thank you." (p. 138)




dition. For Durkheim was interested above all in scientific explanation, and variations in phenomena were sought out precisely because it is by comparing their conditions that one may get a grip on their causes. To do so for Goffman's materials would be to move backward in time and link up with his early work, where power and stratification were more readily available as part of the explanatory context. For it seems that the sharp sex-role dominance reflected in Arab etiquette, the idealized bowing and scraping of haut bourgeois society, the casualness of America in the Vietnam age-all of these have their basis in chang- ing resources of power and privilege. To tie these together would be to bring the microstudy of everyday life back to its relevance for the larger enterprise of sociology.

The main trouble with Goffman's later work is that he has come to under- estimate the importance of his materials. From a revolutionary theorist in the grand tradition, he has become the baron of a prospering but remote province. But interpersonal interaction is not just another specialty: it is, quite literally, all the real empirical material there is in sociology. Societies, states, organizations, families-none of these is anything but men interacting. Organizational charts and answers to questionnaires are only second-hand ways of summarizing what goes on in these interactions. Abstract theoretical schemes have gone astray precisely from failure to realize this; they have "systems" do things that individuals don't do at all, even in reciprocal interactions of any degree of ramification. Larger theories will return to usefulness to the extent that we can ground them in exactly those models of what really goes on in interaction. Power, dominance, solidarity, belief-all of the explanatory prin- ciples are to found in the ritualized contingencies of our daily encounters. When we have adequately understood this, sociology will be on the verge of becoming a science.

JoEL ARONOFF, Michigan State University

In commenting on Erving Goffman's new book I am assuming that Goffman, his methods, as well as the subject matter of the book, are so well known that I can turn instead to the specific request in my invitation to join this symposium. Because I am a social psychologist who does cross-cultural field work, as well as experimental small-group research, I was asked to comment in personal terms on what I hope to learn from a new book by Goffman, and to evaluate what I found.

In particular, I am a member of that academic generation for whom Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life came as an illumination, a glimpse into what a vibrant approach to social science might be. The call from a social scientist for a social psychology that dealt with real people living all the nuances of a real life was almost a religious test to join an approach that one entered at his own peril. Looking at the new fields he helped develop, we can recognize how well he succeeded.

Unfortunately, there is a social regular- ity in which Goffman now has joined. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to recall the career of Erich Fromm, whose first few books taught much but whose later books confused, until you came to realize that there was nothing in them. Prominent men sometimes come to feel that they must keep knocking them out no matter how little they have to say. Reading Goffman now reminds me of when I tried to keep up with Fromm, until I realized that there was nothing there.

So it is with Relations in Public. There is little that needs to be said from any special vantage point of a social psychologist. This is simply a poor book. I regret the time I spent reading it and advise prospective readers to spend their time more wisely. It combines all the flaws of a typical Goffman book and even




his fancy for unusual juxtaposition in strings of nouns, which he does in order to shock the reader into an awareness of the underside of life, is done mechanically and without any new sensibility. Goff- man is now a formula and even his gro- tesque is kitsch.

To be brief. Goffman represents himself as developing new theoretical insights about public social interaction, and in his struggle with the "unknown raw phenomena," he is "forced" to develop new terminology. While new words are needed when new phenomena are dis- covered, the neologisms in this book all denote the most commonplace of variables. Still worse, as he presents the well known, his references are seldom to the people who brought the variable to attention but, instead, for the most part are direction to recent abstruse papers. For example, he calls the joint appearance and interaction of individuals in public a "with," and takes care to argue that he is referring to an interactional rather than a social-structural unit. While that sounds promising, initially, as he proceeds with his standard method (the accumulation of brief anecdotes) his examples fit perfectly the standard defini- tions of the dyad, group or family. For scholarly clarification he cites Harold B. Barclay, Buurri al Lamaab (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1964), which may be a perfectly fine book, but is hardly the origin of these notions. And so on for nearly 400 pages. Indeed, in this book Goffman proves the commonplace so well, that after reading it one wants to say "This is so very important that we should devote a whole field of

Social Science to it. Why don't we call it Sociologyl" It is simply an introductory Sociology text, presented in the form of catchy words and interesting anecdotes. It is not what I had hoped to find.

The value of the book is twofold. First, the compendium of vivid examples of the standard variables can be helpful to every instructor, and earns a place on everyone's shelf along with "Teaching Tips" and the "Instructor's Manual." I am grateful and will borrow many for my introductory classes. Second, Goffman seems to read a lot. In fact he must read every term paper in every graduate seminar in the country. His references are often very interesting and, because they are so abstruse, direct you to papers that, without him, would mostly be missed.

It has often been said that he is our specially-trained novelist, prospecting the raw, and often seamy, phenomena of life. With the same extra talent of our geolog- ically-trained astronauts, with this special skill it is said that he brings back rocks that others have missed. My greatest regret, in this catalogue of complaints, is that he jumps from example to example without clarifying even the raw phenomena of any of them. He strings together examples of the same process, yet gives each a separate name, as if each separate instance is a different variable. In so doing, his lists are false clarity, for by this technique he hides rather than reveals the dimension. If this is our specially-trained novelist, I would much prefer to have read Dostoyevsky, Dick- ens, or even Willa Cather.



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