Sociology 3701: Outline--Week Six
I. Exam One
Why do I keep coming back to personal examples in this course?
II. Impression management
O'Brien: "Meaning is negotiated through Interaction":
"If an interaction is to proceed successfully, the participants must
establish their identities and agree on the sort of situation they find themselves
in."
"Why do people spend so much time thinking about what they should say
and how they should look?" is the beginning statement in a key paragraph, p. 132... read the rest of the paragraph and then the Goffman quote at the bottom of the page
TPS: What are the situations which make you most "self conscious,"
most concerned with how you are coming across to others? On the other hand,
what are the situations in which you are most comfortable with your "self?"
And how do we turn the first situation into the second? (How do you know if you are suffering excessive anxiety in relationships and situations? Health Service and Anxiety Screening)
or
III. Classic account by Elijah Anderson: "A Place on the Corner"
A. The setting: Jelly's Bar and Liquor... hangout for some 75 black men
B. Getting in: Herman the janitor... "going for cousins"
C. An "extended primary group," consisting of three subgroups.The mechanisms by which people establish themselves and get support from the group may be more obvious than in many other settings (or are they: what are the criteria for being part of your circle of friends?)
1. The regulars: "visible means of support" --the second and third
categories are defined through the eyes of the regulars (they don't label
themselves as hoodlums or wineheads, but the boundaries of social interaction
make it clear that these are separate groups).
2. The hoodlums: "big money" and "being tough"... present themselves as "bad" and therefore especially
sensitive to anything that can be taken as a challenge, a lack of respect. Unlike the regulars, for this group having a job would be something to hide. (at least a job of the sort probably most available to them)
3. The wineheads: "getting a taste" and "having fun"
D. Crossing over: the case of Winehead Tiger
1. People from all three groups interact when there isn't a critical mass
of "regulars" present
Defining your place not only a matter of who you hang out with but how you're
allowed to act in their company.
2. Tiger with the regulars, vs Tiger with the wineheads
3. Tiger gets a job
E. Terry the Hoodlum loses his strength
1. Prison sentence for murdering a woman... loss of place... some concrete
restrictions (now he's on probation) but even moreso, a loss of respect
2. Terry fights Dicky
3. Terry and Elijah Anderson
F. Finding/defending your place in the social order at Jelly's
1. Being "down" = tact of a special sort. Example of police officer, but also Elijah himself.
2. Volatility and precariousness of social identity
(like junior high girls' cliques?)
3. Cooperation in support of identity--what happens if a "regular"
begins to slip
4. Ritual, play, and identity
a. joking... what you can say to someone a pretty good measure of your
status (and an ongoing reinforcer of that relationship)
b. Mock fighting (like junior high boys)
O'Brien (p. 138): "Producing a shared reality requires give and
take, concession and acknowledgement by others. INTERACTION RITUALS are
enactments of ceremony that reinforce cultural symbols and expectations."
5. Centrality of Jelly's to these men's identity: what they do when Jelly's
closes for remodeling... they can't just take a vacation from these crucial
relationships...
Who means that much to your identity? How many of you came to UMD initially without having a close friend who was also attending? How did you create your current primary group(s)?
III. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
A. Dramaturgy: as if real life were a theatre performance
1. How do we interpret other people in our encounters with them? And how do they interpret us?
a. The expression that s/he gives and the impression that s/he "gives
off"... Goffman here is especially concerned with the latter, the more
"theatrical and contextual kind, the nonverbal, and presumably intentional
kind." He thinks that the impression we "give off" is often
more intentional and conscious than we make it out to be.
b. Many of our "performances" require some degree of cooperation from the others in our "scene."Goffman has a special interest in the ways in which we cooperate in this whole process
to create what he calls "the working consensus."
"Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official
ruling in the matters which are vital to him but not immediately important
to others, e.g., the rationalizations and justifications by which he accounts
for his past activity. In exchange for this courtesy, he remains silent
or noncommital on matters important to others but not immediately important
to him."
c. Preventive practices
"...events may occur which discredit, contradict, or otherwise throw
doubt on his projection."
"At such moments the individual who has been discredited may feel
ashamed while the others present may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed,
out of countenance, embarrassed..."
1) Defensive practices by the individual (excuses and justifications,
sometimes in advance)
2) Protective practices by another: "tact" (remember being "down" from A Place on the Corner). Perhaps the less power and resources you have, the more you are dependent on the tact of others.
"To summarize, then, I assume that when an individual appears before
others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they
receive of the situation. This report is concerned with some of the common
techniques that persons employ to sustain such impressions and with some
of the common contingencies associated with the employment of these techniques."
B. Sociological concepts related to these "performances"
1. "Front:" that part of the individual's performance which
regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation
for those who observe the performance. Involves three parts:
a. Setting
b. Appearance
c. Manner
2. Idealization: a dramatization of the fit between your performance and
the official values of the society... in effect, a ceremony, often involving a "uniform" of some sort. E.g, student and instructor (in my days as a student vs yours)
Country club, formal dinner (UMD's occasional etiquette dinners; my daughter's private school students and their once a week formal dinners.... preparation to play this part later on)
3. Negative idealization: acting out your inferiority, in order not to challenge
some established status system... requirements in the black/white etiquette
system of the segregated south in the pre-civil rights era
How important? the case of Emmit Till
4. Social distance and positions of authority
Ponsonby, on giving advice to the king of Norway: "I told him he
must get up on a pedestal and remain there... The people didn't want a king
with whom they could hob-nob, but something nebulous like the Delphic oracle.
The Monarchy was really the creation of each individual's brain."
5. Reality and contrivance... we like to think that some of us present
the real self, while others are fake in their performance and are only acting....
in fact, Goffman's contention that everyone has to dramatize their performance
to some degree... a simple sincere-insincere dichotomy just won't do...
6. Improvisation. What happens when an individual moves into a new position
in society and obtains a new part to perform? Ordinarily he will be given
only a few cues, hints, stage directions, and he will have to "fill
in" from there. "In short, we all act better than we know."
7. A lot of our self-presentation takes place within what Goffman calls "social establishment", "any place surrounded by fixed barriers
to perception in which a particular kind of activity regularly takes place."
e.g. the Soc/Anth Department
a. Front region, where a team of performers cooperate to present a
given definition of the situation
b. Back region, where access is limited and the "audience"
cannot see
c. Disruptions:
"We find that performers, audience, and outsiders all utilize
techniques for saving the show."
"There is no interaction in which the participants do not take
an appreciable chance, of being slightly embarrassed, or a slight chance
of being deeply humiliated."
relate to our embarrassment TPS (frontstage and backstage, conflicting
audiences)
C. Implications for the self
"The self, then, is not an organic thing that has a specific location;
it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented...
And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the
person; in fact, these means are often bolted down in social establishments...
The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome, of course, and sometimes
breaks down, exposing its separate components: back region control; team collusion;
audience tact; and so forth."
D. Ways in which the dramaturgical model is a mere analogy and should not
be pushed to extremes
"This report is not concerned with those aspects of theatre that creep
into everyday life. It is concerned with the structure of social encounters--the
structure of those entitities that come into being whenever persons enter one
another's immediate physical presence. The key factor in this structure is the
maintenance of a single definition of the situation, this definition having to
be expressed, and this expression sustained in the face of a multitude of potential
disruptions."