People in Places: Sociology of the Familiar

The essays in this volume all attempt to apply the framework developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in order to understand how most of us navigate our way through the modern world. Goffman’s concern is with ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people and with how these events provide a setting for the “presentation of self.” The foundation of his technique is naturalistic observation, in the tradition of the great men of letters; he looks at his subjects in bus stations, on beaches, in elevators, and he observes them as social creatures, interacting with others. In this manner, he determines what human beings do, how they live, who behaves in a given manner and who does not, what the areas of similarity are between behaviors in dissimilar situations. It is not a recent discovery that folkways and etiquette make society possible. One may be tempted to reject as unworthy of concern, much less scholarly study, such unreflecting actions as drinking in a bar, saying “excuse me,” giving gifts, and even getting ready to go to sleep. But these “non-events” provide the background that everyday life requires for its continuance and supply it with certainty and security, without our ever having to think about them. In fact, their importance for sustaining self-concepts and identities is often brought into consciousness only when a failure to do or say something endangers that easeful and mindless certainty and security, that orderliness, on which we depend for making sense out of our own and others’ doings. The essays in this book, by applying Goffman’s approach to show how we live today, raise many questions about matters formerly regarded as unalterable. How necessary are many of our social forms and relationships for the maintenance of social order? Don't these forms and relationships inhibit the full expression of our selves? How much of our lives can we humans create, and how much must we accept as given? The study of the familiar can shed light on these questions. First, examination of the markedly different ways in which different people perform the same role reveals much about the range of behavior that is permissible in our society. Second, it permits an examination of the interdependent relationship between conforming and deviant behavior in face-to-face interaction, as when people say and do things whose moral rightness others question, fail to respond to threats or warnings, or respond more strongly than expected. Finally, discovery of how human beings create and re-create social institutions in face-to-face interaction not only gives us greater respect for the impact of those institutions on our lives but also suggests new ways of controlling them. This book includes classic statements by long established sociologists, as well as some less well known recent efforts, organized according to several traditional sociological concepts: culture, conformity and deviance, sociability and solidarity, and social control. The result is a study of organized ways of doing things, presented in such a way that the reader can see himself as a person who both acts within a complex web of affiliations and is acted upon by their structures.