Contesting Stigma: On Goffman's Assumptions of Normative Order

Goffman's classic analysis of stigma tacitly suggests that it has a conditional nature. An important shortcoming, however, is that his analysis proceeds from the existence of a normatively shared understanding of the criteria for and the distribution of stigma assignment. I use data from Somali immigrants to Canada to further that argument by showing that stigma as a social object cannot be created when its cultural and structural contexts are disjunctive. Through reverse stigmatization, counter devaluation, and rejection of discrimination, Somalis reveal the problematics of stigma establishment and therein raise the question of who is stigmatizing whom.     

The Phenomenon Of The Public Wife: An Exercise In Goffman's Impression Management*

Approaching the topic of American leader-image from the perspective of politics-as-theater (political communication as exchange of symbols), this paper examines a taken-for-granted visual symbol which a national political leader is invariably expected to present: a wife. Her contributions to her husband's “impression management” techniques (Goffman, 1959) are studied in Goffman's “defensive” categories of dramaturgical loyalty, dramaturgical discipline, and dramaturgical circumspection. This analysis suggests that the visible presence of a wife in public leadership rituals offers the public voter or viewer important reassurances or symbolic guarantees about her husband's “morality”—and, therefore, his appropriateness for public trust. She has become a necessary partof his public performance because of our everyday need for “cultural absolutes” (Furay, 1977) in the image of our leadership figures.     

Cooling the Mother Out: Revisiting and Revising Goffman's Account

This article revisits Erving Goffman's important yet neglected metaphor of “cooling the mark out.” Drawing on a study of mothers whose child has Down's syndrome, I explore the value of Goffman's work for capturing how mothers interpret their child's diagnosis as a loss and rectify this breach by constructing an acceptance of their new situation. The mothers' accounts highlight how Goffman's contentions can be enriched by acknowledging the gendered, temporal, and public character of a loss. This article, thus, can be read both as a celebration and critical revision of his theoretical contribution.     

From the Glory of Hera to the Wrath of Achilles: Narratives of Second-Wave Masculinity and Beyond

Second-wave psychoanalytic feminism understood masculinity through theories that converge in seeing masculinity in mother-son terms. The dread of women, primary femininity, disidentification, father absence, and society without the father all portray an overpowering mother. Men’s reaction is to define masculinity as the not-feminine and as superior, to deny and deprecate femininity in themselves and in women. After Slater, I call these dynamics the “Glory of Hera.” I suggest that they more accurately describe the generic conflicts of men than Freud’s Oedipus. Here, I suggest a third classical narrative. Masculinity is equally, perhaps more basically, understood in terms of the “Wrath of Achilles.” The fundamental developmental and psychic challenge for men is how to be the senior male who humiliates rather than the junior male who feels humiliated and inferior. These dynamics are widespread clinically, and we find them not only in The Iliad but also throughout the literary and operatic canon.     

Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond

This article, based on the Distinguished Lecture presented on August 21, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Anaheim, California, proposes a synthesis of Herbert Blumer's macrosociological perspective on the race question with Roscoe Pound's philosophy and science of law (i.e., his so‐called sociological jurisprudence), Joseph Tussman's and Jacobus tenBroek's juridical methodology, and Philip Selznick's sociology of responsive law. The compound so produced will help to establish a foundation for a praxiological sociology of American constitutional law. The article focuses on the problem of legislative‐made “classifications” and their relations to the legitimate public purposes entailed in the enactment of statutes, laws, and decrees. Such classifications become problematic when they are said to be “underinclusive,” “over‐inclusive,” or both in seeking to effect their aims. Strategic research sites for this issue are racial and ethnic classifications that single out one or a limited cluster of racial or ethnic groups for special benefits (“affirmative action”) or restitution (“reparations”). Calling for a reinvigoration of Pound's pragmatic approach to sociological jurisprudence, I show how Blumer's analysis of the “color line”—when seen in relation to the original intent of the makers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth post‐Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, using Tussman's and tenBroek's showing of how such categorizations might be both methodically evaluated and applied to the challenged classifications—provides grounds for reconsidering whether the latter are instances of “reverse discrimination” and, hence, violations of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the law.” The science of law is a science of social engineering having to do with that part of the whole field which may be achieved by the ordering of human relations through the action of politically organized society. —Roscoe Pound, Justice According to Law We did not hold it necessary to wait for nature to put a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and we shall not much longer hold it necessary to wait for nature to dig the legal canals that will give security to neglected human interests which clamor for recognition and protection. —Roscoe Pound, “Juristic Problems of National Progress”     

Queers in the Line of Fire: Goffman's Stigma Revisited

Using data from in‐depth interviews with young queer people, this article proposes revisions for four areas of Goffman's classic work, Stigma. Interviews reveal a situation between complete acceptance of queer identity and outright hostility, which I term “being in the line of fire,” and three strategies participants use to manage their identity in this situation. Unlike classical identity management, this project considers how their “double consciousness” allows them to respond to stigmatizing situations while remaining insulated from the negative appraisals of others. Instead, they orient toward educating the stigmatizer, minimizing interaction by tailoring their identity, or disengaging. I use these strategies to demonstrate that identity management theory does not properly consider possible responses to hostile reactions, the diversity of stigmatized groups, Goffman's so‐called sympathetic others, or different frames of reference on stigmatized attributes. Orienting to the point of view of the marginalized, this article demonstrates how one manages an accepted identity when one is in the line of fire.     

On Race and Culture: Beyond Afrocentrism,Eurocentrism to Cultural Democracy

Abstract

The author contends that the struggle for cultural democracy in American education will be critical in determining the quality and the future of education and of America itself. Cultural democracy recognizes the human right of each ethnic / cultural group in a culturally diverse society to have equal access to life chances and sources of social power. Power means to have a “voice,” that is, to have the capacity to define oneself as an active participant in the world rather than a passive victim. Thus, the “voice” as expressed in the theoretical underpinnings or major premises of Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, and cultural democracy is examined with emphasis on their current contributions and future possibilities for shaping higher education and charting the directions in intergroup relations in American society in the twenty-first century.     

On The Chinese Loanwords From Cantonese In English

English has undergone more than 1,500 changes from its birth to the present. In the course of its development, it has absorbed and borrowed more than 120 langua...     

In Precarious Motion: From Territorial to Transnational Cultures*

En dépit des efforts déployés pour s'éloigner d'une pratique ethnographique axée sur les cultures territoriales, les récents travaux anthropologiques sur les entreprises “transnationales” se sont souvent fondés sur des cas semblables à ceux des sociétés localisées, études qui sont le propre de l'ethnographie traditionnelle. Cette approche ne peut toutefois tenir compte des effets désunificateurs de la mondialisation. L'auteure de la présente étude se penche sur les orientations convergentes de deux interprétations ayant cours en anthropologic contemporaine et fait état des lacunes de celles-ci dans l'examen socioculturel des transnationales. Le cas des expatriés d'Amérique du Nord et d'Europe travaillant à contrat dans les îles Caïmans est ensuite examiné. L'insécurité d'emploi, l'absence de domicile fixe et le phénomène de déracinement propres à ces travailleurs n'ont pas eu l'effet de créer un rés?eau social transnational bien articulé. L'auteure invite alors les anthropologues á accepter la “perte de la collectivité” comme fondement conceptuel et épistémologique, ceci dans le but de mieux examiner la situation des nombreux voyageurs déracinés et travailleurs itinérants qui n'ont pas reproduit les “agrégats” transnationaux. In spite of an effort to reorient ethnographic practice away from territorial cultures, recent anthropological treatments of the “transnational” have tended to rely on cases that closely approximate localized communities of traditional ethnography. This kind of focus, however, cannot address the more diffuse and disaggregated outcomes of globalization. This essay examines the convergent orientations and limitations of two influential anthropological renderings of transnational social and cultural fields. It then reviews the case of North American and European expatriates working on temporary labour contracts in the Cayman Islands, where insecure employment and residence conditions, cross-border mobility and a sense of displacement have not resulted in the development of a well-articulated transnational social network. In considering the implications of the Cayman case study, I suggest that anthropologists may have to accept the loss of collectivity as a conceptual and epistemological anchor in order to address the situations of the many unconnected travellers and migrants whose movements do not involve the reproduction of transnational aggregates.     

From Tragedy to Farce: On Medicine, the State and the Market

Abstract  This speculative essay is prompted by the formal characteristics of contemporary debates over the progress of medicine, namely their oscillation between claims about ever greater possibilities and dire warnings about threats to fundamental human values, and by a troublesome, yet resonant, phase from Nikolas Rose's reflections on contemporary governmental mechanisms. It seeks to push the terms medicine, state and market to their conceptual limit, and raise question thereby about what might be the most appropriate comportment towards these debates.     

Thinking Beyond Generations: On the Future of Revolution Theory

A recent exchange between Allinson (2019) and Abrams (2019) on the current state of revolution theory rests on the assumption that the generational, backward-looking view of revolution studies is also a fruitful way of thinking of the field's present and future. We argue, in contrast, that while a generational approach has important benefits, it also contains shortcomings that may lead the future of revolution studies in less fruitful directions. We examine where an overreliance on generational thinking has led us, provide an exploratory sketch of how we can begin to move beyond generational thinking, and imagine a new future for the study of revolution.     

Goffman's Interaction Order at the Margins: Stigma,Role, and Normalization in the Outreach Encounter

This article considers Goffman's conceptualization of interaction order at the margins of society in encounters between urban welfare workers and their clients. Observations from these encounters demonstrate practices relating to the situated management of stigma and identity, and the accomplishment of role within these service encounters. A reading of Goffman's theoretical contribution lies in revealing how social actors and social structures are realized in situ within the constraints of the interaction order sui generis. The article discusses three aspects of the outreach encounter, namely, (1) the accomplishment of role and motive, (2) the sequential phases of the outreach encounter, and (3) “the normalization ritual,” and introduces the concept of willful disattention.     

From the Editor: From Scholarship to Practice

Sociological Forum -     

Park,Doyle, and Hughes: Neglected Antecedents of Goffman's Theory of Ceremony1

Erving Goffman's writings on etiquette and front are read in the context of a tradition of Chicago school studies on such topics. Robert E. Park formed this tradition from two strains of thought: one based on the writings of Herbert Spencer, and the other on that of Georg Simmel. A review of writings by Park, and by his students Bertram W. Doyle and Everett C. Hughes, provides a basis for analyzing Goffman's original contributions to the tradition, a synthesis of the two strains. Goffman both advanced the line of study and shared in its biases. These limitations must be overcome if future research in the tradition is to proceed.