| Abstract: | The article inquires into the heuristic and interpretative potential of Goffman’s sociology for historical microanalysis and pleads for more exchange between interpretative sociology and historical fields like microhistory or historical anthropology. Using source material consisting of reports produced by police and medical officers of the city of Basel between 1890 and 1910 the author looks at the ‘abnormal’ or ‘bizarre’ behaviour of people that were examined by the police and subsequently by the town physicians. Goffman’s concepts are applied to analyse everyday aspects of their “performance” in order to interpret them historically, i. e. in the wider contexts of the acceleration of modernization in the decades around 1900. |
