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290 AJS Volume 117 Number 1

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Book Reviews

The Contemporary Goffman. Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen. New

York: Routledge, 2010. Pp. xiii381. $103.00.

Douglas W. MaynardUniversity of Wisconsin

In July 2010, Terry Gross, the host of the radio program “Fresh Air,” wasinterviewing past U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins about an even morefamous poet, Emily Dickinson. Toward the end of the interview, Grossasked Collins about a recent biography:

Gross: Since you’ve studied and taught Emily Dickinson poems, I’m won-dering . . . what you think about the idea of . . . a new version of thestory of her life coming out, a new way of interpreting what we knowof her life. Are you open to that or do you want to just kind of accepther as you’ve known her?

Collins: Well, I prefer the poems to the life. We have to remember thatthis kind of biographical curiosity would not exist if it were not for thepoems themselves. And I find that the poems are pulling us into them-selves and not directing us away into the life of the author. I find thepoems are magnets of attraction.(“Billy Collins: A Poet’s Affection for Emily Dickinson,” NPR.org, July

6, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyIdp128272101)

This exchange rather captures my sense of editor Michael Hviid Ja-cobsen’s The Contemporary Goffman. I confess to a preference for lettingGoffman’s works pull us in and for dealing with them on their own terms,rather than “Dissecting Goffman” or “Reframing Goffman,” which arethe titles of parts 1 and 2 of this volume. Especially because of an alreadyconsiderable critical literature on Goffman, there is often, but not always,something inert about these dissecting, reframing efforts, and I was simplymore captivated by part 3, “Extending Goffman.” The last section is less

about the person or debates concerning what kind of work he generatedand more about the work itself and how it can “pull us in” and movescholarly inquiry forward to comprehend contemporary social and socio-logical issues.

But let me give each part its due. Although it is recognized in severalof the essays, including the editor’s introduction (p. 3), that Goffman hada “contempt for ‘purely scholastic’ sociology,” part 1 forges ahead to pre-sent a personal, intellectual, and biographical portrait—discussingwhether and what way he was “political,” how his purported “shyness”and “marginality” affected his style of inquiry, what the style was andwhat the various inconsistencies are, his eschewal of systematic concep-

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tualization and theory, and even his early life in Manitoba, Canada (byYves Winkin). A chapter by the editor and SØren Kristiansen reviewsprevious attempts to categorize Goffman as symbolic interactionist, func-

tionalist, structuralist, existentialist, phenomenologist, critical theorist, orpostmodernist, concluding that he was a hybrid eclectic, a “master cha-meleon ceaselessly reinventing himself” (p. 93). Another chapter, by GregSmith and Jacobsen, treats Goffman’s literary sensibilities and use of essayistic writing, concluding that the work as a whole is ironic andrhetorical in force.

Charles Lemert articulates a unique perspective on Goffman’s oeuvreby delineating an early period where the focus is a Durkheimian one onthe organization of experience and interaction especially in “social estab-lishments” and institutions. Presentation of Self  (1959) and Stigma (1963)

bracket this period, the former having a more sanguine tone than thedark chord struck in the latter (where spoilage rather than manufactureof identity is the prevailing phenomenon). The subsequent period, al-though inchoate in Strategic Interaction (1969) and Relations in Public

(1971) commences with Frame Analysis and emerges most fully in “Fe-licity’s Condition” and includes the phase when Goffman engaged informal analysis of conversational interaction.

Part 2 on reframing Goffman has chapters suggesting that he needsbetter, renewed, or novel appreciation in several ways. These include,according to Greg Smith, Goffman’s “visual” orientation in apprehending

the social world, as in Gender Advertisements (1976); his anticipation, asThomas Scheff advocates, of a politics of dignity and humiliation (asrepresented in Robert Fuller’s work); his contribution, Jacobsen suggests,to contemporary “recognition theory” by providing access to the micro-world of ritual interactions in which recognition is enacted; and, as AnnBranaman observes, percipient Goffmanian analyses of how selves arerelated to social interaction somewhat independently of vicissitudes in thesocial milieu, including different eras of individualism in U.S. society.

Part 3 on extending Goffman enhances the volume strongly, and a part

1 chapter by Peter Manning easily could have fit here. Manning remarksthat Goffman’s many conceptual frameworks, as drawn from fieldwork,novels, plays, films, and other media, are less like a floodlight with anoverarching theory and more like a spotlight, showing particularistic var-iations on a thematic focus. It is an apt metaphor, and Manning providesan incisive ethnographic study of bars, describing ways in which Goff-man’s writings about such principles as “first come, first served” can beenhanced through observing details and particularities of setting, insti-tutional histories, personalities, and the like.

Three chapters document the relevance of Goffman for the digital era.

Impression management and traffic management, two quintessential con-cepts, are particularly useful, according to Richard Jenkins. Impressionmanagement helps us understand features of social network sites, espe-cially ways in which these sites may require simultaneous management

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of different kinds of social relationships. Traffic management has to dowith how bodies tethered to electronic devices—”podestrians”—managepublic spaces. Rich Ling analytically takes traffic management with mo-

bile devices a step further (so to speak), using a Goffman reference to the“unboothed” telephone to make suggestions about analyzing social situ-ations in which actors are engaged with others who are not copresent.Related to these chapters is one by Ole Jensen called “Everyday LifeMobility,” which explores such matters as “mobile withs” (small collec-tivities traversing contemporary social domains) and the “networked self.”

The planning of communication is a topic that Espen Treberg addresses.Being one who studies interaction and conversation as a contingent ac-complishment, I found this chapter particularly interesting for what itsays about how, due to Goffman, it is possible to appreciate and study

ways in which predetermined texts, as in news broadcasts, may or maynot infuse what happens when a speaker engages an audience. In a nu-anced discussion, Treberg draws on Goffman to suggest that planning of some sort also can be a feature of everyday talk, but that Goffman alsodownplayed spontaneity and reciprocity, which likewise need analyticunderstanding. Two final chapters round out part 3. One is by JonasLarsen on the “tourist gaze,” and the other by Dag Album on “closestrangers,” a study of interactions among patients in acute care hospitals.

 Just as Billy Collins characterized Emily Dickinson’s poems, it couldbe said that Goffman’s works are “magnets of attraction.” If we take

Goffman’s writings as offering spotlights rather than floodlights, then thiscollection as a whole and especially by way of part 3 demonstrates whata number of the authors assert—that Goffman’s work remains as freshnow as it was in his own time.

What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good  from the Person Up. By Christian Smith. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2010. Pp. x518. $40.00.

 John R. HallUniversity of California at Davis

Seldom anymore do sociologists address the big questions of social exis-tence: Why are we here? What should we do? What is to become of us?A discipline once an avatar of the Enlightenment in either its progressiveor radical vision has encouraged professionalization to the point that theprofessoriate en gros increasingly approximates the “specialists withoutspirit, sensualists without heart” whom Max Weber railed against at the

end of  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It sometimesseems our knowledge, and methodological concerns with how to createknowledge, have outstripped our grasp of what knowledge is for.

In What Is a Person?Christian Smith makes an ambitious and wide-