Book Reviews

The Contemporary Goffman. Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen. New York: Routledge, 2010. Pp. xiii 381. $103.00. Douglas W. Maynard University of Wisconsin In July 2010, Terry Gross, the host of the radio program Fresh Air, was interviewing past U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins about an even more famous poet, Emily Dickinson. Toward the end of the interview, Gross asked Collins about a recent biography:
Gross: Since youve studied and taught Emily Dickinson poems, Im wondering . . . what you think about the idea of . . . a new version of the story of her life coming out, a new way of interpreting what we know of her life. Are you open to that or do you want to just kind of accept her as youve known her? Collins: Well, I prefer the poems to the life. We have to remember that this kind of biographical curiosity would not exist if it were not for the poems themselves. And I nd that the poems are pulling us into themselves and not directing us away into the life of the author. I nd the poems are magnets of attraction. (Billy Collins: A Poets Affection for Emily Dickinson, NPR.org, July 6, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId p128272101)

This exchange rather captures my sense of editor Michael Hviid Jacobsens The Contemporary Goffman. I confess to a preference for letting Goffmans works pull us in and for dealing with them on their own terms, rather than Dissecting Goffman or Reframing Goffman, which are the titles of parts 1 and 2 of this volume. Especially because of an already considerable critical literature on Goffman, there is often, but not always, something inert about these dissecting, reframing efforts, and I was simply more captivated by part 3, Extending Goffman. The last section is less about the person or debates concerning what kind of work he generated and more about the work itself and how it can pull us in and move scholarly inquiry forward to comprehend contemporary social and sociological issues. But let me give each part its due. Although it is recognized in several of the essays, including the editors introduction (p. 3), that Goffman had a contempt for purely scholastic sociology, part 1 forges ahead to present a personal, intellectual, and biographical portraitdiscussing whether and what way he was political, how his purported shyness and marginality affected his style of inquiry, what the style was and what the various inconsistencies are, his eschewal of systematic concepFor permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.

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Book Reviews tualization and theory, and even his early life in Manitoba, Canada (by Yves Winkin). A chapter by the editor and Sren Kristiansen reviews previous attempts to categorize Goffman as symbolic interactionist, functionalist, structuralist, existentialist, phenomenologist, critical theorist, or postmodernist, concluding that he was a hybrid eclectic, a master chameleon ceaselessly reinventing himself (p. 93). Another chapter, by Greg Smith and Jacobsen, treats Goffmans literary sensibilities and use of essayistic writing, concluding that the work as a whole is ironic and rhetorical in force. Charles Lemert articulates a unique perspective on Goffmans oeuvre by delineating an early period where the focus is a Durkheimian one on the organization of experience and interaction especially in social establishments and institutions. Presentation of Self (1959) and Stigma (1963) bracket this period, the former having a more sanguine tone than the dark chord struck in the latter (where spoilage rather than manufacture of identity is the prevailing phenomenon). The subsequent period, although inchoate in Strategic Interaction (1969) and Relations in Public (1971) commences with Frame Analysis and emerges most fully in Felicitys Condition and includes the phase when Goffman engaged in formal analysis of conversational interaction. Part 2 on reframing Goffman has chapters suggesting that he needs better, renewed, or novel appreciation in several ways. These include, according to Greg Smith, Goffmans visual orientation in apprehending the social world, as in Gender Advertisements (1976); his anticipation, as Thomas Scheff advocates, of a politics of dignity and humiliation (as represented in Robert Fullers work); his contribution, Jacobsen suggests, to contemporary recognition theory by providing access to the microworld of ritual interactions in which recognition is enacted; and, as Ann Branaman observes, percipient Goffmanian analyses of how selves are related to social interaction somewhat independently of vicissitudes in the social 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 t here. Manning remarks that Goffmans many conceptual frameworks, as drawn from eldwork, novels, plays, lms, and other media, are less like a oodlight with an overarching theory and more like a spotlight, showing particularistic variations on a thematic focus. It is an apt metaphor, and Manning provides an incisive ethnographic study of bars, describing ways in which Goffmans writings about such principles as rst come, rst served can be enhanced through observing details and particularities of setting, institutional histories, personalities, and the like. Three chapters document the relevance of Goffman for the digital era. Impression management and trafc management, two quintessential concepts, are particularly useful, according to Richard Jenkins. Impression management helps us understand features of social network sites, especially ways in which these sites may require simultaneous management 291

American Journal of Sociology of different kinds of social relationships. Trafc management has to do with how bodies tethered to electronic devicespodestriansmanage public spaces. Rich Ling analytically takes trafc management with mobile devices a step further (so to speak), using a Goffman reference to the unboothed telephone to make suggestions about analyzing social situations in which actors are engaged with others who are not copresent. Related to these chapters is one by Ole Jensen called Everyday Life Mobility, which explores such matters as mobile withs (small collectivities 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 accomplishment, I found this chapter particularly interesting for what it says about how, due to Goffman, it is possible to appreciate and study ways in which predetermined texts, as in news broadcasts, may or may not infuse what happens when a speaker engages an audience. In a nuanced discussion, Treberg draws on Goffman to suggest that planning of some sort also can be a feature of everyday talk, but that Goffman also downplayed spontaneity and reciprocity, which likewise need analytic understanding. Two nal chapters round out part 3. One is by Jonas Larsen on the tourist gaze, and the other by Dag Album on close strangers, a study of interactions among patients in acute care hospitals. Just as Billy Collins characterized Emily Dickinsons poems, it could be said that Goffmans works are magnets of attraction. If we take Goffmans writings as offering spotlights rather than oodlights, then this collection as a whole and especially by way of part 3 demonstrates what a number of the authors assertthat Goffmans work remains as fresh now 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 Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. x 518. $40.00. John R. Hall University of California at Davis Seldom anymore do sociologists address the big questions of social existence: 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 progressive or radical vision has encouraged professionalization to the point that the professoriate en gros increasingly approximates the specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart whom Max Weber railed against at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It sometimes seems our knowledge, and methodological concerns with how to create knowledge, have outstripped our grasp of what knowledge is for. In What Is a Person?Christian Smith makes an ambitious and wide292