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New Perspectives on Goffman
in Language and Interaction

This collection highlights new perspectives on the work of Erving Goffman,


revisiting his place in contemporary social theory and interactional
linguistics research and its impact in surfacing new insights in conversation
analysis and our understanding of Goffman’s legacy.
The volume outlines the theoretical foundations of Goffman’s research
across linguistics and the social sciences. Bringing together a cross-
disciplinary group of scholars, the book is organized around these themes,
with sections on self and identity, participation, and bodily practices in social
interaction. Each chapter comprises three perspectives—a look back at
Goffman’s original texts, their correlation in contemporary empirical research
in conversation analysis, and a discussion of conceptual implications in
relevant fields such as interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology,
critical sociolinguistics, and related disciplines. Taken as a whole, the book
not only offers a comprehensive critical overview of Goffman’s legacy in
empirical work in conversation analysis and the social sciences but also the
conceptual grounding for new studies to investigate his continuing role in
contemporary scholarship.
This innovative collection will be of interest to students and scholars in
sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse analysis as
well as sub-disciplines of sociology and psychology.

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of General and French Linguistics at the


University of Basel, Switzerland.

Anssi Peräkylä is Academy Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences/


Sociology, at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics

Titles include:
Social and Regional Variation in World Englishes
Local and Global Perspectives
Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Hanna Parviainen, Mark Kaunisto, and
Arja Nurmi

Everyday Multilingualism
Linguistic Landscapes as Practice and Pedagogy
Anikó Hatoss

Korean as a Heritage Language from Transnational and Translanguaging


Perspectives
Edited by Hyesun Cho & Kwangok Song

Beyond Borrowing
Lexical Interaction between Englishes and Asian Languages
Hyejeong Ahn, Jieun Kiaer, Danica Salazar, Anna Bordilovskaya

All English Accents Matter


In Pursuit of Accent Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Pierre Wilbert Orelus

Migrant Workers’ Narratives of Return


Alienation and Identity Transformations
Hans J. Ladegaard

New Perspectives on Goffman in Language and Interaction


Body, Participation and the Self
Edited by Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

For a full list of titles and more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Sociolinguistics/book-series/RSSL
New Perspectives on Goffman
in Language and Interaction
Body, Participation and the Self

Edited by
Lorenza Mondada
Anssi Peräkylä
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Lorenza Mondada and Anssi
Peräkylä; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-0-367-55577-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-55219-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09411-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003094111
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of contributors vii

1 Body, participation, self: New perspectives on Goffman


and social interaction 1
LORENZA MONDADA AND ANSSI PERÄKYLÄ

PART I
Discussing Goffman’s conceptual insights from the
perspective of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology27

2 Goffman and Garfinkel: Joint enterprises, theoretical


differences and personal sympathies  29
CHRISTIAN MEYER

3 Doing ruling: Goffman, ethnomethodology, and


conversation analysis 54
DOUGLAS W. MAYNARD AND JASON TUROWETZ

4 Goffman, face, and the interaction order 77


JOHN HERITAGE AND STEVEN E. CLAYMAN

5 Following Goffman: Between methodology and stylistics 97


DAVID INGLIS
vi Contents

PART II
After Goffman: Studies on body, participation and the self117

6 Embodied participation in social encounters 119


CHARLES GOODWIN AND MARJORIE HARNESS GOODWIN

7 Strain grunts and the organization of participation 143


LEELO KEEVALLIK

8 Embodied scepticism: Facial expression and response


relevance 170
REBECCA CLIFT

9 Participation within multiparty conversation: Responses


to indirect complaints about a co-present participant 195
RAY WILKINSON, JULIE BOUCHARD, VERONICA GONZALEZ
TEMER, ANTTI KAMUNEN, JULIA KATILA, CARLA CRISTINA
MUNHOZ XAVIER AND ANCA STERIE

10 Bad behaviours, spoiled identities: Face in personality


disorders 217
ANSSI PERÄKYLÄ

11 Mobile body arrangements in public space: Revisiting


“withs” as local accomplishments 241
LORENZA MONDADA

12 Confidence and competition: Impression management,


markets and institutional interaction 276
CHRISTIAN HEATH AND PAUL LUFF

13 The social organization of (in-)attention 299


JÖRG R. BERGMANN AND ANSSI PERÄKYLÄ

Appendix: transcription conventions 323


Index326
Contributors

Jörg R. Bergmann is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Bielefeld University


(Germany); he was Fellow of the Heisenberg Foundation, Professor of
Microsociology at Giessen University, and Director of the Center for
Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld (ZiF). His main research areas
are: interaction in everyday life and institutional settings (particularly
psychiatric and psychotherapeutic interaction); and forms and practices
of moral communication. He worked at extending conversation analy-
sis to the study of communicative genres, and he has a long-standing
interest in relating conversation analysis to Georg Simmel’s theory of
sociation.
Julie Bouchard is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Université
du Québec à Chicoutimi in the Département des Arts, des Lettres et du
Langage. She specializes in second language acquisition, TESOL, and
teacher training. Her research interests include interactions in the lan-
guage classroom, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and atypical
interactions.
Steven E. Clayman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles. His research addresses human interaction as a topic
in its own right and a window into social institutions with an emphasis
on media and politics. His articles have appeared in sociology, com-
munication, and linguistics journals, and he is the co-author (with
John Heritage) of Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institu-
tions (Wiley-Blackwell) and The News Interview: Journalists and Public
Figures On the Air (Cambridge University Press).
Rebecca Clift did her PhD on misunderstandings in conversation at the
University of Cambridge and is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK. She is the
author of Conversation Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2016) in
the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series. Her principal research
viii Contributors

interests lie at the intersection of grammar and interaction, embodied


interaction, laughter, and reported speech. She has published articles on
these topics in, amongst other journals, Language, Language in Society,
Journal of Pragmatics, and Research on Language & Social Interaction.
Charles Goodwin is Distinguished Research Professor of Communication
at UCLA. He focuses his research on the practices human beings use to
construct in concert with each other the social, cultural, and cognitive
worlds they inhabit. Central to this process are language, structures for
the organization of action-in-interaction, and an ecology of sign sys-
tems that includes not only talk, but also a range of different kinds of
displays made by the body, and structure in the environment. His book
Co-operative Action received both EMCA Distinguished Book Award
and Society of Linguistic Anthropology Sapir Book prize. He holds hon-
orary doctorates from Linköping and Aalborg.
Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthro-
pology at UCLA. She is a linguistic anthropologist concerned with the
embodied language practices human beings employ to build the social,
cultural, and cognitive worlds of children’s peer groups, families, and
workplace communities. She examines how forms of human sociality
are achieved through touch, language, prosody, and gaze. She is the
author of He-Said-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Chil-
dren, The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion,
and she is the co-author with Asta Cekaite of Embodied Family Chore-
ography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity.
Christian Heath is Professor Emeritus, King’s College London. His
research addresses the interactional foundations of work and organi-
zation and is currently undertaking projects in the fields of markets,
medicine, and museums and galleries. His publications include: The
Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and
Antiques (Cambridge: ISCA Best Book Award), Video and Qualitative
Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life (Sage, with
Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff), Technology in Action (Cambridge, with
Paul Luff), and Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction
(Cambridge).
John Heritage is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of
Sociology at UCLA. His research concerns the interaction order and its
interface with social institutions, with particular reference to medicine
and mass communication. His publications include Garfinkel and Eth-
nomethodology (Polity Press), Structures of Social Action (with Max
Atkinson, Cambridge University Press), Talk at Work (with Paul Drew,
Cambridge University Press), The News Interview: Journalists and
Contributors ix

Public Figures on the Air (with Steven Clayman, Cambridge University


Press), Communication in Medical Care (with Douglas Maynard, Cam-
bridge University Press), and Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and
Institutions (with Steven Clayman, Wiley Blackwell).
David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He
holds degrees in sociology from the Universities of Cambridge and York.
He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, historical sociology, and
social theory, applying these to contemporary social challenges. He has
written and edited various books in these areas. His current research
concerns globalization, cosmopolitanism, (de)civilizing processes, and
the sociological analysis of wine.
Antti Kamunen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Unit for
Languages and Literature at the University of Oulu. In his research
he uses conversation analysis to study various embodied and multi-
modal practices in social interaction. He has published journal articles
in Gesture, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Gesprächs-
forschung, and Journal of Pragmatics. Kamunen has also worked as an
editor in SKY Journal of Linguistics. His current research interest con-
cerns talk and interaction in multinational crisis management training.
Julia Katila is a postdoctoral researcher from the Faculty of Social Sciences,
Tampere University. Julia’s research includes the study of affect, touch,
and other forms of intercorporeal sociality in naturally occurring inter-
actions. Her current research considers touch and affective practices
among romantic couples and embodied interaction in various health
care settings. Julia’s dissertation (published in 2018) is entitled Tactile
Intercorporeality in a Group of Mothers and Their Children: A Micro
Study of Practices for Intimacy and Participation.
Leelo Keevallik is a professor in language and culture at Linköping Univer-
sity. In her research, she targets the interface of grammar and the body,
currently with a focus on non-lexical vocalizations and sensoriality.
She has published on the use of vocal sounds in Pilates training, dance
classes, doctor-patient interaction, and infant feeding sessions. Recently
she co-edited two special issues on the subject: Sounds on the Margins
of Language with Richard Ogden (Research on Language and Social
Interaction) and Sounding for Others with Emily Hofstetter (Language
and Communication).
Paul Luff is Professor of Organizations and Technology in King’s College
London. His research involves the detailed analysis of work and interac-
tion, drawing upon video recordings of everyday human conduct. He
has undertaken studies in a diverse variety of settings including control
x Contributors

rooms, news and broadcasting, healthcare, auctions, museums, galleries,


and science centres and within design, architecture, and construction.
Paul Luff is the co-author with Christian Heath and Jon HIndmarsh
of ‘Using Video in Qualitative Research: analyzing social interaction in
everyday life, (London: Sage) and ‘Technology in Action’ (Cambridge
University Press: with Christian Heath).
Doug Maynard is the Maureen T. Hallinan Professor Emeritus, Conway-
Bascom Professor Emeritus, and Garfinkel Fellow Emeritus, Department
of Sociology, University of Wisconsin. Recently, Doug has co-edited
(with John Heritage) The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and
Prospects (Oxford University Press 2022) and co-authored Autistic
Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis
(University of Chicago Press 2022). Doug is the author of Bad News,
Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Set-
tings (University of Chicago Press 2003) and Inside Plea Bargaining:
The Language of Negotiation (Plenum Press 1984).
Christian Meyer is a professor of Sociology at the Department of His-
tory and Sociology of the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he
is also Chairman of the Social Science Archive (Alfred Schutz Memo-
rial Archive). His research interests include social and cultural theory,
phenomenological sociology, sociology of embodied interaction, stud-
ies in comparative sociality, and qualitative methods of social research.
Recent publication include Ethnomethodologie reloaded (Bielefeld
2021, co-edited), “The Phenomenological Foundations of Ethnometh-
odology’s Conceptions of Sequentiality and Indexicality. Harold
­Garfinkel’s References to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’”
(Gesprächsforschung 2022, 23: 111–144), and Culture, Practice, and
the Body (Stuttgart 2018).
Lorenza Mondada is Professor for linguistics at the University of Basel.
Working on social interaction in ordinary, professional and institutional
settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic per-
spective, she focuses on video analysis and multi-modality. Her research
on how the situated and endogenous organization of social interaction
draws on a diversity of multi-modal resources, articulates language with
gesture, gaze, body posture, body movements, objects manipulations as
well as multi-sensorial practices involving vision, touch, taste and smell.
She has extensively published in Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Stud-
ies, Language in Society, ROLSI, Journal of Sociolinguistics, co-edited
several collective books, as well as elaborated her approach of sensorial-
ity in the book Sensing in Social Interaction (CUP, 2021), winner of the
ISCA Book Award in 2023.
Contributors xi

Anssi Peräkylä is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki; in


2022–2023 he was Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced
Studies. His current research focuses on psychiatric and psychothera-
peutic interactions and the practices of self-presentation in interaction.
He seeks to combine Goffmanian concepts with the methods of con-
versation analysis and experimental psychology. His work has been
published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Research
on Language and Social Interaction, and the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis.
Anca-Cristina Sterie is a medical sociologist in the Lausanne University
Hospital, Switzerland. Her field of expertise is in communication and
social interaction in clinical contexts: palliative care, geriatrics, and
nursing homes. Anca’s research, using conversation and discourse analy-
sis, focusses on triadic interactions (patients, relatives, and health pro-
viders) on topics that relate to end of life, as well as on communication
with people living with advanced dementia. Drawing on her research,
she equally contributes to the development of training materials for
clinicians.
Veronica Gonzalez Temer is Associate Professor in Phonetics and Inter-
actional Linguistics at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la
Educación in Chile. She holds a PhD in Language and Communication
from the University of York. Her research interests include the study
of particles in Chilean Spanish, classroom interaction, and supervision
meetings. She is involved in building a community of Latin American
CA researchers.
Jason Turowetz is currently Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cali-
fornia-Santa Barbara. He is the co-author of Autistic Intelligence: Inter-
action, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis (University of
Chicago Press 2022). Jason is also the co-author (with Matthew Hollander)
of Morality in the Making of Sense and Self: Stanley Milgram’s “Obedi-
ence” Experiments and the New Science of Morality (Oxford University
Press, in press). He recently completed a post-doctoral research fellow-
ship at the University of Siegen (Germany) with an appointment at the
Garfinkel Archive (Newburyport, MA). With publications in numerous
peer-reviewed journals, Jason has written extensively on the sociology
of medicine and health, autism diagnosis, and sociological theory and
ethnomethodology.
Ray Wilkinson is Professor of Human Communication at the University of
Sheffield. He uses conversation analysis to study human interaction as
well as interaction between non-human primates. His research includes
xii Contributors

the study of communication disorders such as aphasia, dementia, and


stammering and their impact on conversation, and he is the co-editor
(with John Rae and Gitte Rasmussen) of Atypical Interaction: The
Impact of Communicative Impairments within Everyday Talk (2020,
Palgrave Macmillan).
Carla Cristina Munhoz Xavier works as Associate Lecturer at the University
of Surrey and the University of Birmingham. She holds a PhD from the
University of Sheffield, and a MSc in Developmental Linguistics from the
University of Edinburgh. Her areas of expertise are Bilingualism, First
and Second Language Acquisition, Translation, and E-learning tools.
In 2020 she created her own e-learning company, Educantes, which pro-
vides training to governmental and corporate clients.
1 Body, participation, self
New perspectives on Goffman
and social interaction

Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

1. Introduction
The prolific oeuvre written by Erving Goffman (1923–1982) has been
highly esteemed and largely criticized; his method of doing micro-sociology
has been abundantly referred to and acknowledged by many scholars,
although at the same time seldom adopted by them as a scientific model.
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) traditionally share
this ambivalent relationship to Goffman, recognizing his importance in
paving the way for the analysis of social interaction as a valid sociologi-
cal object, while also being in many ways critical of his conceptualization
of social interaction. This book continues this tradition by presenting a
constructive critical perspective on Goffman’s work, acknowledging none-
theless that the richness of this oeuvre has not been exhausted by previ-
ous reception. Indeed, numerous topics and phenomena remain for which
Goffman has offered original innovative insights and which converge with
emerging conceptual and empirical interests within recent developments in
EMCA. Inspired by the work of Goffman, this book is a collection of theo-
retical and empirical studies that critically engage to reflect on his renewed
relevance for EMCA enquiries.
EMCA is a direction of research that emerged at the same time as when
Goffman was active (for example, see Heritage, 1984). In spite of the close
connections during their early phases, Goffmanian research and EMCA
have predominantly developed independently. One objective of this book
is to bring these two traditions back into closer contact, considering that
this contact can benefit both. In particular, the chapters of this book present
recent conceptual debates and empirical, video-based research procedures
in EMCA that can cast new light on Goffman’s central ideas concerning the
self, participation, public space, and the body. This book addresses Goff-
man’s ideas as a springboard to new systematic explorations of structures
and practices of social interaction within recent conceptual and methodo-
logical developments in EMCA. The authors’ relation to Goffman is deeply

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094111-1
2 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

appreciative but also critical – with the appreciation and criticism balanced
differently in different chapters.
This introduction provides a general background of Goffman’s work
by addressing social interaction, positioning his legacy both in terms of
its interdisciplinary reception and its discussion within EMCA. We first
outline Goffman’s contribution to contemporary social sciences and lin-
guistics. We then present his work more specifically in the three key areas
covered by this book – the self, body, and participation. We also link the
contributions of the book chapters to these three research fields.

2. The legacy of Goffman in the social sciences and the EMCA


reception
Even though Goffman is considered to be one of the most important social
theorists of the 20th century (Collins, 1980; Giddens, 1988; Hettlage, 2022;
Jacobsen & Smith, 2022), he himself understated the theoretical import of
his work. He pointed out that his contributions were fragmentary and did
not offer a unified model of social interaction. In Asylums (1961), Goffman
maintained that a comprehensive theory of interaction was not yet possi-
ble, while specific studies of different interactional organizations remained
feasible: “better, perhaps, different coats to clothe the children well than a
single splendid tent where they shiver” (1961, p. xiv). Despite his disclaim-
ers, Goffman outlined a conceptual synthesis of his ideas on interaction in
his last essay (1983). Now, 40 years after the publication of that essay, it
might be possible to reconsider whether Goffman’ss work makes possible a
“splendid tent” alongside the “different coats”.
This book reconsiders those metaphors from the perspective of contem-
porary scholarly work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
(EMCA). The relations between EMCA and Goffman have been com-
plicated during Goffman’s life and in the later reception of his work (see
Drew & Wootton, 1988; Hoey & Rawls, 2022). However, it is currently
possible to revisit them in two ways. First, thanks to new input from the
Garfinkel archive, it is possible to formulate a nuanced and original vision
of Goffman’s relations with ethnomethodology, as demonstrated by May-
nard and Turowetz as well as Meyer in this volume. In particular, Meyer’s
chapter provides evidence that the relations between Goffman and Gar-
finkel were continuous from as early as the beginning of the 1950s, lasted
over decades, and were characterized by a deep mutual respect and care.
This casts new light on their shared history, marked by their exchange of
ideas, manuscripts and students – although, as demonstrated by Meyer,
this does not erase their differences, which they thoroughly debated.
Second, new insights provided by multimodal analysis of video data in
EMCA offer a new interpretation of topics that were considered less in the
Body, participation, self 3

previous discussions, and that crucially involve the embodied self and oth-
ers in interaction, as demonstrated by the empirical chapters of this book.
Goffman’s theory of interaction – the “splendid tent” the feasibility of
which he also doubted – is erected on two key concepts: co-presence and
interaction order, which we will now address briefly.
The wide-reaching theoretical implications of Goffman’s emphasis on
co-presence as a distinct domain of social organization – initially formu-
lated in his short article titled Neglected Situation (Goffman, 1964) – have
been acknowledged and highlighted by social theorists such as Giddens
(1988) and Collins (1988, 2004). Co-presence as the focal domain of
social organization remains a distinct and radical perspective within
the subject matter of social science. Rather than beginning from group
relations, cultural structures, or large-scale social institutions, Goffman
invites social scientists to begin their inquiry into ‘the social’ from sit-
uations in which individuals can see and hear each other. Considering
co-presence enables the analysis to include the contingencies of social
interaction even before the would-be-interactants engage in the open-
ing of the encounter, casting new light on the conditions for establishing
a common interactional focus and on the opening sequence itself. This
enables questions related to the fundamental principles for the emergence
of human interaction.
Beside the physical co-presence in face-to-face interactions, which is
favored in this volume, questions regarding co-presence as the core of soci-
ality have also been recently recalled and reshaped. These are related to the
evolution of various forms of technologically mediated interactions (for
an overview, see Arminen et al., 2016), inviting analysts to also consider
co-presence for digital forms of communication (Campos-Castillo & Hit-
lin, 2013; Ayaß, 2022). The ultimate significance of co-presence is also
addressed by newer research technologies. These include neuro-imaging
(Jiang et al., 2012) and movement capturing (Stevanovic et al., 2017),
which make it possible to explore the biological and behavioral under-
pinnings of the co-ordination of interpersonal action and experience in
co-presence.
The studies presented in this collection all attempt to specify and elabo-
rate social processes that occur in co-presence, where participants are in
perceptual contact with each other. The studies share the approach of
EMCA in examining the social processes in co-presence, exploiting the
specificities of video methodologies and multimodal analyses to observe
in more depth the dynamics of co-presence. The studies specify, elaborate,
as well as correct the Goffmanian descriptions and taxonomies of social
processes in co-presence. An example of this is Goffman’s (1971) concept
of with, denoting a configuration of more than one person who is perceived
as one unit in a public space. Using multimodal conversation analysis (CA),
4 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

Mondada’s chapter demonstrates how “withs” are produced, perceived,


how they act, and how they are acted upon.
Closely related to co-presence is the Goffmanian concept of interaction
order (1983). This refers to the distinct social organization of activities
that emerge in co-presence and its technological extensions. A particular
research program arises from the notion of interaction order in that the
practices and processes of social interaction can and should be studied in
their own right, without an effort to trace them back to larger social struc-
tures. Goffman’s concept of interaction order established some of the key
terms for long-standing sociological discussions based on the connections
between the micro- and macro-levels of social organization (for example,
see Collins, 1987; Giddens, 1988; Salomon, 2022). The concept of interac-
tion order has also served as a key justification for the micro-sociological
research agenda of conversation analysis (for instance, see Drew & Woot-
ton, 1988, p. 10; Heritage, 1984). In this collection, the chapters in Part
I that contribute to our understanding of interaction order are those that
particularly focus on Goffman’s conceptual insights. Meyer demonstrates
how the interactional order was close to Garfinkel’s use of the notions of
‘systems of interactional’ and ‘interactional systems’ of 1960–1961, but
also differed from the latter’s ethnomethodological views on interaction as
a self-emergent and self-regulating sphere. Maynard and Turowetz empha-
size the place of rules in Goffman’s understanding of interaction order.
They contrast conceptualization in which rules guide the actors, with the
ethnomethodological understandings of rules as a resource for actors.
Heritage and Clayman, on the other hand, discuss how Goffman’s theory
of face might be implied in, and compatible with, conversation analytical
understandings of preference structure. As for the relations between the
interaction order and larger scale social structures, the chapter by Heath
and Luff analyze how in a particular setting (auctions) interactional prac-
tices are intertwined with the economic order of society and the production
of economic value.
While Goffman explicitly discussed the interface between the interac-
tion order and larger scale social structures, characterizing this relation as
“loose coupling” (Goffman, 1983), he addressed another interface between
the structures of interaction and the psychological processes in the par-
ticipants of interaction, only in passing. In the preface to his essay collec-
tion Interaction Ritual (1967), Goffman observed that the study of social
interaction needs a model of the individual actor. Yet, the psychology that
was needed for interaction research was to be of a particular type: “one
stripped and cramped to suit the sociological study of conversation, track
meets, banquets, jury trials, and street loitering” (Goffman, 1967, p. 3).
What exactly such a stripped-down psychology might entail remains unre-
solved. It is intriguing that Goffman’s own students have criticized him
Body, participation, self 5

both for psychological reductionism, that is, for explaining social practices
as outcomes of individuals’ motivations (Schegloff, 1988), as well as for
overlooking psychology at the expense of an exclusive focus on behavioral
analysis (Scheff, 1988). In this collection, the chapters on face by Herit-
age & Clayman and by Peräkylä as well as the chapter on attention by
Bergmann & Peräkylä suggest connections between individual-level pro-
cesses that are emotional, cognitive, and perceptual, and the organization
of interaction. From a different perspective, the chapter by Keevallik also
refers to the individual, as it focuses on how displays of bodily strain are
organized interactionally.
Goffman was a sociologist who – especially during the last part of his
career at the University of Pennsylvania – worked in a cross-disciplinary
environment that was in close collaboration with linguists and anthro-
pologists. His work had a major, enduring impact on a number of disci-
plines. Below, we will discuss four Goffman-inspired lines of research – in
linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science – that to different
degrees converge with and diverge from the approach adopted in the stud-
ies included in this collection.
The central theoretical importance of human interaction as conceived of
by Goffman had a significant impact on linguistic models. While in Berke-
ley, and subsequently at the University of Pennsylvania, Goffman closely
collaborated with colleagues who were interested in language and talk in
society and culture, such as Dell Hymes and William Labov, among oth-
ers (see the volume edited by Gumperz & Hymes, 1964, in which Goff-
man’s article Neglected Situation was published), in a context in which the
ethnography of communication, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and
conversation analysis were emerging (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1987). In addition,
later on, Goffman’s early writings on face (Goffman, 1955) were a source
of a longstanding theoretical discussion as well as a line of empirical studies
on politeness, which was initiated by Brown and Levinson’s (1987) mono-
graph on the face-threatening implications of different speech acts. Goff-
man’s concept of footing (Goffman, 1979) has been equally important and
it generated further elaborations and systematizations, including typological
implications (Levinson, 1988; see Sidnell, 2022 for a critical perspective).
The concept of footing also influenced a vast array of studies on reported
talk (Holt & Clift, 2007) and more generally, an interest in voicing and
polyphony, which was also fueled by the reception of Bakhtin in this field.
Even more importantly, footing has been a wellspring for crucial discussions
on the notion of participation (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004), leading to a
redefinition of the embodied dynamics of participation as well as of multiple
voices in interaction (in particular, see Goodwin & Goodwin, this volume).
One of the most influential appropriations of Goffman’s ideas in soci-
ology concerns interaction ritual theory. Developed by Randall Collins
6 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

(2004), this theory is based predominately on Goffman’s writings from


the 1950s and 1960s, combining them with insights from Durkheim and
Darwin. Collins argues that the rhythmic entrainment between the emo-
tional expressions of actors in situations of co-presence, and the mutual
attention and boundaries between ratified participants and outsiders, cre-
ates “collective effervescence” that renews group solidarity and emotional
energy as well as group-related membership symbols and moral norms.
This theory has been highly influential in fields such as the study of sports
(Cottingham, 2012), the sociology of religion (Heider & Warner, 2010),
and the study of tourism (Sterchele, 2020). In comparison to the interac-
tion ritual theory, the studies presented in this volume adopt a perspective
which is focused less on rituals as means for renewing group symbols and
norms, and focused more on the moment-by-moment organization of the
co-present interactions through language, bodily expressions, and emo-
tional displays. Moreover, as documented and developed in the chapter by
Meyer, the notion of ritual remained one of the major points of disagree-
ment between Garfinkel and Goffman. Garfinkel objected to the use of the
ritual as a general explanation for social interaction, and criticized it for
imposing a structure on the indexicality and dynamicity of social interac-
tion that was stable, even rigid, and reproductible.
For broader audiences, Goffman is perhaps best known for his drama-
turgical approach (Goffman, 1959). This focuses on the presentation of the
self and impression management. The dramaturgical perspective has been
sustained both in experimental social psychology (see Leary, 1996) and in
the branch of qualitative sociology known as symbolic interactionism (see
Scott, 2015; Tavory, 2016). Social psychological studies have conducted
experiments and adopted self-report measures in an attempt to describe
the individual differences in an inclination to impression management as
well as the styles it has within different contexts. Closer to conversation
analysis, but rather applying ethnographic methods, symbolic interaction-
ists have investigated the interactional practices in the everyday manage-
ment of social identities, roles, and norms in mundane social settings, such
as during fantasy role-playing games (Waskul & Lust, 2004), holiday mak-
ing (Stein, 2011), and at the swimming pool (Scott, 2009). By comparison,
conversation analysis has not thus far adopted the dramaturgical aspects of
Goffman’s work. From the perspective of CA, the dramaturgical approach
has been regarded as one that imposes a metaphorical exogenous orien-
tation on the interpretation of social interaction (see Drew & Wootton,
1988). However, the chapters in this collection by Heath and Luff, and by
Goodwin and Goodwin, revisit the dramaturgical perspective as a local
accomplishment of participants. By analyzing artwork auctions, Heath and
Luff report on the skillful bodily and verbal practices used by the auction-
eers to manage the accountability regarding of the origin of a bid. They
Body, participation, self 7

convey an impression that the bidder is a potential buyer, even when the bid
is actually from the seller. Goodwin and Goodwin’s chapter, on the other
hand, explores the ways in which a person with aphasia and exceedingly
limited language abilities successfully presents himself as an independent
and competent social actor through intonation, gesture, and the coordina-
tion of his actions with co-present others. More generally, while the papers
in this volume share the qualitative, data-driven approach with symbolic
interactionism, the studies included here do not draw overall pictures of
distinct social settings. Instead, these studies focus on the particular micro-
scopic practices of interaction, revealing their generic character, which are
found not only in one particular setting but everywhere people interact
together. Examples of such generic, micro-interactional practices include
the strain grunts studied by Keevallik and the skeptical facial expression
analyzed by Clift.
In political science, perhaps the most influential among Goffman’s
works is Frame Analysis (Goffman, 1974). Since the 1990s, researchers
have examined the frames and framing processes associated with social
and political movements. According to this research tradition, frames are
analyzed in the context of meaning construction (Benford & Snow, 2000),
that is, as outcomes of discursive and practical action, “action-oriented sets
of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and cam-
paigns” (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 614). In one application of frame anal-
ysis in the field of political movements, Luhtakallio (2013) examined visual
representations of contentious social movements, demonstrating the inter-
twined nature of the representations of political events (demonstrations,
violence, and performance as “dominant frames”) and representation of
gender (femininity, masculinity, or gender ambiguity as “keyings” of the
frames). Alongside dramaturgical ideas, frame analysis belongs to aspects
of Goffman’s work that have usually not been explored by conversation
analysts. In this collection, however, Keevallik touches upon the concept of
keying, which is revisited in a local and processual manner, demonstrating
that the strain grunts which can be leakages of physical effort sometimes
are keyed and become displays that are part of instructional activity. Like-
wise, Goodwin and Goodwin refer to frame analysis, showing how the
main protagonist of their chapter, Chil, successfully propels participants to
change a frame from one that is serious into one that involves make-believe
and humor. The chapters by Keevallik and Goodwin and Goodwin pre-
sent their analyses of frames and framing as local, momentary interactional
achievements – a perspective that differs from the more global understand-
ing of framing in political science.
Goffman has been predominantly criticized but also praised (see Inglis,
this volume) for his use of heterogeneous empirical materials, unsystem-
atic sources, and anecdotical evidence. Even when based on substantial
8 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Goffman himself, his work does not


include a clear description of his approach nor a presentation of its results.
Instead, as explicated in the chapter by Inglis, Goffman’s prose skillfully
incorporates other genres and creative modes of writing to convey his anal-
yses. Goffman also criticized the use of video to document micro-social
practices and argued that this altered them, ultimately making access to
them difficult if not impossible. This critical view distinguished him from
close colleagues, such as Birdwhistell (1970), Scheflen (Scheflen et al.,
1970), or among the younger generation, Kendon (Kendon et al., 1975),
Erickson (1982), and the Goodwins (Goodwin, 1981), who were precisely
pioneering the use of video for the analysis of social interaction, in a con-
text marked by the aftermath of Bateson’s project of the Natural History of
an Interview (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1987; Mondada, 2021). In this context, the
use of video methodology to revisit Goffman from an ethnomethodological
and conversation analytic perspective might seem paradoxical. However,
applying up-to-date video methodology in the exploration of “Goffma-
nian” themes is timely right now. Video analysis in EMCA has been con-
tinuously elaborated on during the last decades, including in critical and
reflexive ways (Broth et al., 2014; Heath et al., 2010; Knoblauch et al.,
2006). Some advances have been precisely attributed to Goffman’s insights.
These include research on co-presence and public places, or on the pub-
lic visibility of body glosses, necessitating adequate video recording tech-
nologies and approaches. This accounts for the relevance of multimodal
approaches within EMCA for revisiting Goffmanian themes that had not
been discussed in the previous EMCA critical approaches of Goffman –
crucially involving bodies in their material ecologies.
The following sections discuss these contributions by reference to three
key thematic and conceptual issues in Goffman – the self, participation,
and bodies in space.

3. The self in social interaction


From his earliest writing onwards, Goffman considered the self as a key
node in social organization. He adopted a classical social psychological
theme – from James (1891), Mead (1934), and Cooley (1902), combining
it with Durkheimian insights – and placed it under the scrutiny of socio-
ethnographic research. Goffman argued that the maintenance of positive
images of the selves of participants – their ‘faces’ – is an omni-present
concern in interaction (Goffman, 1955). The self and its worthiness are
not only or primarily relevant in self-reflection, when persons think or talk
about themselves, which is the position maintained by most social and
behavioral science research (for example, see Leary & Tangney, 2012).
But the self and its worthiness are, in fact, an ubiquitous concern that
Body, participation, self 9

permeates all actions in social encounters (Goffman, 1955, p. 227). The


claim by Goffman regarding the omnirelevance of the self is parallel to the
philosophical analysis recently outlined by Zahavi. This orientation posits
a “tight link” (2014, p. 15) between the phenomenal consciousness and
self-consciousness – interpersonal processes as such imply the perception
of the self (see also Neisser, 1993). In sociology, reinterpreting the concept
of face as one that focuses on relation (rather than on a person), Arundale
(2010) also argued for the omnirelevance of face.
There is a long reception history of Goffman’s writings on the self. For
example, the influential work on politeness by Brown and Levinson (1987)
developed Goffman’s theory of face on a theoretical and analytical level.
The importance of this contribution is recognized even by its recent critics
(see Mills, 2017; O’Driscoll, 2017). Politeness theory suggests that virtually
all communicative actions involve an intrinsic face threat to the recipient
or the speaker (cf. O’Driscoll, 2017, p. 98). This theory offers a structural
model of finite repertoires of realization strategies (Kasper, 1996), that is,
ways of performing these actions such that face threats become minimized.
Such strategies can involve expressing appreciation for the other’s wants
(orientation to positive face) or avoidance of imposition (orientation to
negative face). Politeness theory has generated an important literature in
various scholarly domains, such as pragmatics, where politeness has been
central for explaining indirect speech acts as well as in sociolinguistics, by
contributing to the understanding of issues such as (in)formality, authority,
hierarchy, and power (Ruiz de Zarobe & Ruiz de Zarobe, 2012; Watts,
2003). Politeness theory has also had a major impact on discourse analysis
and interpersonal pragmatics, in which it has been important to model
social positions and social relations, forms of polite as well as impolite
communication (Culpeper et al., 2017; Locher, 2012), and gender dynam-
ics (Mills, 2003). In this collection, Heritage and Clayman discuss the dis-
tinction between positive and negative face. They suggest a link between
the two conversation analytical accounts of preference (one focusing on
the progressivity of action and the other on affiliation) and the two aspects
of face, so that negative face is related to preference-as-progressivity and
positive face to preference-as-affiliation.
While politeness theory offers a formal model for understanding the self
in interaction, the field of conversation analytic studies has been both criti-
cal of the notion of face as well as interested in some face-related practices.
From rather early on, conversation analysts investigated specific contexts
of action and sequential environments in which participants orient to face
problems (see Lerner, 1996; Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984). Rather than
assuming that considerations of face on a general level motivate actions,
these studies sought to describe the momentary, context-specific orienta-
tions to face by participants. A key question for CA remains the procedural
10 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

consequentiality (Schegloff, 1992) of face, which entails whether or not


particular aspects of participants’ actions show – for co-participants and
analysts alike – that they take face into consideration when they decide on
what to do next. In this collection, the chapter by Peräkylä demonstrates
one social setting – the diagnostic interview in psychiatry – where concern
for face seemingly permeates the descriptive actions in which the patients
depict their impulsive behaviors.
Another aspect of the self and face that was highlighted by Goffman is
its connection to emotion: “A person tends to experience an immediate
emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him . . .
his ‘feelings’ become attached to it” (Goffman, 1955, p. 213). In his ethno-
graphically oriented work, Scheff (1988; see also Scheff, 2003) argued for
the social significance of self-related feelings of shame and pride as engines
of social control. In this collection, the connections between the self and
emotion are addressed by Goodwin and Goodwin. In their analysis, they
demonstrate how the presentation of a competent and independent self
is intertwined with, and facilitated by, expressions of deeply emotional
stances, predominantly conveyed by prosodic means.
More than the concept of self or face, EMCA studies have approached
issues pertaining to the identity of interaction participants by means of
membership categorization analysis (MCA; Sacks, 1972, 1992). The
strength of MCA is that, within a course of action, it helps identify under
which specific category the actor’s action is viewed, and thus it can be
identified under a specific social identity. In other words, MCA attempts
to demonstrate the ways in which social identities are made relevant at
particular moments and within particular, situated courses of action (Sche-
gloff, 1992). In Goffman’s work, categorical social identities were in focus,
particularly in Stigma (Goffman, 1963b), where he explored the interac-
tional management of negative attributes (such as physical deformations
or deviant behaviors) that spoil the identity of which a person would oth-
erwise been an incumbent. In discussing the experiences of persons with
stigma, the issues that appear to meet are the social identity categorization
and the self.
More recently, two lines of reasoning have recontextualized Goffman’s
arguments concerning face. By re-visiting Goffman’s discussion of infor-
mation preserve as a territory of the self (Goffman, 1971), Heritage and
Raymond (2005) linked the analysis of the self to a conversation analytical
discussion of epistemics in conversation (see Heritage, 2013). Analyzing
agreements on assessment sequences, Heritage and Raymond suggested
that claims and sometimes disputes regarding knowledgeability involve not
only social expectations, rights, and obligations to know but also issues of
face. Another line of the recontextualization of Goffman’s theory of self
brings it into dialogue with psychiatry. Peräkylä (2015) argues that there
Body, participation, self 11

is a yet unrecognized theoretical connection between the theory of face


and the psychiatric understanding of disturbances of the self in personality
disorders (APA, 2013). This suggests that it is the experience and practices
associated with ‘face’ that have been impaired in personality disorders. In
other words, during ordinary interactional face work, individuals with per-
sonality disorders might not be able to receive the recognition of the value
of the self. In this collection, the connections between personality disorders
and face-work are pursued in the chapter by Peräkylä.

4. Participation
The notion of “participation framework” was introduced and developed
by Goffman in Forms of Talk (1981) – although Goffman first introduced
the concept earlier in Frame Analysis (1974, pp. 496–559). His conceptu-
alization of participation was highly influenced by Harvey Sacks and con-
versation analysis, and in turn, it influenced linguistics and ethnography.
Goffman’s vision of participation emanates from the critique of the
conventional ‘two-party paradigm’ (1981, p. 132), opposing speaker and
hearer, and reveals the plurality of (not always convergent) facets of both
parties. Goffman offers an innovative critical appraisal of the positions of
speakers and hearers, even though he maintains their asymmetry and repro-
duces the traditional division between them. As early as in 1974, Goffman
emphasizes that the speaker is not a monolithic figure but rather “splits
himself off from the content of his words by expressing that their speaker is
not he himself or not he himself in a serious way” (Goffman, 1974, p. 512).
Later, Goffman systematizes this observation: in discussing the ‘production
format’ of utterances, he differentiates between the animator as a mere
‘sounding box’ from the author who selects the words to be uttered, and
the principal who is responsible for what is said (1981, pp. 144–145).
Goffman therefore demonstrates that the speaker is not a homogeneous
entity. This is in line with interests in the multiple and even contradictory
voices inhabiting the speaker that have been developed in other intellectual
contexts by Freud, Lacan, Bakhtin, and Gramsci. Goffman also devotes his
attention to the hearer, often considered by other analysts as absent, silent,
and passive; he offers a fascinating typology of how hearers participate in
ratified and unratified ways, in ongoing interactions, as overhearers and
eavesdroppers, and in a variety of forms of unratified exchanges, such as
crossplay, byplay, and sideplay (1981, pp. 132–134).
Goffman’s approach to participation has been read and received in many
diverse ways. Some insist on the permanence of the global participation
framework, typically characterizing institutional activities, and insist on
how it enables (or hinders) different forms of participation. Others firmly
support the subtle differentiations that footing categories make possible
12 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

and develop them, for example, in terms of the linguistic expressions that
manifest them.
Goffman’s approach to participation frameworks inspired studies in
anthropology and education interested in the permanence of participation
structures, mainly studied by ethnographers interested in the compara-
tive studies of spatial and institutional arrangements of participants which
favor or exclude their participation to activities. For instance, Philips (1983)
explored the reasons for the school failure of Native American students,
adopting the concept of participation structure to oppose the white Ameri-
can classroom where the teacher controlled the student participation, and
centrally distributed opportunities to speak – and the Native American
class – more centered on peer exchange and group work, in which the
teacher had rather a role of support. Thus, by distinguishing structures of
participation, favoring different styles of communication, Philips (1983)
was able to demonstrate that Native American students were discriminated
by means of organizing participation.
Goffman’s approach to participation in the article Footing (Goffman,
1979) resonated rather differently with linguistic inquiries that were likewise
interested in the non-monolithic profile of the speaker and in distinguishing
various voices in talk and text. It is significant that the concept of footing is
introduced by referring to Gumperz’s notions of code-switching that enable
shifts in perspective (1976), differentiating voices in reported speech, forms
of involvement, types of addressees, topic versus comment, old versus new
information, etc. (Goffman, 1981, p. 127). Pinpointing the fact that linguists
have been critical of the distinction between speaker/hearer for a long time,
Levinson (1988, p. 168) shows how Goffman’s typology of participant roles
(the term he uses instead of footing) partially converge with grammatical
categories that are made relevant by typologically diverse language systems
to differentiate references to persons and mark phenomena of perspectivi-
zation. Goffman’s roles approximate ideas of polyphony, such as Ducrot’s
distinctions between locuteur (the producer of the talk) and énonciateur
(what Goffman would refer to as the author) (1984), which led to analyses
of negation, presupposition, irony, and reported speech.
The idea of participation is ubiquitous in conversation analysis, although
it is often not conceptualized as such. Participation in CA has not acquired
the same theoretical status as one of the basic structures of all interac-
tion, such as the organization of turn-taking or sequence organization. The
legacy of Goffman has been both recognized and criticized in the work of
Charles and Marjorie Goodwin, and further elaborated on in their chap-
ter in this volume. In particular, Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) highlight
the importance of the temporal and embodied dimensions of participation.
They demonstrate that the typology characterizing speaker’s and hearer’s
positions is too rigid, and underestimates the fleeting and flexible ways
Body, participation, self 13

in which these are constantly established and re-established in time. This


calls for a more dynamic conception of participation, which continuously
changes as interaction unfolds. This also re-examines how the positions of
speaker and hearer are orchestrated in social interaction (Goodwin, 1981).
Even though Goffman introduced the notion of participation, acknowledg-
ing the importance of its visual and even tactile (1981, p. 129) dimensions,
talk remains at the center of his approach to participation, neglecting the
fundamental contribution of both body postures and movements as well as
body arrangements (Goodwin, 2007a, 2007b; Mondada, 2009). It should
be acknowledged, however, that body, posture, and movements were more
central in other Goffmanian contributions, such as in his studies of naviga-
tion in public spaces (1963a, 1971), which will be discussed in the next
section below.
The notion of participation has contributed to a better understanding
of the fundamental aspects of the organization of social interaction that
involves several participants in different configurations. This has been
explored mainly by C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin. For instance, they
demonstrate how a multi-unit turn is interactively organized by being
addressed to various persons in the absence of any responsiveness (Good-
win, 1979, 1981), how a word search is distributed among different parties
(Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986), how storytelling might involve different
co-authors (Goodwin, 1984, 1987) and how assessments orchestrate the
convergence of different voices (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987). Later, this
has prompted C. Goodwin to elaborate on the concept of the lamination
of voices and other resources (2017). In this volume, the chapter by Good-
win and Goodwin pursues this topic, demonstrating how various voices –
including the active voice of Chil, a speaker who can barely speak – are not
only skillfully collectively organized by the participants but also negotiated
and transformed within the course of dissent in the ongoing conversation.
The research by Goodwin and Goodwin and their discussion of Goffman
has influenced the analysis of the different voices audible in social inter-
action, that is, in reported talk (Goodwin, 1990a, 1990b; Holt & Clift,
2007). They have inspired research on reported speech and polyphonic
voices and stances, as well as on recipient design and multiple addressees
(Goodwin, 1990b), involving diverse forms of authorship, responsibility,
and involvement in talk (Mondada, 2015). This has also had an impact on
the elaboration of the difference between participants and parties (Sche-
gloff, 1995) as well as on the notion of assemblies of participants (Lerner,
1993, 2002).
From a broader perspective, the notion of participation has also been
central for detailing the specific organization of distinct institutional set-
tings. This affected the reflections within educational research in the
1980s concerning different ways of organizing inclusion and exclusion in
14 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

classrooms (Erickson, 1992; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Philips, 1983); it


has been crucial for characterizing the ways that the asymmetry between
doctor and patients are actively managed in medical consultations (Heath,
1986; Maynard, 1991), as well as the ways in which aphasic participants
are given more or less opportunities to participate (Laakso, 2014; Saldert
et al., 2015). More generally, participation is crucial for an understanding
of how institutions are “talked into being”, and specific formats of insti-
tutional talk are mediated (Heritage, 1984; Heritage & Clayman, 2010).
Lately, it has been fundamental to recognize how collectivities are achieved
and organized, such as the interactions with larger audiences and crowds
(for example, leading to a respecification of the political notion of partici-
pation in interaction, Mondada, 2013; Keel & Mondada, 2017).
In this volume, the notion of participation occupies a central position.
It is further elaborated on by Goodwin and Goodwin, extending their
previous studies and referring back to their significant critical chapter of
2004. Participation is likewise addressed by other chapters. In particular,
Keevallik discusses the issue of how “response cries” (Goffman, 1978)
are produced and (over)heard in a situation of co-presence and co-action,
and demonstrates how sounds displayed as outbursts of the body – such
as grunts and strains produced while doing physical efforts – are actually
finely tailored within the ongoing action and by taking into consideration
the complex participation space of the ongoing activity. The concept of
“response cries” is also evoked by Clift in her study of a particular facial
expression consisting of raised eyebrows and pursed lips, produced as a
skeptical response to a claim made by a co-participant. Participation is
fundamental in every study of multi-party interactions: Wilkinson et al. in
their chapter observe how this becomes increasingly complex within the
organization of delicate courses of action, such as complaints in multiparty
interactions targeting a co-present party. In this case, the local turn-taking
organization integrates the fact that an action (a complaint) can make a
response relevant by one participant (the complained-about person) even
when the speaker (the complainer) is not addressing them directly. As in
the chapter by Goodwin and Goodwin, the chapter by Wilkinson et al.
demonstrates how it is possible to productively revisit categories as an
“addressed” versus “non-addressed” recipient within the dynamic sequen-
tial organization of actions in social interaction.

5. Embodied practices
An important line in the early work of Goffman analyzed gatherings in
public spaces. His insights constituted a rich array of intuitions about
social conduct in groups and among unacquainted persons. This concerns
how people maintained unfocused interactions and civic inattention when
Body, participation, self 15

in co-presence, how they shift to focused interaction, and how they manage
gaze, glances, and looks. Other related human behavior Goffman analyzed
included how people engage in multiple activities and how they navigate
in public spaces by tacitly coordinating and avoiding collisions (Goffman,
1963a, 1971). In this work, Goffman introduced early on an attention to
the body, mobility, and space, as well as practices of gazing and glancing.
These ideas all resonate today in much of the contemporary research that
has revisited the body as central for social theory and has been able to
advance due to video studies and multimodal analyses.
Goffman’s insights into gatherings in public places were rather early on
also developed further by urban anthropologists and sociologists working
ethnographically, exploring the ways in which strangers manage their ordi-
nary trajectories in the city and the conditions at which they meet (or avoid
each other) (Lofland, 1973, 1998). More recently, a related field inspired
by the work of Goffman concerns mobility studies (Jensen, 2022). For
example, Conley (2012) develops a sociology of traffic through an ethnog-
raphy of drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, interested in how these different
“vehicular units” (Goffman, 1971) interact in their mobile trajectories and
negotiate the order of traffic. Likewise, the notion of negotiation-in-motion
(Jensen, 2010, 2022, p. 293) was proposed to account for the dynamic
complexity of human mobility, which connected the central sociological
problem of ‘order’ with Goffman’s insights into how pedestrians negotiate
traffic problems (as well as joggers who negotiate the space they run in
and that might be occupied by other categories of walkers (Smith, 2001).
More generally, Goffman has also inspired a reconsideration of the body
in sociology (Crossley, 2001, 2022; Shilling, 1993), crucially referring to
Relations in Public (1971) and Behavior in Public Places (1963a) as dem-
onstrating the centrality of the bodily idiom (1963a, p. 35) for the intelligi-
bility of public life, and therefore the embodied dimension of fundamental
forms of sociality.
From an EMCA perspective, it is relevant to pinpoint how Goffman’s
work on public spaces acknowledges some fundamental dimensions of the
multimodal organization of interaction that have been investigated over
the last decades, often not in reference to Goffman.
First and foremost, Goffman offers central insights into the management
of gazes and glances in social gatherings between people approaching each
other – concerning how focused versus unfocused interactions are based on
different types of gaze, how joint attention is organized, and how mutual
gaze characterizes focused encounters and the “ecological huddle wherein
participants orient to one another and away from those who are present in
the situation but not officially in the encounter” (1964, p. 135). These top-
ics continue to be central in the contemporary discussions on the organiza-
tion of gaze (from Kendon & Ferber, 1967 to Goodwin, 1981; Rossano,
16 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

2012), and are further enhanced and made controversial by discussions


on the use of eye-tracking and the results of such studies (Auer, 2017). In
this volume, the importance of gaze, seeing, looking at, and monitoring
others is emphasized by several authors. As demonstrated by Heath and
Luff’s chapter, in auctions, the auctioneer looks at and closely monitors the
audience; reciprocally, the bidders carefully follow their search for further
bids, and visibility is central to managing the impressions on which the
procedure itself is based. In the chapter by Mondada, the recognizability of
the “with” is crucially built by the gaze of others on them. In the chapter
by Clift, the significance of the “skeptical look” is itself established by the
fact that it addressed or at least was captured by them.
Second, Goffman’s analysis of behavior in public places discusses not
only different types of gaze practices but also how the entire body is seen
and made visible during such encounters. In this respect, the notion of
“body gloss” is central, referring to “the process whereby an individual
pointedly uses over-all body gesture to make otherwise unavailable facts
about his situation gleanable. Thus, in driving and walking the individual
conducts himself or rather his vehicular shell, so that the direction, rate,
and resoluteness of his proposed course will be readable” (1971, p. 11). The
notion of body glosses is crucial in determining how the visible account-
ability of bodies in interaction is constituted. All the empirical chapters of
this volume consider body details that constitute the practices and actions
targeted by the analysis and reflect upon their situated relevance as it is
produced, made relevant and recognized by the co-participants. The chap-
ter by Bergmann and Peräkylä, for example, discusses the ways in which
body arrangements and gaze are intertwined with the organization of
attention.
Third, Goffman’s perspective on bodies in public spaces highlighted
early on the importance and relevance of studying the mobility of social
life. His conceptualization of mobile participation frameworks in terms of
mobile withs and vehicular units (Goffman, 1971, pp. 26–40) has inspired
contemporary research on mobile talk-in-interaction (Haddington et al.,
2013), mobile formations in general (McIlvenny et al., 2014), and mobile
practices of pedestrians in particular (De Stefani & Mondada, 2018; Liber-
man, 2013; Livingston, 1987; Mondada, 2009; Ryave & Schenkein, 1974;
Weilenmann et al., 2014). It has also inspired studies of mobility of the
blind (Relieu, 1994), and of people affected by mental illness (Merlino &
Mondada, 2019). Moreover, communication in and with cars (De Stefani
et al., 2018; Deppermann et al., 2018) and their coordinated organiza-
tion has also benefited from his insights on navigation in space. This line
of research on mobility is pursued in this volume by Mondada’s chapter,
exploring not only how the at-a-glance recognizability of the “withs” is
a situated achievement but also how its continuous relevance is actively
Body, participation, self 17

built by and through the moment-by-moment details of members display-


ing their actions as those of a “with”.
Goffman thus offers crucial insights regarding co-presence, unfocused
and focused interaction, and the relevance of public space for understand-
ing how unacquainted people tacitly recognize each other on the basis of
“body glosses” and “tie signs”. Goffman also provides for the categorial
recognizability of each other as “fellow users of a public [place]” (Sacks,
cited in Goffman, 1971, p. 7, fn. 5). This refers to how these users mutually
regulate their behavior and thereby coordinate autonomous (in unfocused
interaction) or convergent (in focused interaction) trajectories. This also
connects with the notion of “tickets” to enter in interaction (Sacks, 1992,
p. 265). Nonetheless, while Goffman highlights the evidence on the recog-
nizability at a glance of some conduct, he does not consider this visible evi-
dence to be the product of a concerted methodical accomplishment. These
processes in and through time, crucially relying on the detailed organiza-
tion of embodied conducts, are aspects analyzed by the studies presented
in this volume.
Goffman also highlighted the public visibility at a glance of a “body gloss”
or a “with.” But he did not elaborate on their sustained accountability beyond
the instance of a glance, nor their accountable transformations moment-by-
moment as trajectories of unfolding action. Ethnomethodological and con-
versation analytic work interested in walking together (Ryave & Schenkein,
1974), in the tacit coordination of pedestrians (Lee & Watson, 1993), and in
the dynamic shaping and reshaping of interactional space (Mondada, 2009),
all reveal how this accomplishment is methodically assembled in a continu-
ous way through time. Similarly, in an attempt to characterize the generic
order of embodied conducts in public space, Goffman evokes rules that
regulate public behaviors (1971, pp. 30–31). However, from an ethnometh-
odological perspective, these rules are highly indexical and contingent upon
multiple locally made relevant aspects where the meaning-making depends
less on the rule and rather consists of the methodically situated adjustments
of trajectories and actions (Rawls, 1987). For example, crossing the road
becomes less a problem of keeping face (Goffman, 1971, pp. 127–128) than
a matter of fine-grained, tacit coordination that is based on accountable
embodied behaviors (Smith, 2017; Merlino & Mondada, 2019), exhibit-
ing other subtle forms of civility (Laurier, 2019). Furthermore, the EMCA
work on the openings of focused interactions in public space, while centrally
inspired by Goffman’s insights into how people move from mere gatherings
(co-presence) to focused encounters, points to the step-by-step accomplish-
ments that are secured through the sequential order of actions and sequences
(D’Antoni et al., 2022; De Stefani & Mondada, 2018).
Goffman created fertile analytical ground for the investigation of embod-
ied conducts in social arenas, and his work offers a myriad of original
18 Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä

observations about the fundamental micro-practices constituting the soci-


ality of urban life. These topics can serve as an inspiration for EMCA stud-
ies. In turn, EMCA studies revisit Goffman’s topics by decidedly focusing
on the primacy of the situated and methodical organization of actions
in time. This praxeological approach, which the studies included in this
volume aim to develop, is fundamental in demonstrating that the micro-
phenomena identified by Goffman are practical accomplishments and as
such require an analytic approach able to demonstrate the relevant details
of these practices as they are assembled moment-by-moment and in sequen-
tial order. Praxeological interactional multimodal studies benefit from the
use of videos, and the analytical possibilities of video studies, which enable
a detailed examination of the moment-by-moment organization in courses
of action. This approach ultimately revisits the understanding of the funda-
mental principles that motivates the intelligibility and intersubjectivity of
public life. With and beyond Goffman, these principles enable us to address
the issues of how the accountability of practices is constructed and made
publicly available, how it is actually addressed, oriented to, and interpreted
by others, and how this is revealed in fine-grained subtle adjustments and
coordination of the individuals inhabiting public space and their unfolding
in time, within trajectories of action.

6. Conclusion
The studies presented in this collection are inspired by Goffman and adopt
the methods and theoretical concepts of ethnomethodology and conversa-
tion analysis (EMCA).
All empirical studies included in this collection also combine four ana-
lytical foci. All studies (1) originate from EMCA; (2) they concentrate on
a particular empirical field or fields (such as an auction, a family interac-
tion, a public space, or a psychiatric interview); (3) they focus on par-
ticular fine-grained embodied interactional practices (such as movement,
facial expressions, gaze, or prosody) on the basis of video recordings; and
(4) they critically elaborate specific ideas or concepts that originate from
Goffman’s texts (such as participation, self, withs, response cries, or shared
attention). While the chapters are firmly rooted in Goffman’s ideas and
concepts, the empirical methods and conceptual perspective from EMCA
enable them to move beyond Goffman’s original approach. The EMCA
conceptualization of social scenes and social facts as self-organizing assem-
blages makes it possible to envision “Goffmanian phenomena” as local
interactional achievements, rather than culturally given, rule-governed
forms of action. Analytically, video-based EMCA methods facilitate a mul-
timodal approach and offer a level of detailed granularity that was not
possible in Goffman’s ethnographies.
Body, participation, self 19

This book also has four chapters that are primarily focused on theoretical
issues. They address the continuities and discontinuities between Goffman
and EMCA, balancing these two in different ways. In his historical review,
Meyer presents evidence that Goffman and Garfinkel communicated more
and appreciated each other more than has thus far been assumed; nonethe-
less they also had points of disagreement, especially regarding the concept
of ritual that was central for Goffman. Maynard and Turowetz consider
another point of discontinuity: the understanding of rules as explanans
of interactional practices, a question in which Goffman was close to the
“mainstream” sociology, a perspective challenged by ethnomethodology.
Heritage and Clayman, on the other hand, focus on continuity, arguing
that the CA idea of preference structure should be seen as anchored to ten-
ets of interactional organization that Goffman referred to as face. Finally,
Inglis comments on continuities and discontinuities from a different view-
point, arguing that Goffman’s original contribution to social sciences was
also made possible by his creative writing style. Inglis also suggests that
this creativity may be at risk in EMCA and other studies if scholars over-
emphasize the technical refinement of data gathering and analysis at the
expense of “thinking like Goffman”.
Goffman was born 100 years ago and died more than 40 years ago and
there is broad consensus that he renewed much of social science. This book
attests to our understanding that the ramifications of this renewal continue
to offer further avenues for research.

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Part I

Discussing Goffman’s
conceptual insights
from the perspective of
conversation analysis and
ethnomethodology
2 Goffman and Garfinkel
Joint enterprises, theoretical
differences and personal
sympathies
Christian Meyer

1. Introduction
Erving Goffman’s relationship with Harold Garfinkel was multi-faceted.
Garfinkel and Goffman both stand for the achievement of having inno-
vated sociology by developing, diffusing and firmly establishing social
research about the evanescent details of everyday life and face-to-face
interaction, both theoretically and empirically, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Together with contemporary sociologists such as Howard Becker, Herbert
Blumer, Edward Lemert, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, they opened
up a new subject matter for the discipline. Goffman and Garfinkel both
represent a sociology that inspects in detail the ways in which people act
together in building their social reality physically in real time. They moved
the discipline away from focusing on abstract social structures that are
inaccessible for actors, and toward the valuation of the practices of actual
individuals and dyads within concrete social situations. Goffman and Gar-
finkel shared a concern with closely examining empirically processes of
social interaction in situ, a focus on the role of communication within
these processes and a skepticism towards quantitative methods, advocat-
ing instead methods of participant observation.
Thus, Goffman and Garfinkel lead the discipline toward a more detailed
look at the interaction order as a topic of sociology in its own right and
not as standing for something else (e.g., social structure or culture). In
doing so, they were confronted with the challenge that studies on social
interaction at the time of their doctoral research were dominated by the
“small group interaction” approach, both at Harvard and Chicago (Bales
et al., 1950). Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s emphasis laid on factors relevant
for social interaction as well as on its unfolding dynamics in real-time. Both
focused on the relevance of real, putatively “messy” processes of commu-
nication for the establishment and maintenance of social order. This is

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094111-3
30 Christian Meyer

shown by both early outlines and manuscripts by Garfinkel (1948/2006,


1952/2008) and Goffman’s doctoral thesis (1953), which centers on the
communication and conduct in a community on Shetland. Garfinkel was
familiar with research on information processing and communication
theory more generally (Garfinkel, 1952/2008), and Goffman (1953) was
informed by anthropological and ethological studies of communication as
well as Birdwhistell’s kinesics. Both were not only interested in cultural
particularities but in generic social forms. Their concern with communica-
tion and linguistics sparked an interest in explicating member competences
that later led to joint interests with the ethnography of speaking and socio-
linguistics endeavors within the University of California system (Garfinkel,
1972, p. 307; Goffman, 1974, p. vii, 44 n. 14).
While Goffman focused on social interaction and the self, Garfinkel (later
joined by Sacks) turned to the problem of intelligibility of social action at
its most fundamental level. Garfinkel furthermore argued as early as in the
1950s and 1960s that even scientific practices and scientific objects are rec-
ognizably constructed social orders that should be made an object of socio-
logical inquiry. However, there are also some early theoretically anchored
differences between the two scholars: Goffman’s aim was to generate a
conceptual framework that illuminates everyday behavior, especially face-
to-face interaction and its rituals, whereas Garfinkel was concerned with
elucidating the processes by which social phenomena are practically consti-
tuted and then experienced by the co-participants as objective facts. Goff-
man treats interaction as being heavily influenced by stable outside factors,
whereas Garfinkel insists that any context of social interaction can only be
effective when the co-participants actively constitute it as being relevant.
In this text, I will deal with the relationship of the two famous soci-
ologists, both personal and intellectual. As will be revealed, Garfinkel and
Goffman knew each other very well beginning in the early 1950s, read
each other’s texts closely and often before publication, used them in their
university courses and even pursued joint publication projects. This con-
tradicts the widespread impression of dislike or hostility between the two,
even though it is also clear that both scholars theoretically differed in many
respects. To discuss these issues, I will first examine “views from within
and from without” about their relationship, mutual interests and scien-
tific positions. Then I will further consider convergences, but also differ-
ences in their “basic theoretical orientations.” My third interest concerns
the different positions the two scholars adopt in regard to “the interac-
tion order.” I will then discuss further how both contributed, individually
and in co-operation, to “developing a sociology of everyday life.” Since
their respective positions did not remain stable throughout their careers,
I will discuss in two subsequent sections the divergences that their sociolo-
gies went through in regard to “identity, self and participation” and “the
Goffman and Garfinkel 31

organization of experience.” By way of conclusion I will reconsider their


relationship, and theoretical positions, about “mutual recognition and
trust.”

2. Views from within and from without


From the outside, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Goffman’s drama-
turgical sociology were viewed in the 1950s and 1960s as two closely con-
nected exemplars of the same sociological movement that aimed at turning
sociology away from a focus on “society” (as represented by Parsons,
Lazarsfeld or Merton) toward social situations in everyday life. Frequently,
this view from the outside was antagonistic, criticizing it as trivial, non-
scientific and subjective (famously Gouldner, 1970). Until today, Goffman’s
and Garfinkel’s theoretical advancements tend to be sorted into the areas
of “micro-sociology” and “qualitative methods” which does not live up
to their own aspirations. Their ambition was not to fill in trivial “micro”
details of the big picture provided by theorists of society, nor to produce
“qualitative” research that prepares the ground for quantitative surveys.
Instead, Goffman intended to complement the level of society with an inde-
pendent interaction order sui generis. Garfinkel, drawing on phenomenol-
ogy, offered an alternative picture of society that focuses on the perceptual,
interpretive and judgmental work through which society is accomplished
as a social object by its members. In this vein, Parsons’ concept of “com-
mitment” as shared moral basis of society (Garfinkel, 1962, 2019, p. 234)
became translated into the realm of fragile situated action and empiricized
by what Garfinkel (1963) calls “trust conditions” and Goffman (1956)
calls “working consensus” (cf. Rawls & Turowetz, 2021, p. 320).1
While initially, Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s approaches were seen as com-
plementary up to being open for integration into a single general theory
(Denzin, 1969), particularly ethnomethodologists began to insist on signifi-
cant differences between their own approach and the work – increasingly
well-known in the American public – of Goffman as well as symbolic inter-
actionism (Zimmerman & Wieder, 1970). These debates of mutual differ-
entiation partly led to the wrong impression that Goffman was “almost in
a personal fight (intellectual, that is) with Harold Garfinkel” (Winkin &
Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013, 67).
For it is widely unknown that Goffman and Garfinkel knew each other
well and cared for each other. Many of the ideas later attributed to either
ethnomethodology or Goffman actually emerged in early close exchanges
between Garfinkel and Goffman.
Their joint initiative toward developing a sociology of everyday life and
face-to-face interaction began when Goffman and Garfinkel met in 1953
immediately after their doctorates. Garfinkel had received his doctorate
32 Christian Meyer

from Harvard in 1952, Goffman from Chicago in 1953. At the initiative of


Edward Shils, in 1953, Goffman and other Chicago graduate students were
made available copies of seminar papers from Harvard doctoral students,
including Garfinkel (1948/2006). Goffman sent comments to Garfinkel
and encouraged him to publish the manuscript (Rawls & Turowetz, 2019,
p. 21, n. 15). A copy of the manuscript with Goffman’s marginal notes
is kept in the Garfinkel Archive. In this time, Goffman also sent an early
draft of his dissertation to Garfinkel, and they met and discussed it (Wieder
et al., 2010, p. 134).
They continued their interchange: in the 1950s and 1960s, the two schol-
ars regularly exchanged their unpublished manuscripts, placed each other’s
texts on their seminar literature lists and taught them to their students
(Turner, 2010; Wieder et al., 2010, p. 134). Larry Wieder, a 1957 gradu-
ate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, learned about
Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in the Edinburgh Edition
(1956) in an introductory course because his instructor Clovis Shepherd
had previously read it in a seminar with Garfinkel at UCLA (Wieder et al.,
2010, p. 134). They also engaged in personal contact: as Cicourel (2009)
reports, Erving Goffman celebrated New Year’s Eve of 1957 at Harold
Garfinkel’s home in Los Angeles.
When Goffman was at Berkeley, Philip Selznick, who had arranged for
Garfinkel to take over his position at UCLA in 1954, but already moved
to Berkeley in 1952, founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society
in 1961. This allowed numerous later interaction sociologists to receive
funding for their doctoral projects. These include, for example, David Sud-
now, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Roy Turner. Aaron Cicourel
conducted a postdoctoral project at the Center. Parsons’ newer work, Goff-
man’s first books and Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s joint one-semester stay at
Harvard in 1959 had sparked a great interest in interaction and everyday
sociology among students on the East Coast and now drew them to Cali-
fornia. Schegloff reports, “I learned from Goffman of the very possibility
of studying interaction per se, and of the possibility of description as a
serious disciplined undertaking” (Cmejrková & Prevignano, 2003, p. 21).
For many of these students, Goffman served as a springboard to Garfinkel
(Rawls et al., 2008). Some speak of a “propaedeutic function” that Goff-
man assumed for ethnomethodology (Wieder et al., 2010, p. 136). Often,
his influence was mediated by Sacks who began his own research on the
details of conversational activities upon his arrival at UCLA from Berkeley
in 1963 (Sudnow, 1972, p. vix).
Goffman’s relationship with Garfinkel intensified thanks to the favorable
situation that both had received assistant professor positions within the
dynamic and innovative University of California system (Garfinkel, 1954
in Los Angeles, Goffman, 1958 in Berkeley), where, as Berkeley sociologist
Another random document with
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“No,” he replied in a curious, strained tone. “It’s foolish to say what
the end of anything is going to be.”
She looked at him a moment pleadingly and with a gesture of
helplessness started toward the door. He opened it for her, followed
her into the hall, pressed the buttons that lighted the rooms above,
and returned to the living-room....

III
Their routine continued much as it had been for the past two years,
but to her tortured senses there was something ominous now in the
brevity of their contacts. Shep often remained away late and on his
return crept softly upstairs to his room without speaking to her,
though she left her light burning brightly.
Constance kept to her room, she hadn’t been well, and the doctor
told her to stay in bed for a few days. For several nights she heard
Shep moving about his room, and the maid told her that he had been
going over his clothing and was sending a box of old suits to some
charitable institution. A few days later he went into her room as she
was having breakfast in bed. She asked him to shift the tray for her,
more for something to say than because the service was necessary,
and inquired if he were feeling well, but without dispelling the hard
glitter that had become fixed in his eyes.
“Do you know when Leila’s coming home?” he inquired from the foot
of the bed.
“No; I haven’t heard. I’ve seen no one; the doctor told me to keep
quiet.”
“Yes; I suppose you have to do that,” he said without emotion. He
went out listlessly and as he passed her she put out her hand,
touched his sleeve; but he gave no sign that he was aware of the
appeal the gesture implied....
It was on a Saturday morning that he went in through his dressing
room, bade her good morning in much his old manner and rang for
her coffee. He had breakfasted, he said, and merely wanted to be
sure that she was comfortable.
“Thank you, Shep. I’m all right. I’ve been troubled about you, dear—
much more than about myself. But you look quite fit this morning.”
“Feeling fine,” he said. “This is a half day at the office and I want to
get on the job early. I’m dated up for a foursome this afternoon with
George, Bruce and Carroll; so I won’t be home till after the game.
You won’t mind?”
“Why, I’m delighted to have you go, Shep!”
“I always do the best I can, Connie,” he went on musingly. “I
probably make a lot of mistakes. I don’t believe God intended me for
heavy work; if he had he’d have made me bigger.”
“How foolish, Shep. You’re doing wonderfully. Isn’t everything going
smoothly at the office?”
“Just fine! I haven’t a thing to complain of!”
“Is everything all right now?” she asked, encouraged to hope for
some assurance of his faith in her.
“What isn’t all right will be—there’s always that!” he replied with a
laugh.
He lingered beside the bed and took her hand, bent over and kissed
her, let his cheek rest against hers in an old way of his.
“Good-bye,” he said from the door, and then with a smile—Shep’s
familiar, wistful little smile—he left her.

IV
Shep and Whitford won the foursome against Bruce and Carroll, a
result due to Whitford’s superior drives and Carroll’s bad putting.
They were all in high humor when they returned to the clubhouse,
chaffing one another about their skill as they dressed. Shep made a
tour of the verandas, greeting his friends, answering questions as to
Connie’s health. The four men were going in at once and Shep, who
had driven Carroll out, suggested that he and Bruce change partners
for the drive home.
“There are a few little points about the game I want to discuss with
George,” he explained as they walked toward the parking sheds.
“All right,” Bruce assented cheerfully. “You birds needn’t be so set
up; next week Carroll and I will give you the trimming of your young
lives!”
“Ah, the next time!” Shep replied ironically, and drove away with
Whitford beside him....
“Shep’s coming on; he’s matured a lot since he went into the trust
company,” remarked Carroll, as he and Bruce followed Shep’s car.
“Good stuff in him,” said Bruce. “One of those natures that develops
slowly. I never saw him quite as gay as he was this afternoon.”
“He was always a shy boy, but he’s coming out of that. I think his
father was wise in taking him out of the battery plant.”
“No doubt,” Bruce agreed, his attention fixed on Shep’s car.
Shep had set a pace that Bruce was finding it difficult to maintain.
Carroll presently commented upon the wild flight of the car ahead,
which was cutting the turns in the road with reckless abandon,
leaving a gray cloud behind.
“The honor of my car is at stake!” said Bruce grimly, closing his
windshield against the dust.
“By George! If Shep wasn’t so abstemious you’d think he’d mixed
alcohol with his gas,” Carroll replied. “What the devil’s got into him!”
“Maybe he wants a race,” Bruce answered uneasily, remembering
Shep’s wild drive the night of their talk on the river. “There’s a bad
turn at the creek just ahead—he can’t make it at that speed!”
Bruce stopped, thinking Shep might check his flight if he found he
wasn’t pursued; but the car sped steadily on.
“Shep’s gone nutty or he’s trying to scare George,” said Carroll. “Go
ahead!”
Bruce started his car at full speed, expecting that at any minute Shep
would stop and explain that it was all a joke of some kind. The flying
car was again in sight, careening crazily as it struck depressions in
the roadbed.
“Oh, God!” cried Carroll, half-rising in his seat. Shep had passed a
lumbering truck by a hair’s breadth, and still no abatement in his
speed. Bruce heard a howl of rage as he swung his own car past the
truck. A danger sign at the roadside gave warning of the short curve
that led upward to the bridge, and Bruce clapped on his brakes.
Carroll, on the running board, peering ahead through the dust,
yelled, and as Bruce leaped out a crash ahead announced disaster.
A second sound, the sound of a heavy body falling, greeted the two
men as they ran toward the scene....
Shep’s car had battered through the wooden fence that protected the
road where it curved into the wooden bridge and had plunged into
the narrow ravine. Bruce and Carroll flung themselves down the
steep bank and into the stream. Shep’s head lay across his arms on
the wheel; Whitford evidently had tried to leap out before the car
struck. His body, half out of the door, had been crushed against the
fence, but clung in its place through the car’s flight over the
embankment.

V
To the world Franklin Mills showed what passed for a noble fortitude
and a superb resignation in Shep’s death. Carroll had carried the
news to him; and Carroll satisfied the curiosity of no one as to what
Mills had said or how he had met the blow. Carroll himself did not
know what passed through Franklin Mills’ mind. Mills had asked
without emotion whether the necessary things had been done, and
was satisfied that Carroll had taken care of everything. Mills received
the old friends who called, among them Lindley. It was a proper thing
to see the minister in such circumstances. The rector of St.
Barnabas went away puzzled. He had never understood Mills, and
now his rich parishioner was more of an enigma than ever.
A handful of friends chosen by Constance and Mills heard the
reading of the burial office in the living-room of Shep’s house.
Constance remained in her room; and Mills saw her first when they
met in the hall to drive together to the cemetery, an arrangement that
she herself had suggested. No sound came from her as she stood
between Mills and Leila at the grave as the last words were said. A
little way off stood the bearers, young men who had been boyhood
friends of Shep, and one or two of his associates from the trust
company. When the grave was filled Constance waited, watching the
placing of the flowers, laying her wreath of roses with her own
hands.
She took Mills’s arm and they returned to their car. No word was
spoken as it traversed the familiar streets. The curtains were drawn;
Mills stared fixedly at the chauffeur’s back; the woman beside him
made no sign. Nothing, as he thought of it, had been omitted; his son
had been buried with the proper rites of the church. There had been
no bungling, no hysterical display of grief; no crowd of the morbidly
curious. When they reached Shep’s house he followed Constance in.
There were women there waiting to care for her, but she sent them
away and went into the reception parlor. The scent of flowers still
filled the rooms, but the house had assumed its normal orderly
aspect. Constance threw back her veil, and Mills saw for the first
time her face with its marks of suffering, her sorrowing eyes.
“Had you something to say to me?” she asked quietly.
“If you don’t mind——” he answered. “I couldn’t come to you before
—but now—I should like you to know——”
As he paused she began to speak slowly, as if reciting something
she had committed to memory.
“We have gone through this together, for reasons clear to both of us.
There is nothing you can say to me. But one or two things I must say
to you. You killed him. Your contempt for him as a weaker man than
you, as a gentle and sweet soul you could never comprehend; your
wish to manage him, to thwart him in things he wanted to do, your
wish to mold him and set him in your own little groove—these are the
things that destroyed him. You shattered his faith in me—that is the
crudest thing of all, for he loved me. So strong was your power over
him and so great was his fear of you that he believed you. In spite of
himself he believed you when you charged me with unfaithfulness.
You drove him mad,” she went on monotonously; “he died a
madman—died horribly, carrying an innocent man down with him.
The child Shep wanted so much—that he would have loved so
dearly—is his. You need have no fear as to that. That is all I have to
say, Mr. Mills.”
She left him noiselessly, leaving behind her a quiet that terrified and
numbed him. He found himself groping his way through the hall,
where someone spoke to him. The words were unintelligible, though
the voice was of someone who meant to be kind. He walked to his
car, carrying his hat as if he were unequal to the effort of lifting it to
his head. The chauffeur opened the door, and as he got in Mills
stumbled and sank upon the seat.
When he reached home he wandered aimlessly about the rooms,
oppressed by the intolerable quiet. One and another of the servants
furtively peered at him from discreet distances; the man who had
cared for his personal needs for many years showed himself in the
hope of being called upon for some service.
“Is that you, Briggs?” asked Mills. “Please call the farm and say that
I’m coming out. Yes—I’ll have dinner there. I may stay a day or two.
You may pack a bag for me—the usual things. Order the car when
you’re ready.”
He resumed his listless wandering, found himself in Leila’s old room,
and again in the room that had been Shep’s. It puzzled him to find
that the inspection of these rooms brought him no sensations. He felt
no inclination to cry out against the fate that had wrought this
emptiness, laid this burden of silence upon his house. Leila had
gone; and he had seen them put Shep into the ground.
“You killed him.” This was what that woman in black had said. She
had said other things, but these were the words that repeated
themselves in his memory like a muffled drum-beat. On the drive to
the farm he did not escape from the insistent reiteration. He was
mystified, bewildered. No one had ever spoken to him like that; no
one had ever before accused him of a monstrous crime or
addressed him as if he were a contemptible and odious thing. And
yet he was Franklin Mills. This was the astounding thing,—that
Franklin Mills should have listened to such words and been unable to
deny them....
At the farm he paused on the veranda, turned his face westward
where the light still lingered in pale tints of gold and scarlet. He
remained staring across the level fields, hearing the murmur of the
wind in the maples, the rustle of dead leaves in the grass, until the
chauffeur spoke to him, took his arm and led him into the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I
Carroll and Bruce dined at the University Club on an evening early in
October. The tragic end of Shepherd Mills and George Whitford had
brought them into a closer intimacy and they were much together.
The responsibility of protecting Shep’s memory had fallen upon
them; and they had been fairly successful in establishing in local
history a record of the tragedy as an accident. Only a very few knew
or suspected the truth.
“Have you anything on this evening?” asked Carroll as they were
leaving the table.
“Not a blessed thing,” Bruce replied.
“Mr. Mills, you know, or rather you don’t know, is at Deer Trail. The
newspaper story that he had gone south for the winter wasn’t true.
He’s been ill—frightfully ill; but he’s better now. I was out there today;
he asked about you. I think he’d like to see you. You needn’t dread it;
he’s talked very little about Shep’s death.”
“If you really think he wants to see me,” Bruce replied dubiously.
“From the way he mentioned you I’m sure it would please him.”
“Very well; will you go along?”
“No; I think he’d like it better if you went alone. He has seen no one
but Leila, the doctor and me; he’s probably anxious to see a new
face. I’ll telephone you’re coming.”
As Bruce entered Mills’s room a white-frocked nurse quietly
withdrew. The maid who had shown him up drew a chair beside the
bed and left them. He was alone with Mills, trying to adjust himself to
the change in him, the pallor of the face against the pillow, the thin
cheeks, the hair white now where it had only been touched with gray.
“This is very kind of you! I’m poor company; but I hoped you wouldn’t
mind running out.”
“I thought you were away. Carroll just told me you were here.”
“No; I’ve been here sometime—so long, in fact, that I feel quite out of
the world.”
“Mrs. Thomas is at home—I’ve seen her several times.”
“Yes, Leila’s very good to me; runs out every day or two. She’s full of
importance over having her own establishment.”
Bruce spoke of his own affairs; told of the progress that had been
made with the Laconia memorial before the weather became
unfavorable. The foundations were in and the materials were being
prepared; the work would go forward rapidly with the coming of
spring.
“I can appreciate your feeling about it—your own idea taking form.
I’ve thought of it a good deal. Indeed, I’ve thought of you a great deal
since I’ve been here.”
“If I’d known you were here and cared to see me I should have come
out,” said Bruce quite honestly.
While Mills bore the marks of suffering and had plainly undergone a
serious illness, his voice had something of its old resonance and his
eyes were clear and alert. He spoke of Shep, with a poignant
tenderness, but left no opening for sympathy. His grief was his own;
not a thing to be exposed to another or traded upon. Bruce marveled
at him. The man, even in his weakness, challenged admiration. The
rain had begun to patter on the sill of an open window and Bruce
went to close it. When he returned to the bed Mills asked for an
additional pillow that he might sit up more comfortably, and Bruce
adjusted it for him. He was silent for a moment; his fingers played
with the edge of the coverlet; he appeared to be thinking intently.
“There are things, Storrs,” he remarked presently, “that are not
helped by discussion. That night I had you to dine with me we both
played about a certain fact without meeting it. I am prepared to meet
it now. You are my son. I don’t know that there’s anything further to
be said about it.”
“Nothing,” Bruce answered.
“If you were not what you are I should never have said this to you. I
was in love with your mother and she loved me. It was all wrong and
the wrong was mine. And in various ways I have paid the penalty.”
He passed his hand slowly over his eyes and went on. “It may be
impertinent, but there’s one thing I’d like to ask. What moved you to
establish yourself here?”
“There was only one reason. My mother was the noblest woman that
ever lived! She loved you till she died. She would never have told me
of you but for a feeling that she wanted me to be near you—to help
in case you were in need. That was all.”
“That was all?” Mills repeated, and for the first time he betrayed
emotion. He lay very still. Slowly his hand moved along the coverlet
to the edge of the bed until Bruce took it in his own. “You and I have
been blessed in our lives; we have known the love of a great woman.
That was like her,” he ended softly; “that was Marian.”
The nurse came in to see if he needed anything, and he dismissed
her for the night. He went on talking in quiet, level tones—of his early
years, of the changing world, Bruce encouraging him by an
occasional question but heeding little what he said. If Mills had
whined, begged forgiveness or offered reparation, Bruce would have
hated him. But Mills was not an ordinary man. No ordinary man
would have made the admission he had made, or, making it, would
have implored silence, exacted promises....
“Millicent—you see her, I suppose?” Mills asked after a time.
“Yes; I see her quite often.”
“I had hoped you did. In fact Leila told me that Millie and you are
good friends. She said a little more—Leila’s a discerning person and
she said she thought there was something a little more than
friendship. Please let me finish! You’ve thought that there were
reasons why you could never ask Millicent to marry you. I’ll take the
responsibility of that. I’ll tell her the story myself—if need be. I leave
that to your own decision.”
“No,” said Bruce. “I shall tell her myself.”
Instead of wearying Mills, the talk seemingly acted as a stimulus.
Bruce’s amazement grew. It was incomprehensible that here lay the
Franklin Mills of his distrust, his jealousy, his hatred.
“Millicent used to trouble me a good deal with some of her ideas,”
said Mills.
“She’s troubled a good many of us,” Bruce agreed with a smile. “But
sometimes I think I catch a faint gleam.”
“I’m sure you do! You two are of a generation that looks for God in
those far horizons she talks about. The idea amused me at first. But I
see now that here is the new religion—the religion of youth—that
expresses itself truly in beautiful things—in life, in conduct, in
unselfishness. The spirit of youth reveals itself in beautiful things—
and calls them God. Shep felt all that, tried in his own way to make
me see—but I couldn’t understand him. I—there are things I want to
do—for Shep. We’ll talk of that later.... Every mistake I’ve made,
every wrong I’ve done in this world has been due to selfishness—
I’ve been saying that to myself every day since I’ve been here. I’ve
found peace in it. There’s no one in the world who has a better right
to hear this from me than you. And this is no death-bed repentance;
I’m not going to die yet a while. It’s rather beaten in on me, Bruce”—
it was the first time he had so addressed him—“that we can’t just live
for ourselves! No! Not if we would find happiness. There comes a
time when every man needs God. The wise thing is so to live that
when the need comes we shan’t find him a stranger!”
The hour grew late, and the wind and rain made a continual clatter
about the house. When Bruce rose to go Mills protested.
“There’s plenty of space here—a room next to mine is ready for a
guest. You’ll find everything you want. We seem to meet in storms!
Please spend the night here.”
And so it came about that for the first time Bruce slept in his father’s
house.
II
Bruce and Millicent were married the next June. A few friends
gathered in the garden late on a golden afternoon—Leila and
Thomas, the Freemans, the Hendersons, a few relatives of the
Hardens from their old home, and Carroll and Bruce’s cousin from
Laconia. The marriage service was read by Dr. Lindley and the
music was provided by a choir of robins in the elms and maples.
Franklin Mills was not present; but before Bruce and Millicent drove
to the station they passed through the gate in the boundary hedge—
Leila had arranged this—and received his good wishes.
The fourth of July had been set as the time for the dedication of the
memorial. The event brought together a great company of
dignitaries, and the governor of the state and the Secretary of War
were the speakers. Mills had driven over with Leila and Thomas, and
he sat with them, Millicent beside him.
Bruce hovered on the edges of the crowd, listening to comments on
his work, marveling himself that it was so good. The chairman of the
local committee sent for him at the conclusion of the ceremonies to
introduce him to the distinguished visitors. When the throng had
dispersed, Millicent, with Carroll and Leila, paused by the fountain to
wait until Bruce was free.
“This is what you get, Millie, for having a famous husband,” Leila
remarked. “He’s probably signing a contract for another monument!”
“There he is!” exclaimed Carroll, pointing up the slope.
Bruce and Mills were slowly pacing one of the colonnades. Beyond it
lay the woodland that more than met Bruce’s expectations as a
background for the memorial. They were talking earnestly, wholly
unaware that they were observed. As they turned once more to
retrace their steps Mills, unconsciously it seemed, laid his arm
across Bruce’s shoulders; and Millicent, seeing and understanding,
turned away to hide her tears.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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