Modern Sociologists on Society and Religion

Inger Furseth, Pål Repstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000459289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

Modern Sociologists on Society and Religion provides an introduction to some of the most influential figures in contemporary social theory with an emphasis on their analyses of society and religion. The figures profiled include Erving Goffman, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Arlie Hochschild, Richard Sennett, and Patricia Hill Collins.

The introduction places these sociologists in contemporary social discourse. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the main work and social analyses of the sociologist in question. After a brief critical assessment, it outlines their view on religion, followed by examples of how other sociologists have used their theories to study religion. Each chapter ends with the authors' suggestions for how their perspectives can be used to analyze the role of religion in contemporary society.

The book provides a general introduction and overview of social analyses in modern sociology. It is a rich resource for scholars and students on all levels who are interested in social theory and the complexity of religion in contemporary society.

1
Erving Goffman

Between manipulation and deference

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181446-2

The legacy of the sociologist Erving Goffman is complex and multifaceted. He left no comprehensive and consistent theoretical system, and those who try to build one based on his texts will have several building blocks left over that do not quite fit. Perhaps the most important and frequently used among sociologists today is the wide range of cogent concepts that he created or disseminated as sociological terms: presentation of self, impression management, framing, frontstage, back-stage, total institutions, stigma, role distance, and face-work, among others.

It is possible to trace four main perspectives in Goffman’s sociology. In his book, Goffman’s Legacy (2003), sociologist A. Javier Treviño points out—as do several other Goffman connoisseurs—four main perspectives in Goffman, all representing important angles of approach to society. We will follow Treviño’s order. First, we can view society and social life as a theater or an arena for drama. Further, rites and ceremonies may also influence society and social life. Rites often serve to maintain peace and tolerance in social life. Thirdly, sometimes social life is about taking risks and “playing high.” The game metaphor—social life as a game, where some win and others lose—is also central to some of Goffman’s work. Finally, and increasingly towards the end of his production, Goffman presented interpretations of social life as images with a specific framing (the frame metaphor), where frame and perspective cause something to fall within and something else to fall outside of the frame, and one sees what falls within from a particular point of view.

Private and professional impulses

Goffman wrote little or nothing about his own life and gave almost no interviews. He guarded his private life, so those who may have been interested in seeing connections between his life and work have had to resort to painstaking detective work among colleagues and relatives. Sociologist Dmitri N. Shalin has been a diligent collector of Goffman documentation and manages an extensive online archive, The Erving Goffman Archives. Shalin draws interesting lines between life and work, and we will refer to some of them (Shalin 2013).

Erving Goffman was born in 1922 in Canada. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. The family lived at first in small towns, later moving to Winnipeg, where 200,000 people of Jewish descent lived. The family gave the children a secular upbringing (Cavan 2013). Shalin (2013) says that his mother and other relatives were very interested in theater, and as a schoolboy, Erving played in Hamlet. The immigrants’ environment was competitive and characterized by a desire to get on and succeed in society; at the same time, good manners meant a lot. The father eventually became a successful and wealthy investor on the stock exchange, but he experienced an early bankruptcy that compelled the family to move and begin again from scratch. It seems that the father was also a skilled poker player.

Dmitri Shalin perceives some themes in this upbringing as central to Goffman’s scientific production. He was an immigrant and a Jew in Canada in a period with a good deal of anti-Semitism. He was also small in stature. Shalin remarks that for this reason, he avoided dancing at student parties. On the other hand, he took notes after the parties! One theme in Goffman’s sociological texts was how people present themselves to others, another how polite ceremonial can smooth down social life, a third how people can find meaning in cultivating risky actions, for example, through gambling.

Goffman completed three years of study at the University of Manitoba in chemistry, philosophy, and English. In 1945, he began to work at the Canadian Film Board. Here he learned a lot about documentaries, and some have viewed his texts as a kind of verbal documentary. He thrived best as a lecturer when he could show slides—the PowerPoints of the time (Winkin 1999). Parallel with his film job, he began to study sociology, first in Toronto and later in Chicago. Goffman married Angelica Choate in 1952. She came from the affluent Bostonian upper class and wrote a master’s thesis on the upper class’s personality traits. Goffman thanks her for valuable input in the book that gave him his international breakthrough, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956/1959). The marriage ended tragically. Angelica struggled with depression and committed suicide in 1964. Although not source-based, it is tempting to see a connection between these experiences and Goffman’s critical attitude towards psychiatry and mental hospitals, as first expressed in the book Asylums (1961). This book evolved from a one-year stay as a field researcher at a large traditional mental hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1955 and 1956, Goffman’s second extended period of fieldwork. Previously he had spent 16 months from December 1949 in a local community on the island of Unst in the Shetland Archipelago, north of Scotland. Here he pretended to be interested in agricultural methods, while in reality, he was interested in the social encounters between local inhabitants and newcomers. He played billiards in the community center and attended funerals and weddings. He took a part-time job at the local hotel and attended social events while avoiding the limelight. It may interest sociologists of religion that this sociologist with a Jewish background often dined with the local Protestant minister (Winkin 2000, 194).

Goffman’s doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1953 developed from this fieldwork. The book version of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, first published in Edinburgh in 1956, did not attract much attention. However, three years later, an expanded new edition in the United States appeared. By 1980, it had sold half a million copies in English and numerous translations.

In 1957, Goffman was offered a professorship at Berkeley and moved from Chicago to California. Around 1960, he had shorter stays in Las Vegas, partly to study gamblers, but according to many sources also because of his own fascination with gambling. He remained in Berkeley until 1968, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania. Here he entered an environment that stimulated his interest in language and communication, which is reflected in writings such as Gender Advertisement (1979) and Forms of Talk (1981). He also became more aware of gender. He had previously described the traditional division of labor between the sexes without a critical perspective, but now he studied with a critical eye how women are described as less competent and treated by helpful men almost as grateful children (Goffman 1977, 1979).

In 1981, Goffman married the sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff, but he died the following year of cancer, at the very height of his career. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association and had prepared the inaugural address, but was unable to hold it due to illness.

Goffman’s main sociological interest was to describe the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. He highlights the actors’ ability to maneuver in such meetings. Here one can say that he stands in a tradition from the Chicago School in the interwar period, where George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer were central names. They wanted to study society “from the bottom up” and to take as their starting point the everyday lives of ordinary people rather than abstract grand theories about society’s development in general. After the war, however, structural functionalism with Talcott Parsons had its heyday in American sociology. Parsons placed great emphasis on how societal structures shaped individuals’ behavior. In Goffman’s time, criticism of Parsons grew. Dennis Wrong (1961) criticized Parsons for having an “over-socialized” image of people, and Harold Garfinkel (1967) claimed that Parsons only viewed people as “cultural dopes”. Goffman was concerned with how people could promote their own interests and still pay attention to others and avoid embarrassing tensions. Goffman’s preoccupation with how the social order maintains itself undoubtedly arose from one of sociology’s classic thinkers, Emile Durkheim. In Chicago, sociologist and anthropologist Lloyd Warner was Goffman’s main mentor. He was interested in Durkheim and also aroused Goffman’s interest in observation as a method. It was through Warner’s contacts that Goffman ended up in Shetland. Another teacher in Chicago who meant a lot to the young Goffman was the sociologist Everett Hughes (Chapoulie 1996). Hughes extended the Chicago School’s interest in using ethnographic methods in the study of everyday life and was critical of quantitative survey methods, which triumphed in American sociology after the war.

Goffman appears not infrequently in overview books under the so-called symbolic interactionists, a direction concerned with creating and interpreting meaning in human interaction. There are reasons to make such a classification, including a common emphasis on observation as a method. Goffman had studied at the same time as Herbert Blumer, who eventually introduced the term symbolic interactionism and became a central figure in this tradition. The two were also colleagues at Berkeley. But Goffman was less interested than Blumer—and before him Mead—in how people conduct an inner, cognitive dialogue when designing their behavior:

On the other hand, Goffman has a keen eye for how behavior develops in the actual encounter among those physically present. Mead’s notion that an individual takes over others’ attitudes towards oneself is a simplification, says Goffman. The individual must rather trust others to complete a picture of oneself, which he is only partially able to paint himself, for the self is a product of joint ceremonial work (Goffman 1967, 84–85).

Similarly, there were differences between Goffman’s perspectives and social constructionism. In an interview published many years after his death, Goffman himself distanced himself from such a categorization:

But where I differ from social constructionists is that I don’t think the individual himself or herself does much of the constructing. He rather comes to a world, already in some sense or other, established.

(Verhoeven 1993, 325)

For Goffman, people could be creative, but they entered a socially established order with limited opportunities. As we shall see, his relative emphasis on the power of the social environment and the actor’s autonomy and room to maneuver varied in different writings. The differing emphasis was due perhaps to a certain inconsistency, but mostly because Goffman studied different social settings. In Asylums (1961), where the concept of total institutions is central, the framework for the inmates’ or patients’ creativity is very narrow and under the control of a robust system. But even under such totalitarian conditions, people demonstrate resistance strategies to preserve their dignity in the face of strong structural forces.

Four primary metaphors for social life

As mentioned, Goffman’s four central metaphors correspond to his four main perspectives on social life. Before we go into a more detailed description of each of the four views, we can sketch them into his books. The dramaturgical perspective is most evident in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956/1959), Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). The ritual perspective is particularly present in Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (1963a) and in some essays in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1967), including one with the telling title “Embarrassment and social organization”. The rites’ contribution to maintaining a profound moral order in society is also evident in Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (1971).

The perspective that views social interaction as a game of chance is most visible in the book Encounters (1961a), partly also in Interaction Ritual (1967) and Strategic Interaction (1969). Finally, we have the frame perspective of Goffman, who sees social life as an image with a frame and a perspective that characterize its interpretation. It is most visible in his later production, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), Gender Advertisements (1979), and Forms of Talk (1981).

Social life as performance and theater

For Goffman, the man behind the mask is less important than the man with the mask. He attacks the widespread tendency to distinguish between a genuine and stable “inner” self and a more impersonal self that one consciously displays outwardly. What a person “really” is, is not a central theme for Goffman. Even what may exist of an inner self is shaped by how we behave in social situations, he claims (Goffman 1967, 72).

The Presentation of Self is about how people handle their expressions to make a good impression on others they meet. Here, Goffman uses several images from theater and drama, such as performance, presentation, roles and audience. He portrays everyday life as a drama performed in a theater, where people perform like actors to make a positive impression on the audience. The key concept performance is defined by Goffman as follows:

the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers.

(1959, 22)

The book is full of examples of different forms of dramaturgical strategies for making—and controlling—impressions. The actors can engage in idealization, i.e. presenting a “Sunday edition” or “better side” of themselves. Or they can engage in mystification and keep a certain distance to fascinate the audience. It is vital to show dramaturgical discipline, keep track of form and content, and not get lost or break the current play’s game rules. One can also adapt resources and equipment to the audience to make the desired impression: social status, clothing, voice, position, and more. How you behave has a lot to say. Sometimes you can look a bit tough, at other times low-key and heartfelt. Often, someone who wants to make an impression will try to create an image of more closeness to the audience than is the case. In short, the actors try to get the audience to see them the way they wish to be perceived.

If several actors are on stage, they can demonstrate what Goffman calls dramaturgical loyalty by not allowing their secrets—such as internal disagreements—to be apparent to the audience. It is important to show unity on stage and avoid any transfer of loyalty to the audience, which might create a risk of revealing information about what is happening behind the scene. There is a difference between the information and impressions that actors intend to make on the audience and what they reveal backstage, where the public has no access. Backstage, where the audience may not enter, they can problematize or contradict the impressions formed on stage and joke about what they recently performed with apparent sincerity (1959, 107–12). Another aspect of the distinction between front and backstage is to keep track of different parts of the audience, so they receive the information and the impressions they should have, rather than those they should not have.

This does not mean that actors have no leeway regarding their official roles on stage. Goffman developed the concept of role distance while observing surgeons who behaved unpretentiously and somewhat ironically in their hectic collaborations with others during observations. This behavior could function as a lubricant in an interaction where the emphasis on hierarchy and formalities could otherwise hinder effective co...