Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior

By Erving Goffman

Book Overview

In a brilliant series of books about social behavior, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, and Stigma, Erving Goffman has exposed all that is at stake when people meet face to face. Goffman's work, once of the great intellectual achievements of our time, is an endlessly fascinating commentary on how we enact ourselves by our responses to and our readings of other people. From the exemplary opening essay of Interaction Ritual , "On Face-Work," --a full account of the extraordinary repertoire of maneuvers we employ in social encounters in order to "save face"--to the final, and classic, essay "Where the Action Is,"--an examination of people in risky occupations and situations: gamblers, criminals, coal miners, stock speculators--Goffman astounds us with the unexpected richness and complexity of brief encounters between people. For Goffman, as for Freud, the extreme cases are of interest because of the light they shed on the normal: The study of the trapeze artist is worthwhile because each of us is on the wire from time to time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394706315
• ISBN13: 9780394706313
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.3" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

Classic Text

People call Goffman a sociologist, but the more I read of him, the more I see him as a philosopher. I mean, George Herbert Mead is considered a philosopher and not a sociologist, right? In my day-to-day life, I find Goffman's observations about ritual human behavior and face-to-face interaction to be endlessly useful. Almost every day I think about something he's written in one of his books. His style is not overly pedantic, and you can read through any of his books without specialized education. Sure, the 50s/60s examples he gives are sort of dated, but so what- we all watch Mad Men, don't we?

Seminal Work

Good seminal work by Goffman. It includes one of Goffman's most noted pieces: "On Face-Work," originally published in Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes.

Goffman is a genius

As a communication major, I used this book frequently when I write papers and do research. If you want to know about concepts such as "face", you will have to read this original. But I don't think it's a book for everybody, that's the only reason I gave it 4 star.

Needs a 21st-century filter

Edgar Schein recommended this book, so I read it. I'm glad I did. Goffman is fascinated by what happens when people engage one another face-to-face, and the essays in this book synthesize many years of observation, research and deep thinking on this topic. There is much to learn in the book, and it's even well-written and filled with interesting anecdotes that illustrate his points.However, the book was written at a time when psychologists made no distinction between the social actiions of men and women. In this book, "a person" is always male. It's easy to see that the book was written long before Deborah Tannen came along, and it suffers from that.