621

ON ERVING GOFFMANN

DELL HYMES

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. ~These qualities drew him into the
orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he
remained always his own man, as much a critic as anything else. From first to
last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation.
This vision is of course stated best by Erving himself, most notably in his
presidential address, "The interactional order." It can be seen twenty years
earlier in the first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at
Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing
network of"sociolinguistic" activity until this day. The paper, "The neglected
situation," was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the
American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, and was published
the next year in a special number (The Ethnography of Communication) of
the American Anthropologist (Gumperz and Hymes, eds., 1964). In this
paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging
attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research
that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of
participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be
entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it.
States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not
reducible to partial correlation.
I stress this continuity over two decades, because Erving's increasing participation in the loose confederation just mentioned, and his increased attention
to speech in his writings, can give the impression of a basic change. Some
thought that such a change could be seen especially after his move to the
University of Pennsylvania in 1969. I don't think so. What was looked at may
have undergone change, but not the eye that did the looking.

Graduate School of Education, L#liversitv of Penn.sTIvania.

622
I should like to attest to that point with observations and information out of
my own relationship with him. That seems the best c o m m e m o r a t i o n ! can
provide, to serve, as it were, as an informant. Some of what I can say will
have the virtue of being in Erving's own words, consisting of remarks made in
the course of serving on the editorial board of the journal, Language in
SocieO', begun in 1972 against the background of that S S R C Committee.
Let me present first comments that bear on the theme that "linguistics needs
the sociologist." (Here and elsewhere I shall modify wording to conceal
identity.) To start with a specific type of speech act, and focus on it alone,
could raise the same difficulty as partial correlation:
there is a lot of useful stuff here b u t . . , the central point of the paper, that [this type of speech
act is] inflected in accordance with the character of the social moment and its participants...
throws the study of speech forms into the study of social manners [and] l e a v e s . . , the task of
presenting an analysis of all of this aspect of social life, and this [the author] doesn't begin to
do [26 March 1975].

An analysis might confuse what many have come to call the distinction
between "emic" and "etic," failing to ground itself in what participants define
as real, and imposing what the linguistic analyst defines:
This paper presents a shrunk thesis instead of a stretched argument and could only be loved
by [the author's] a d v i s o r s . . , there is throughout the notion that interruptions are interruptive and that uninterrupted no gap-no overlap talk is somehow normal. All of this involves a
frightful mixture of emic and eric, of what people do and what linguists inveigh against. (See
my forthcoming works.) The naturalistic basis to start from, it could be argued, is the
difference between talk that is perceivedly faulted and fault unnoteworthy by its participants. Any other standard is arbitrary. The problem is that the analysis of perceivedly
faulted talk allows the analyst to then go on and s e e . . , lots of faults in conversation that isn't
perceivedly faulted by its participants. In brief, the linguistic analysis of faultable talk, that is,
talk in which linguists can find faults, is not the same as the analysis of perceivedly faulted
talk, although when all of us become linguists, and every man has a jack where his bunghole
should be, the two will coincide [9 January 1976].

Again, depth of participant observation is needed to discover what counts as a

norm in a situation, and a focus on language alone may be misleading; one
has to address the interactional order as a whole:
[The authors] chose a set of retards in a buddy relationship whose members routinely
maintained together an open state of talk, i.e., the right but not the obligation to initiate
verbal comments. A m o n g normals this arrangement brings much apparent incoherence
[relative to the structuring of informal conversations that have been studied], we don't know
much about it, and so have no standard against which to measure conformance and
disconformance. In any case, there is the paradox that the more efficient informal conversation is, the more, presumably, it will rely on allusions and truncations that only participants
will 'be able to expand, and so to know whether such speakers are pragmatically competent

623
or not, one has to become rather fully a participant observer; and that, of course, is where
[the authors] fail. All they really do is try to apply some fairly rough notions about
conversational sequencing to communicative actions whose interpersonal significance for
the actors they can't know much about.
By the way, observe how linguistic bias leads away from the stud}' of what might be the most
~mportant communication form: that by which a one or two word directive by one person is
followed by a non-linguistic action on the part ol the recipient, which action satisfies the
speaker that his words have been properly taken into consideration. 771at nexus might be the
reasonable starling point in looking at the retardedness of retards [28 January 1977].
Y e t g o i n g b e y o n d t a l k t o t h e a c t i v i t y o f w h i c h it is p a r t is n o t e n o u g h in itself.
O n e h a s t o l o c a t e t h e a c t i v i t y in t h e c u m u l a t i v e

s t u d y o f t h e s u b j e c t in

q u e s t i o n , a n d o n e h a s t o give it s u b s t a n c e a n d c o n t e x t :
As I understand [the author] he presents ( 1) an off-t he-cuff gloss of the strategic structure of
[the activity], which shows no regard or familiarity with the literature on the subject: (2) an
argument that the structure of [the activity] is not the structure of talk but accounts better
than anything else for the structuring of talk during [the activity] which 1 agree with very
much but which [the author] himself doesn't in his beautiful references to Sacksian conversational analysis: (3) and provides three or four brief excerpts from [the activity] among
six-year-olds, without giving us enough material to know wbat happened before and after,
or what sort of[specific activity] might have been going on. In brief, and to put it harshly,
[the author] mimics a tradition he doesn't quite understand with work he hasn't quite done [6
April 1977].
Again and again, insistence on seeing speech acts as deeply embedded

in

social events, and on presenting sufficient evidence of that embedding when

the interpretation

r e q u i r e s it t o d e m o n s t r a t e

its c o n c l u s i o n s . T h u s , w i t h

regard to speech acts as culturally embedded:

Shelly's comments on the shift from Austin to Searle as a direction that is consonant with
our own individualistically oriented culture.., are much needed as is her wonderfully well
taken point that although we are ready to see that wedding performatives are part of an
institutional arrangement, we are not ready to see that all other utterances are too the first,
in fact, serving merely to confirm for us bow different are the second . . . .
I believe, in most cases Austin's classic performatives are not performatives at all but rather
the embedding of ritualized verbal performative utterances in ceremonies (marriages, ship
christening, etc.), such that there was the least proper chance in the world that one would not
intone what was expected of one: to properly catch the non-linguistic feature of such vocal
ritualistic acts would require an analysis much more refined... [25 September 1980].
And with regard to sufficiency of evidence, the controlling consideration was
not a single methodological criterion, unvaryingly applied. The controlling
c o n s i d e r a t i o n , f o r E r v i n g as e d i t o r , w a s r a t h e r a f i n e l y t u n e d s e n s e o f w h a t
w o u l d a n d w o u l d n o t suffice, g i v e n t h e s t a t e o f t h e a r t a n d t h e a d v a n c i n g e d g e
of understanding

in t h e field.

624
The overall point, if there is one, is that utterances are finely tuned and multiply determined.
1 think that at this stage of the game the only warrant for that sort of point is to make it
convincingly enough, and accessibly enough so that this instance can become the controlling
one in the literature. No way. Indeed, in my opinion, the reader's obligation to locus on a
couple of lines of text but at the same time to read a long piece of before-and-after is never
shown to be justified by what can be wrung from the analysis. After all, to ask us to focus on
such a small strip when there is no way for us to know the biography of the occasion and its
participants is to imply that magical unpacking is going to occur. But it doesn't. The warrant
for Gall and Manny's approach is that although we have to take the context on faith, and
although we have to focus on a niggling detail, the point made does not depend on the
claimed interpretation being right in this particular case, merely a possible feature of lots of
bits of talk. But when the job is to show the overdetermined polysemy of a bit of talk, nothing
convincing can be done unless the context is richly provided [22 May 1981].
I n s u m , i n s i s t e n c e o n t h e s i t u a t i o n as a w h o l e , o n d o i n g w h a t is r e q u i r e d t o
l e a r n a b o u t t h e r e l e v a n t l o c a l w o r l d a s well a s a d e t a i l . T h i s i n s i s t e n c e c a m e
o u t r e c u r r e n t l y in e d i t o r i a l a s s e s s m e n t s o f m a n u s c r i p t s o f a c e r t a i n k i n d in
the ethnomethodological
contributions

approach.

from that approach.

Not that he did not welcome certain

That

is i n d i c a t e d in t h e e x c e r p t j u s t

q u o t e d , a n d in his r e p r o a c h t o m e , y e a r s l a t e r , f o r n o t h a v i n g a c c e p t e d o n e
such paper:
She seems to have a wonderfully nice mind, providing us with hope for the student
population and yet another elegant precis of a paper we (ahem) rejected [6 July 1982].
And, as the excerpt shows, criticism could be offset by appreciation of critical
i n t e l l i g e n c e in a s t u d e n t o r y o u n g e r c o l l e a g u e . T h u s , in o n e case:
If one knew the best place to study linguistics, one would want to send [the author, an
undergraduate] to it (and applause for the teacher at Antioch who encouraged such things).
But as a paper I don't much favor its publication;... On the other hand . . . . And of course it
is nice to encourage young students [27 September 1979; 8 August 1980].
Moreover, he could be quite calm about new work neglecting to situate itself
in t h e s t u d y o f its s u b j e c t , w h e n t h e n e g l e c t e d p r e d e c e s s o r w a s h i m s e l f . T h u s ,
charitably:
a lovely exercise in the approach of linguistics without quite using the terminology
thereof. As you say, there are problems of reference to prior work. (1 could match your
complaint with one of my own:...). But this is a disease which she got from [X], which he
got from [Y], and I think it's too late now to do anything about it; we could wait for a full
moon, but where would we find enough silver bullets'? So what can one do but help them
along in passing us over? [26 June 1973].
9

And an active sense of what young students and junior colleagues were up
a g a i n s t , in r e g a r d t o t h e i r p e r s o n a l c i r c u m s t a n c e s a n d t h e s t a t e o f t h e a r t .

625
As you say, this paper is not suitable for LinS and may indeed even be too simplistic for
LIrhan Life, to which you might want to recommend that he send it. But there is some useful
stuff here, and 1 am very grateful for your sending the paper on to me. In fact, 1 wish the
paper were citable. It provides critical negative [emphasis supplied] evidence for the argument that in face-to-face talk ~e ha~e the fleshy context of delivery as a constant check on
the meaning of the message, especially when things apparently go wrong. So what [the
author] has, he has not been in a position to properly display strictly a consequence of
doing one's work away from the cults and the centers. But may,be he has a good family life
[30 November 1979].

But being away from cults and centers was not enough to elicit sympathy.
One had to have something new to offer in terms of the state of the art:
A long thoughtful piece of undergraduate industry, obediently demonstrating that the three
sources recommended were read and applied the provision of this evidence being largely
what the study aimed in effect to accomplish, and succeeded in accomplishing. Perhaps the
piece implies that we have made some progress, for it is apparently harder to do a usable
piece on meetings than it once was. In any case, it is charming to see you and the Irvine group
going down the same drain together, flushed by earnest students in the hinterlands. Bear up.
And reject [27 May 1976].

Yet sensitive sympathy, too, to the chancy nature of the conjunction between
personal ability and the state of the art:
An issue, of course, is that early papers in this vein could make time by showing that ordinary
interaction and discourse presupposed a great deal that no one talked about and that could
be gotten at by worrying a small piece of data to death. But now that we know that, its
demonstration per se isn't news. and digging as such could be endless. Now, of course, we
need people with golden shovels who can dig in just the right place and come up with
presuppositions that apply broadly. Interesting, if Harvey had written this piece, it would
stand as further evidence of his quality [9 February 1977].

In sum, respect for fresh work and fresh minds, gauged, so far as publication
was concerned, in terms of a sense of the state and progress of the subject,
with personal pride of precedence subordinated to that progress.
But, utter scorn for work and minds that appeared to be merely following a
flag, neglecting the traditions and accomplishments of past sociology without adding anything. More detailed comments several times showed a
detailed concern for the cumulative sociological literature:
S o the topic of rumor is set aside (along with all of the vast literature on that subject except for
Shibutani), and we move on to a quite different matter, the issue of discrepant definitions of
the situation, a topic, incidentally, that has exercised every sociologist since the birth of
sociological time, and to which this paper contributes nothing. So we learn nothing
analytical about rumor (either how it should be defined or what its features and functions
are) and nothing new about what is substituted for it accounts. And, incidentally, the
traditional literature on stereotyping, distortion, prejudice, bias, etc., is bypassed. In brief,

626
what this sort of thing does is substitute a critique of current work for a contribution to it, but
starting with the implied authority of a funded field study. Better than cannons but just
better [3 October 1975].
And, recurrently, the sense almost of bitterness that both sociological scholarship and the fullness of social reality were being sacrificed, not for new
insights, but as merely a badge of membership:
The sociological theory goes back to a classic paper of 1941 by Fuller and Myers long before
symbolic interaction became a tag for anything . . . . Although [the author] doesn't know it,
that is his real starting point . . . . Sutherland's work on white collar crime . . . . The next
addition, less welt defined, comes from anthropology and (later) from eth-meth: namely,
even when something objectively amiss can be said to exist behind a socially perceived social
problem, this concern must neglect a thousand other adjacent candidates for attention, and
the issue becomes why select one instead of another. Cross-cultural materials are brought to
bear to show that what is one group's social problem is another's state of nature.
As for [this'?] piece, the actual analysis he provides is not very extensive and somewhat
sparse. H owever I like what he does, especially in the matter of reflexivity and in trying to get
at what constitutes a National voice. But 1 think the piece is more appropriate for . . . .
And so another eth-meth piece9 A relatively bright student, sealed in a small fun house of
mirrored readings, gets ahold of something interesting to treat as data, worries it a little, tugs
at it some, and stops his inquiry as soon as he has uncovered enough illustrations to use as
support for the notion that eth-meth has the answers, that this radically separates the men
from the boys, and that the current writers is now to be recognized by the other men as one of
them . . . . In fact, of course, although the footnotes torture out an eth-meth affiliation, the
findings are those of any student of a political document . . . . [These things used to be]
canonically handled in sampling courses which all sociology students used to have to take
before the likes of us came along to help undermine training. As you sow, so shall you weep
[18 January 1977].
Although with an element of self-reflection:
excuse this outburst, which is for yourself, not [the author]. His piece could be taken, I
suppose, as something of a speech event analysis, and you may want to read it yourself. It's
just that I'm getting very tired of slogans and flags and kinship acknowledgements and
membership badges, no doubt because I have employed so many myself [6 April 1977].
9

This steady concern for sociological tradition, literature and perspective, for
w o r k t h a t c o u l d b e c o u n t e d a s a g e n u i n e c o n t r i b u t i o n t o a c u m u l a t i v e field,
s h o w e d in o t h e r r e l a t i o n s h i p s w i t h E r v i n g . O n e w a s t h e s e r i e s h e i n i t i a t e d
with me at the University of Pennsylvania Press,

Conduct and Communica-

tion. It c a m e t o i n c l u d e a c e r t a i n a m o u n t o f l i n g u i s t i c s , o f c o u r s e , i n c l u d i n g
Language in the Inner City a n d Sociolinguistic
Patterns, a n d m y o w n Foundation in Sociolinguistics. Y e t E r v i n g v e t o e d o n e

t w o v o l u m e s b y Bill L a b o v ,
excellent account

of a language situation, because he thought

it m a i n l y

l i n g u i s t i c , a n d t o o s l i g h t in s o c i a l c o n t e x t . I n t h e t w o y e a r s b e f o r e his d e a t h ,
he worried that the series might have exhausted

its p u r p o s e , b e c a u s e t h e

627
manuscripts coming to attention were strongest in attention to speech genres
and text, and were not balanced by manuscripts strong in social structure.
His concern indeed produced a period of subdued crisis a b o u t the series. To
protestations that I and the editor for the Press were eager to have something
on the latter, more truly sociological side, he could not suggest anything, but
yet did not want to go ahead with one book, because it was on the side
already overweighted. He was cool to a n o t h e r manuscript, although more
sociological in character, analyzing as it did the ways of speaking of a
religious group in the seventeenth century, and indeed from someone with a
claim to association with the University, on the g r o u n d s of the difficulty of
knowing accurately the social realities of a past historical period.
Not that Erving was consistent. In the midst of this period the Press proposed
that my manuscript on A m e r i c a n Indian narratives ('In Vain I Tried to Tell
You' (1981)) be included in the Conduct and Communication series, when
published. I expressed d o u b t a b o u t the appropriateness. Erving insisted that
it was an entirely different matter. The logic of scholarly categories was
replaced by the logic of a c a d e m i c kinship. Not that the relationship between
these two logics did not sometimes give Erving trouble. Having a p p r o v e d
one b o o k on the basis of kin-like comradeship, after its publication he
expressed misgivings, precisely for having acted on that basis. A n d editing
with E r r i n g was sometimes uneasy. His own feelings, and changes of heart,
would enter discussion sometimes as instances of scholarly principle, sometimes as matters of the well k n o w n way of the world. Sometimes he seemed
Spinoza, sometimes A n n Landers.
The c o m m o n root, I think, was an intractable modesty, a modesty kept in
trim by c o m p a r i s o n of himself with the s t a n d a r d of what he thought truly
excellent in sociology. He wished to think of himself as a servant of that
standard, and sought to ground evaluation outside himself in that standard.
Of course he did not escape a lively sense of how much farther short of that
s t a n d a r d a g o o d m a n y others fell. W h e n inadequacy came clothed in pretension, his imaginative irony flared, his gift for verbal d e n u d a t i o n came into
play. Let me give one example:
This paper is short on solid data and long on Germany. It doesn't deal with communication
problems, it constitutes one. (Indeed, in a frightening way, the paper is data.) [The author]
should be taken back down to the bottom of the ocean and this time brought up slowly.That
way bubbles from the various American books he has annexed would have a chance to settle.
Pricking each of them separately would be a long job, underpaid, and should only be
performed by his mother. Perhaps we should write her directly and complain. Regards . . . . [20 January 1976].

628
1 hope it is not inappropriate to speak of Erving's anger. At least it is partly in
terms of anger that 1 made sense of him myself. 1 imagined his rudeness, his
game-playing, his invention of inviolable rules of which one had not hitherto
heard, as having this source: a mind gifted for the dissection and creation of
culture in a way analogous to the gifts for physics, mathematics and music
that we more readily recognize and marvel at, born short and Jewish in a
small Canadian town. (When I once said something that implied failure to
recognize the prevalence of bilingualism in the world, Erving reproached me
with words to the effect: "You forget that 1 grew up (with Yiddish) in a town
where to speak another language was to be suspect of being homosexual.") A
mind able not only to perceive behavioral norms of which others were
unaware, and to christen practices that had no name, but also to imagine
alternatives that had as yet no culture to inhabit. He made of this gift a life in
which joy and anger were inseparable. Joy in the increasing mastery of the
gift and the finding of a world in which it was valued; anger first perhaps at a
way of being in the world that could never leave the world unobserved, and
later, perhaps, as a modulated defense of the gift itself, of its free innocence of
eye. A modulated defense too, perhaps, of seriousness. The rest of us might
assimilate experience of Erving's gift to such manageable genres as wit and
anecdote. For him it was life itself.
Those who know the trickster stories of American Indians (told about
Coyote a m o n g the people l know myself) may sense an analogy to the oral
tradition about Goffman. The trickster has a range of character, and different narrators may weight a story in favor of one or another part of the range.
Sometimes Coyote is strong and even a noble benefactor, arranging and
proclaiming the way the world is to be for the people who are to come.
Sometimes Coyote is a buffoon, just the butt of a story. In between, and
typically, he is smart but improper. Earthy appetites and trickery for its own
sake lead to h u m o r and often benefit. The stories often say that the world
came to be the way it is and mostly should be, not by divine intervention or
ineluctable causes, but because of a personage acting on motives we would
never admit, and doing things we would never do (though we can enjoy
hearing about it). Perhaps in coming to the land of the interaction order we
North American social scientists have an unconscious desire for a trickstertransformer to have travelled about it and set it more or less to rights for us.
I hope it is not inappropriate to remember in this regard that Erving's
commitment to sociology was not always reciprocated. When he was to
come to Penn as Benjamin Franklin Professor, the sociology department of
the time was not all that pleased. The departments that welcomed him were
elsewhere. That is why his initial title was that of Benjamin Franklin Profes-

629
sor of Anthropology and Psychology, and his office in the University Museum.

What Erving did, when he started out, was certainly odd. What he produced
certainly did not look like the kinds of brick most others in the craft were
adding to its common edifice. Erving had to build his own part of the
structure, until enough of it was in place to make clear to others that his
intellectual commitment and that of sociology the origins, maintenance,
and transformations of social order were the same, and that the shape he
gave to that commitment enriched sociology as a whole.
Twenty years ago it was easy enough to think of his work as a kind of
anthropology or psychology; later it could be thought of as a kind of
linguistics, ethology or communication science. That's what can happen to a
diamond in the rough. As it polishes each facet in turn, different segments of
the environment are caught in its gleam. Some in whose direction it begins to
gleam may think that one facet is all there is. Others may think that
something that gleams in a direction in which they cannot has turned away
from them. From the point of view of the diamond, of course, it is in the same
place, simply adding to its ability to illuminate.
Erving did turn to linguistics increasingly, then, but from his own point of
view. His paper, "Replies and Responses," a masterful and extended critique
of empirically too simple assumptions about the ordering of conversation,
was first read to a linguistics conference. 1 remember his hesitation in doing
so, the dead seriousness in reading the full paper, its cumulative impact. And
Erving is one of the very few sociologists to have published in the main
journal of American linguistics, Language: his "Response Cries." Both papers were developments of his work, reaching out to a discipline that had
begun to catch up to him. A year or so before his death he did begin a
manuscript on speech acts in which he necessarily covered ground already in
the literature. He did so clearly and elegantly; 1 am not sure what would
eventually have become of it, but can only think he would have developed it
in a way consistent with the body of his work, showing how to ground such
study in the interaction order. (See"Felicity's Condition," American Journal
of Sociology, 1983.)
A sociologist might indeed go further into linguistics than did Erving, while
remaining true to the purposes of sociology. The great need, and decisive
challenge to the "linguistic turn," from the standpoint of empirical science, is
to join ability to address the fullness and texture of social reality with ability
to recognize the ways in which specific linguistic means are selected and

630
grouped together to serve the purposes of action, actors and institutions.
Talk about "language" and "discourse" is almost inescapable these days, but
that does not mean that there are very many places in which students are
being adequately trained to do much about either. The kind of training that is
needed, after all, is not a kind that assumes that sociologists should become
linguists. It is rather the kind that used to be regularly provided ethnographers, as a tool of field work. That kind of training in practical linguistics is
not all that c o m m o n today even in anthropology departments. So far as 1
know, it is extremely rare in sociology departments, and those remarkable
sociologists who have acquired such skills have mostly had to acquire them
on their own. Yet there is a severe limit to what one can make of individual
linguistic features, in interaction, if one has little sense of their status as part
of a partly autonomous system of linguistic levels, styles, and verbal repertoire. On the other hand, there is a limit to what one can make of a device or
style, once recognized accurately, if one has little sense of the social and
cultur~,l diversity of the country (let alone the world) or of the main lines of
theory that attempt to make sense of the origins, maintenance and potential
transformations of the present social order. Erving was sensitive to both sides
of this gap:
The kind of communicative competence [such people] have is a natural topic and also
socially worthwhile. The problem is that this piece is not very good, being weak on the
interactional side, and behind that is the problem that somebodyoriented competentlyto the
interactional side of things might not have linguistic training.... [28 January 1977].
And again:
All fluttery, biographical, yummy and splattered but not systematicor orderly. Much of the
trouble I'm proud to say may come from inadequate grounding on the socialside at Berkeley
[10 June 1980].
The future in this field belongs, I think, to the discipline or schools, who can
integrate the two kinds of training. But that is another story.
Erving's greatness, I think, is this. In a period in which linguistics was
stumbling from syntax into semantics and discourse, and sociology was
reeling from renewed zeal for qualitative analysis of interaction, he saw
clearly from the beginning what the meeting point would have to be, and that
for all the charm and fascination of linguistics, the ground in which the
linguistics of social life could flower would have to be sociological ground.
I should like to close with a short poem. It is not memorial in conception, but
mock-heroic, something that came to mind over the winter holiday before

631
Erving died. He seemed to like it. It has the virtue at least of treating the same
theme as these remarks.
On First Looking into a Manuscript by Goffman*
Many speak of speaking, who were dumb
When rationalist Chomsky's unrelenting thumb
Pressed hard on any antecedent -ist,
Behavioral-, structural-: they squirmed but raged unmissed;
Social interaction went down the taps,
Conflated with fatigue and memory lapse.
Now, all allow, even the most dogmatic,
One should be at least a bit "pragmatic";
But happy the few, in early sixties' Berkeley,
Who saw the neglected situation starkly,
Whole, saw speaking tongue-tied at its core
Until exchanged, entwined, in something more,
Itself just one strategic modality,
Framed, inseparable from the sodality
Of interacting humankind. You sloughed
Methodologies, set out to tell what oft
Is done, but ne'er quite well expressed. And until
Well expressed, well christened, ill seen. Gentle
G O F F M A N , so much of such seeing we owe, we know,
To thy quick quirky quizzing of our status quo.
* Subtitled "'Some problems in the ethnography of discourse"
January 1982; revised 9 July 1983.

From what he said of the original, Erving was amused ["If only it were so."]

NOTES
This article was prepared for the 78th Annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association in Detroit, Michigan, for a special memorial session: The life and work of
Erving Goffman and Everett K. Hughes. The session was chaired by Allen D. Grimshaw. 1
am grateful to Alice Rossi and the Association for inviting me to take part.

Theory and SocieO' 13 (1984) 621-631

0304-2421/84/$03.00 9 1984 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.