Interactional Sociolinguistics
Reading
Week 2
Required Reading
So What?
Last week we talked about how life is like a play and how we perform different roles using various 'fronts' to advance our 'lines'. Of course, life isn't a play. It's very, very real. But seeing it like a play is a useful tool for understanding how and why people do what they do and to make our 'performances' more successful. One of the most important things it can teach us is that the performance is not the same as the person. Often we have conflicts with other people because we attribute to their actions internal motivations or innate characteristics of that person (he's so stupid!). Sometimes, though, what we are really witnessing is just a failed performance. There are many reasons for performances to fail, but the most common is that the 'actors' are not reading from the same script. Your boyfriend may want to be a really good boyfriend, but maybe the 'boyfriend script' he has is different from the one you have. Seeing what we do as a performance allows us to separate ourselves from it a little bit, and to sometimes to be able to step back and say, 'what script or routine are we performing, and do we really want to perform it?' The problem with life being like a play is that usually we are controlled by the play--being more conscious of it in this way helps us to control the play. It can make you more conscious of the kinds of 'fronts' you need to have available to you to put on successful performances, and it can help you to identify the routines that are not useful or not successful.
Doing Being Normal
Most of the time the main thing we are performing is 'being normal'. But 'being normal' is actually a very complicated thing, and something that varies a lot from culture to culture. Understanding how people 'do being normal' is an important basis for understanding how and why social interaction works (or does not work). Studying being normal is also a good way to remind yourself that 'being normal' is not something that you are, but something that you do, and something that you have to learn to do. Children are not as good at 'doing being normal' as adults. What we consider normal is not 'natural'. It is invented (constructed) by our societies. Finally, studying how people 'do being normal can help us to learn how to question our habits and the habits of our society. We usually think 'being normal' equals being 'good' or being 'right', and often people who 'do being normal' in a different way than we do, or who are not very good at 'doing being normal' in the way they think they should be are victims of social discrimination and even violence. I'm not saying that 'being normal' is bad. I'm just suggesting that the normal way of doing things is not always the only or the best way.
The study of 'doing being normal' is called ethnomethodology. It was invented by an American sociologist named Harold Garfinkle. Garfinkle had a very interesting method for trying to understand how be 'do being normal'--he would intentionally do something abnormal and watch how people reacted. Sometimes this is called 'doing a Garfinkel'.
Relations in Public
One of the best places to study 'doing being normal' is in public places. When people interact in public (riding on the MTR, queuing at the ATM machine, ordering a latte at the Pacific Coffee) they follow a whole set of very intricate rules and perform a number of very intricate rituals in order to show that they are 'normal'.
Of course, the way you act in public depends quite a lot on whom you are with, what you are doing and where you are. Goffman calls the 'units' in which we interact in public 'participation units'. Participation units are really the same as 'teams'. Goffman says there are basically two kinds of 'participation units'-- the 'single' and the 'with'.
A 'with' is a group of two or more people who are in some way together. A with can consist of just two people or can consist of thousands of people (the audience at a concert, for example). The most important thing about 'withs' is that we use them to create our social identity (and to decide what the social identity of other people is). In other words, the people you hang around with are part of your 'front'--part of the way you show 'who you are'.
The way we can tell 'withs' are 'withs' is through 'tie signs'. 'Tie signs' are any features of the people, interaction or environment that 'tie' a person to another person. Examples are a boy and girl walking hand in hand, the yellow caps members of tourist groups from Taiwan wear, and one person pointing a camera at another person standing ten meters away. Some 'tie signs' can be very subtle, a certain way of holding the body or a similar rhythm to movements or walking (interactional synchronicity). Some tie signs are unintentional or unavoidable (prisoners all wearing the same uniform). Other are quite deliberate 'displays' of membership within a 'with' (a girl holding onto her cute new boyfriend in a disco).
Singles and 'withs' have very different sets of 'rights' in public. People are less likely to try to join 'withs' or interfere with them. Also, when people are in 'withs' they create their 'own little worlds' in public. They speak and act in ways that they would not if they were singles, and display themselves to the public in ways they they normally would not. People who are not in the 'with', however, usually do not (or pretend not to) pay attention to these antics. This practice is called 'civil dis-attention', and it is one of the most important components of social interaction, especially in a crowded place like Hong Kong.
Singles must pay more attention to how they display themselves, whether they are trying to invite attention to themselves or whether they are trying to deflect it. They use all sorts of tools to do this including newspapers, mobile telephones, portable music devices, faraway or vacant glances and certain ways of walking, standing and sitting.
Of course some singles (and in some sense, all singles) are not really alone--they are 'between withs', and sometimes they show the 'tie signs' of the 'withs' they are soon to be with or those they have just left (a girl looking at her watch, a boy holding a pocketbook outside of a toilet, a man wearing a wedding ring).
So What Again...
So what's so important about singles and 'withs'? I suppose the most important thing is that our social identity is to a large degree determined by the participation units we are in, and this affects the kinds of things we can do and can't do. Much of your identity is relational, and part of what we do when we interact with people involves trying to decide who they are 'with' and to show who we are 'with' by searching for, displaying (or concealing) 'tie signs'.
Supplementary Readings
Erving Goffman, 'Participation Units' (from Relations in Public, Harper, pp. 19-27) and Erving Goffman, 'Tie Signs' (from Relations in Public, Harper, pp. 188-199) (e-group)
Optional Readings
Ron Scollon, 'Handbills, tissues, and condoms: A Site of Engagement for the Construction of Identity in Public Discourse. (from Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1(1):39-61.) (e-group)