Rituals of interaction in everyday life: Goffman, Durkheim player

Abstract

This article proposes an exegesis of Goffman’s affiliation to Durkheim’s sociology, relating two works: Interaction Ritual and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He emphasizes two aspects that estimate present in both authors: the rites and the sacredness of the individual and the moral dimension of life in society. For Goffman the interaction rites are occasions to affirm the moral and social order. In a face-to-face, each social actor seeks to provide him a prized image, the “face” or “positive social value a person effectively claims by line of action that others assume that it adopted in the particular contact course.” In Interaction Ritual, Goffman critical sociologists and social anthropologists who, being engaged in the symbolic significance of modern society from Durkheim, did not take into account the notion of soul, present in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. After identifying the intellectual and scientific influence in the formation of habitus and sociological métier Goffman, the text proposes to examine notions such rules, soul, rites, deference and the size necessary for the understanding of the social fabric in the order of interaction. It follows exposing a comparative table of the rites as described by Goffman modeled from Durkheim’s typology. It is expected that the reading of Goffman the light of Durkheim is an access road to the sociology of the first, and a way to update the contributions of the second reading of the social fabric of everyday life.