Writing like Goffman

The Meaning of Ethnography

Would Erving Goffman, who is one of the greatest sociologists, be happy if he sees human society in the 21st century?

If happy, is this because he is already dead, or because he could still remain courageous to confront human society?

Shamelessness

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1749975513507244

As I started reading this article, I came to suspect that hiding shame would be making our world more and more helpless. Shame ought not to be hidden but is allowed to be experienced.

Experiencing shame is, however, embarrassing. It is too embarrassing to past away. Hence, we tend to presume that we must be feeling ashamed at any time in unpredictable ways (the unpredictability constitutes an essential part of shame, anyway). Hiding shame appears, thus, to be quite a reasonable strategy. But, how come can we assume that something ubiquitous and unpredictable like shame could at all be hidden away?

While social psychologists recognize shame as one of the fundamental emotions in the constitution of society, they reduce the significance of shame by dealing with it as if to be something manageable. Shame is as significant as it is fleeting as opposed to the author of the article, who says that shame recurs back upon itself. We are not that strong (or foolish?) to confront recursive negative emotions. We are rational enough to try to avoid them. In effect, we’ve got false consciousness that shame has become manageable.

Though I’m not an ethnographer, below I argue that by re-reading Goffman, ethnography can help people (re)discover the meaning of shame in less embarrassing ways. Considering the constitutive importance of shame in everyday practices, we may start by learning how to make visible usually hidden processes, such as shame and morality

Ethnography

Goffman’s writings are said to be saturated with ambiguities especially in causal logic. Why did he write in ways that made it difficult for us to come up with any simpler causality? It is quite an unreasonable conclusion that he ignored the importance of formal analyses of causality. His ambiguity in this respect may be his intention or sincerity to realities he studied. Even in professional organizations, patterns are being formulated along not only rational logic but also spontaneous imaginative intuitions. His choices of cases hint at his ideas. He studied relatively unusual cases. He did not intend to formalize practices of his subjects. Rather, he wrote about unusual cases to let readers imagine their own theories hidden in everyday life.

He elaborated processes in which his subjects’ practices came to demonstrate certain conventionality or patterns. In such unusual cases as total institutions, we may discover such processes. Due chiefly to professional demands, people in somewhat unusual circumstances demonstrate ostensibly their skills with which to interact with each other as well as contexts in which they are situated. However, in everyday life, it is almost impossible to find similar processes in which habits and customs are being formulated. This is because we collaboratively and skillfully conceal them like shame. Moreover, we rarely problematize such skillful concealment of reality. We are unaware of our own skills and knowledge contained in our everyday practices.

Of course, it is difficult even for expert researchers to identify patterns being demonstrated in certain institutional settings. Ethnography as a social scientific method has its legitimacy. However, Goffman’s writings go beyond the ethic and analytical effectiveness of researchers’ ethnographic interventions. He must be thinking about relevance of social research. In modernity, there is virtually no one who is not participating in any institutions. Hence, it is important for anyone to understand institutional influences upon her/his everyday practices.

Ethnographers’ excellence should reside in how they are capable of getting to the heart of moral problems. Their subjects as well as themselves are concerned with morality. However, morality never manifests itself to determine what is good and what is bad. As is the case with shame, we collaboratively hide reality from purely moral causes. Letting readers imagine something relevant to their everyday practices by reference to ethnographers’ writings is morally good because ethnographers offer readers some spaces for breathing, rather than suffocating them by imposing their frameworks.

Such is called analogical reasoning or metaphor. Invoking our ability to recognize similarities and dissimilarities, ethnographers may draw their readers’ attention to non-obvious meanings by presenting reality that seems to them obvious and familiar. The moment at which one feels inspired by one’s own finding non-obviousness in obviousness excels grasping reality by formal logic in creating human knowledge.

It is obvious that everyone is constrained in one way or the other by institutional forces, including culture. This is the hardest fact no one can escape. Hence, metaphorically inspired moments are not trivial at all. Before starting talking about self-reflection, self-control, self-…, etc., we each need spaces for breathing. Care for such space that everyone deserves is supposed to be ethnographers’ reason for intervening in others’ realities, which is no less moral than epistemic virtues.

Shame is hidden but it never ceases to exist. It is important to offer means to (re)experience shame in less embarrassing ways. Shame constitutes an essential part of social reality. Ignorance of shame skews the reality, and accordingly, ways of managing it.