The Unmasking Style in Social Theory by Peter Baehr

Author:Peter Baehr [Baehr, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138091757
Google: 4lBCwQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-15T03:47:02+00:00

II. Anti-unmasking sociology

If Durkheim’s redefinition of religion falls short of full-blown unmasking, Erving Goffman’s (1959, 1961, 1963, 1967) Durkheimian dramaturgy flatly opposes it. Goffman (1922–1982) is sociology’s premier student of dissimulation. An important part of his work describes the camouflage donned by those whose “face” is ruined by bodily disfigurement and by social dishonor. People mask, he shows, to avoid devaluation by the socially better placed. Strategies of disguise such as “covering” and “passing” are means of self-protection.

No one could sensibly accuse Goffman of being a sentimental writer. Yet it is obvious where his sympathies lie. Goffman consistently imbues the cloaking of appearance with considerable pathos. By contrast, he treats with barely concealed disgust the tendency of “total institutions” – boarding schools, army barracks, concentration camps, prisons, insane asylums – to strip the identities of those who enter their confines. “Why would sociologists ever want to unmask anyone?” Goffman seems to ask. Are people not vulnerable enough already? Questions of sincerity, hypocrisy and delusion are not sociologically pertinent. They are none of sociology’s business.

Ethnomethodology is another mode of sociology that spurns the unmasking style. Its founder, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011), does not claim that men and women live in doxa-drenched credulity, deficient in their grasp of the concealed mechanisms driving their conduct, the fools fooled of Pierre Bourdieu’s memorable evocation. Nor does he promote the view that human lives might be corrected by a thorough understanding of the world exposed by ethnomethodological analysis. People do not need sociology, least of all its most esoteric arm, to live well or badly. Garfinkel’s point is that if sociology as a scientific discipline wishes to grasp how action occurs, it needs to understand action’s situated, sequential character and the methods by which people accomplish a world. It is the actual, routine communicative efforts of actors that Garfinkel seeks to theorize – “things done, said, heard, felt” – not actors’ habitus or structures beyond their ken.9 Having written a classic account of degradation ceremonies, Garfinkel (1956) was allergic to any sociological approach that smacked of unmasking.10 For, as he shows, it is through ritualized acts of denunciation, a favorite unmasking tool, that a person’s worth is shattered and their body destroyed. In this respect, as in many others, Garfinkel’s analysis contrasts with the more pacific view of denunciation outlined by Luc Boltanski, a writer much influenced by Marxism’s unmasking tradition, to whom I return in Chapter 6.

A neutral perspective on the mask is evident in role theory. It seeks neither to affirm nor to deride a behavior, only to describe and explain it scientifically. This once popular approach in sociology and social psychology received a particularly rich treatment in Anselm Strauss’s Mirrors and Masks (orig. 1959), a book shaped by American pragmatism and Chicago School interactionism. Strauss describes how individuals struggle to forge a distinct identity. Seeing ourselves in the mirrors of others’ estimation, we don masks to conform to, deflect, challenge or refuse their appraisals. Strauss’s approach is dynamic. Identities change and clash. They attach to individuals, groups and even societies.

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