Erving Goffman and the Gestural Dynamics of Modern Selfhood

In another decade or two, we may be in a position to historicize the trend to see ‘bodily practices’ as an important topic for cultural and historical studies. Currently, however, we seem to be in the phase of ancestor worship, the nascent gods being people like Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Erving Goffman. Because I have a long-standing interest in Goffman, I was more than pleased to accept Michael Braddick's invitation to participate in the Past and Present conference on ‘The Politics of Gesture’. I decided to use the opportunity to examine Goffman's notion of the modern self in relationship to gesture, understood as both an analytic construct and a feature of social action. In what follows I will sketch a set of theoretical issues that I found implicit in our conference abstract, which framed our topic in terms of a distinction between gesture and ritual. I will then offer a reading of Goffman's work in terms of those issues.