Spencer E. Cahill

Toward a Sociology of the Person

This paper proposes a sociology of the person that focuses upon the socially defined, publicly visible beings of intersubjective experience. I argue that the sociology of the person proposed by Durkheim and Mauss is more accurately described as a sociology of institutions of the person and neglects both folk or ethnopsychologies of personhood and the interactional production of persons. I draw upon the work of Goffman to develop a sociology of the person concerned with means, processes, and relations of person production. I also propose that the work of Goffman, Foucault, and others provides insights into the contemporary technology of person production and into how its control and use affects relations of person production. I conclude with a brief outline of the theoretical connections among institutions of the person, folk psychologies, the social constitution of the person, and the prospect of a distinctively sociological psychology.

Children and Civility: Ceremonial Deviance and the Acquisition of Ritual Competence

Goffinans analyses of the ritual elements of everyday interaction indicate that our contemporary civil society is characterized by a kind of religion of civility. Based on observations of children in public settings, this article empirically analyzes some of the ways in which children are socialized to civility. That analysis indicates that childrens disruptive and otherwise offensive acts are essential elements of that socialization process in that they occasion observed interpersonal rituals, ceremonial instructions and coaching. Children often are not the beneficiaries of the expressions of respect and regard that they are instructed and encouraged to give to others, however. Such treatment may actually encourage the young to engage in a kind of calculated ceremonial deviance which may also indirectly promote their socialization to civility.

Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places:

dubious territory in his latter chapters, where he argues that some of the white students who had black and Latino friends and assumed their styles of dress and speaking “embodied a way of being white that resisted the dominant model of whiteness” (p. 108). Morris himself points out that this “resistance” stemmed largely from the fact that whiteness was not “cool” among the student-of-color majority; he gives no evidence that the white students were developing a larger, progressive political consciousness and praxis that could truly “disrupt the taken-for-granted hegemonic ideal of being white” (p. 128). Morris connotes whiteness too much as a symbolic force alone here. Furthermore, it is arguable that the students were not challenging the hegemonic core, but reproducing it by contributing to the duality of margin and center. At other times I found myself uncertain about Morris’s claims because they appeared ungrounded in his own investigation, but overall I found the work valuable for the new and significant ways it illuminates the processes by which white privilege is reproduced in schools. It is written in accessible language, though is somewhat geared more toward a professional audience than undergraduate students.