Abstract
The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To embed the sociology of the sacred into the analysis of (im)politeness phenomena, I develop an alternative conceptual architecture that both encompasses and expands the field. This involves two conceptual shifts that I draw out of contemporary Durkheimian cultural sociology. The first shift, from (im)politeness to (in)civility, brings a wider range of phenomena into our analytic purview, and the second, from face to ritual, displaces face as the central concept in (im)politeness research. The value of these conceptual shifts is illustrated using the example of an account of a racist encounter in public space. Consequences of these conceptual shifts for deeper and wider interdisciplinary exploration are explored.
About the author
Mervyn Horgan is associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Guelph and faculty fellow at the Yale University Centre for Cultural Sociology. He has a long-standing research interest in the genesis and course of solidarity between strangers in everyday urban life, with special attention to the meanings that attach to both uncivil and convivial encounters. His recent research appears in Pragmatics, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Social Inclusion.
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