The Body and the Social Construction of Reality in Erving Goffman’s Microsociology

Abstract

In this article we aim at analyzing the important role played by the body in diverse daily interactions as well as tracing the body’s status in the social reality, as these appear in E. Goffmans microsociology. The bodily compresence, the mutual perception of the bodies responding to certain constraints in certain situations integrate themselves into a system of signs and signifying symbols specific to different social and cultural codes. For Goffman the body represents the basis of communication, any information transmitted willingly or not by an individual in face-to-face interaction is embodied; at the same time the body acts as the instrument of socialization, since any individual resorts to a series of adjustments which allow him to express his own personality coherently and which grant him the social recognition. This socialization presupposes a wide range of roles, masks, simulacra/simulations which let the actor build and define his own identity in relation to other persons. The originality of Goffman’s endeavor also results from his choice of processing data, a method which he himself describes as a display of his own body and personality, thus the sociological analysis turns out to be the adjustment of one’s body to that of the others, and to the interactive situation, finally transforming itself into an actual interaction between the observer and the observed.