Remembering Erving Goffman

Aaron Cicourel, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California San Diego, wrote this memoir and gave his approval for posting the present version in the Erving Goffman Archives. The memoir was received on February 18, 2009

As manifestações institucionais e cotidianas do habitus

The article explores the concept of habitus viewed as a process through which babies and children acquire capacities in their daily practices and experiences of socialization within contexts of family interaction, based on data from surveys conducted in Mexico City and Buenos Aires.O texto examina o conceito de habitus como processos de aquisição de capacidades por bebês e crianças, em meio às práticas e experiências cotidianas de socialização em ambientes de interação familiar, valendo-se de investigações empíricas empreendidas na Cidade do México e em Buenos Aires

Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization

Bourdieusian Reflections on Language: Unavoidable Conditions of the Real Speech Situation

The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of language. Although he has dedicated a significant part of his work to the study of language and even though his analysis of language has been extensively discussed in the literature, almost no attention has been paid to the factthat Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions, that is, on a set of universal assumptions about the very nature of language. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a detailed overview of 10 key features which, from a Bourdieusian point of view, can be regarded as inherent in language. On the basis of this enquiry,the study seeks todemonstrate that——contraryto commonbelief——there is not only a Bourdieusian sociology of language but also a Bourdieusian philosophy of language, which provides a useful theoretical framework for examining the unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on the flaws and limitations of Bourdieu’s approach to language

A Reply to My Critics: The Critical Spirit of Bourdieusian Language

Drawing on my article “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, this paper provides a detailed response to the above commentaries by Lisa Adkins, Bridget Fowler, Michael Grenfell, David Inglis, Hans-Herbert Kögler, Steph Lawler, William Outhwaite, Derek Robbins and Bryan S. Turner. The main purpose of this “Reply to my critics” is to reflect upon the most important issues raised by these commentators and thereby contribute to a more nuanced understanding of key questions arising from Bourdieu’s analysis of language

Chapitre III. Taux de délinquance et ancrages organisationnels

Qu’en est-il des processus selon lesquels les statistiques officielles rassemblent et agrègent leurs données ? On se propose ici, à l’examen de matériaux constitués par les fichiers de services de police et de contrôle judiciaire, d’apporter quelque clarté sur cette question. L’objet est de montrer en quoi les explications sociologiques conventionnelles sont construites par l’usage que les chercheurs font de telles données statistiques – des explications qui entrent parfois en contradiction a..

Chapitre VII. Audiences au tribunal des mineurs et comment l’on y négocie

Les cas examinés dans ce dernier chapitre ne concernent que la ville B. D’une part, le volume d’affaires y était plus important et, d’autre part, les chances y étaient plus grandes de tomber sur des audiences impliquant des décisions à prendre de caractère problématique. En particulier, un juge arbitre siégeait à temps plein au tribunal de cette ville ; alors que les juges qui se succédaient dans la ville A étaient, quant à eux, moins portés à conduire les audiences de manière à faire ressort..

Remarques conclusives

Dans les chapitres précédents, j’ai essayé de montrer en quoi les approches de la sociologie classique devaient être remodelées pour faire toute leur place au rôle des attentes d’arrière-plan que les membres d’une société engagent dans la moindre de leurs décisions quotidiennes, ainsi qu’aux propriétés invariantes qui sont les leurs. Ce thème des attentes d’arrière-plan et de leurs propriétés invariantes a été approfondi par ailleurs et on en aura endossé la pertinence dans tous les développe..