Abstract
This article fills a long-standing gap, proposing a framework for what Goffman called for in 1967’s Interaction Ritual: a sociology of occasions. Occasions are omnipresent throughout the sociological literature yet are often only casually analyzed. The author proposes a perspective that solidifies occasions as a basic unit of sociological analysis. This proposal offers a framework based on (1) four resources, (2) three patterns, and (3) five properties. These simple and interlocking tools situate the occasion as a valuable and adaptable sociological focus.
Crowds gathering for events are marvelously complex. These effervescent moments of copresence can be planned or uncoordinated, contested or embraced (see Campos-Castillo and Hitlin 2013). Events can be large or small; they contain arrivals and departures, various small interactions and groupings, and lots of participants with many motivations. They can be tightly controlled and carefully monitored, as in an opera performance, or loosely arranged, like the international music day Fête de la Musique, when musical performances are scattered across a city. These occasions are not, however, systematically understood as sociological phenomena.
In Interaction Ritual, Goffman (1967) proposed that events should be a “subject matter in their own right, analytically distinguished from neighboring areas, for example, social relationships, little groups, communication systems, and strategic interaction” (p. 2). Goffman’s fellow traveler Howard Becker ([1982] 2008) stated that “collective action and the events they produce are the basic unit of sociological investigation” (p. 370). Substantively, occasions certainly abound in our discipline, albeit often presented as sociological epiphenomena. In this article I focus on events to offer a general theory, answering Goffman’s call for a sociology of occasions.
To develop this idea, I first distinguish Goffman’s two proposals for a sociology of occasions: a more restrictive one from his 1982 American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address on “the interaction order” (IO) and a more adaptable second proposition pieced together through his earlier books and articles that I call ESGO, a system composed of encounters, situations, gatherings, and occasions. I then offer a tripartite framework for studying occasions based on (1) resources (i.e., economic, physical, social + human, and symbolic), (2) patterns (i.e., confetti, core, and citadel), and (3) properties (i.e., longevity, repetition, porosity, density, and turbulence). In so doing, I propose a few simple and interconnected ideas that hold promise for a wide range of social scientists studying similar phenomena.
Io Versus Esgo: Assembling an Approach to Occasions
The idea of studying large, semicoordinated activities as a convergence of harmonious and conflicting motivations and perspectives dates back to book 6 of Aristotle’s Physics. Conceptually, this focus weaves through Durkheim’s ([1912] 1966) effervescent rituals, Simmel’s formal sociology, Thomas and Thomas’s (1928) situations, Alexander’s (2006) recent appropriation of performance studies to examine rituals as cultural communication, and through the more general analysis of rites, interactions, and events across a variety of disciplines. Approaches range from the historical (Clemens 2007; Somers 1996; Wagner-Pacifici 2010) to the more empirical (Caren and Panofsky 2005).
Goffman’s position on occasions originates with Durkheim, as traced through anthropologist and Radcliffe-Brown protégé W. Lloyd Warner. The connections between Goffman and Warner were numerous. 1 Collins (1986:110; 1988) underscores the significance of Warner’s thought to the first of three phases in Goffman’s intellectual career, without identifying how occasions play a key role in the rest of his work.
Like many similarly inspired Durkheimian anthropologists, 2 Warner had an interest in rituals and social dramas. In the fifth volume of his expansive Yankee City study, The Living and the Dead (Warner 1959), he analyzed Newburyport’s tercentennial celebrations, particularly a “grand historical progression” that served as the culmination of the festivities. For Warner (1959), the event unlocked an understanding of how people “collectively state what they believe themselves to be,” and he was careful to mark what was “put in and left out, selected and rejected” and who “had the power to choose the [significant] symbols,” which in turn was critical for connecting “the inner world of those involved and the present beliefs and values of the collectivity” (p. 107). Yankee City details how the parade’s content, a set of 42 scenes portraying the city’s history, was constructed to overrepresent some decades, including some voices while excluding others, and crystalized Newburyport’s collective community sentiments.
Goffman’s intellectual debt is evident if not fully understood. Although at one point he described himself as a “Hughesian urban ethnographer” (Verhoeven 1993:318; see also Jaworski 1996, 2000), his paper “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (Goffman 1956) opens with a confession to being “under the influence” of the British anthropological tradition of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown. Goffman (1963) revised his understanding of complex group activity in his subsequent Behavior in Public Places, drawing from Durkheim’s ([1912] 1966) Elementary Forms to turn attention from more elaborate and religious events to everyday interactions, without sapping their relevance to both participants and social scientists. Goffman wrote of fleeting moments replacing one-time supernaturally infused rituals. Pointedly, he defined the social occasion as a
wider social affair, undertaking, or event, bounded in regard to place and time and typically facilitated by fixed equipment; a social occasion provides the structuring social context in which many situations and their gatherings are likely to form, dissolve, and re-form, while a pattern of conduct tends to be recognized as the appropriate and (often) official or intended one. (Goffman 1963:18)
For Goffman, occasions are where behaviors are shaped, shared meanings crafted, interactions set, and rules and norms communicated. Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967:2), which includes his famed paper on deference and demeanor, opens with the aforementioned call for a sociology of occasions.
Despite a surfeit of ideas for understanding the properties of large social activity, Goffman left no clear model. This is unsurprising, as gentle readers have concluded that he was more taxonomist than theorist (Lofland 1980), and more of a “wondrous voyeur” than a systematizer (Fine 2005:1287), who failed to fully map the “theoretical territories” he explored (Collins 1980:206). Even worse, fellow travelers are left with the pieces of not one perspective on occasions but two. Closer examination is required to tease them apart.
Goffman took no less a venue than the 1982 ASA presidential address to develop his most concise vision of an occasion-based model, outlining what he called the interaction order. He suggested two smaller levels first: ambulatory units (i.e., persons either “singles” or “withs”) and contacts (i.e., entering into copresence). Next come conversational encounters and formal meetings: the class of arrangements in which people “come together into a small physical circle as ratified participants in a consciously shared, clearly interdependent undertaking, the period of participation itself bracketed by rituals of some kind” (Goffman 1983:7). Penultimately, one finds platform performances (i.e., presenters set before audiences) and, finally, celebratory social occasions (i.e., events requiring admittance, coordinated participation, and “a sense of official proceedings”) (Goffman 1983:6–7). The IO thus reads as follows:
Ambulatory Units < Contacts < Conversational Encounters
< Formal Meetings < Platform Performances
< Celebratory Social Occasions
The celebratory occasion sits at the highest and most complex level, with smaller activities potentially, but not necessarily, embedded within. Here, Warner’s (1959) The Living and the Dead is given its due, as Goffman (1983:10) claimed it to be the “best treatment” of occasions, before concluding with an affirmation of their centrality to social research.
The IO, however, appears restrictive when compared with a model that can be assembled using Goffman’s earlier concepts, and it is this second formation that should be rendered in contrast. This second perspective offers a more adaptable set of tools for understanding large group interactions.
Throughout his early work, Goffman repeatedly described the various strata below the wider and more inclusive definition of the occasion given in Behavior in Public Places (Goffman 1963). First are smaller events called encounters, which are consensual, face-to-face, personal, and focused interactions (e.g., a job interview or a romantic date) (Goffman 1961a:17, 158, 355, 368; 1961b). Building from the encounter, Goffman defined a situation as not just a focused interaction but an “environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who are ‘present,’ and similarly find them accessible to him.” Next comes a gathering, a divided and loose aggregate of participants (Goffman 1964:135). 3 This line of thought culminates in the introduction of Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967), in which the occasion is defined as a “normatively stabilized structure” that is a “shifting entity, necessarily evanescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures” (p. 2). Goffman (1964) noted that although nested, larger units do not necessarily require smaller ones, as a “given social gathering of course may contain no encounter, merely unengaged participants bound by unfocused interaction” (p. 135). This second order can be constructed as follows:
Encounters < Situations < Gatherings < Occasions
For this discussion, let us call this the ESGO model.
Seeing IO as the culmination of Goffman’s thoughts on large group activity is alluring and understandable, because of the high profile of its presentation (as the ASA presidential address), its chronological place at the end of his career, and for emotional reasons (i.e., the address was delivered in absentia, as he was battling stomach cancer, which he succumbed to only a few months later). Similarities also encourage such a conclusion: both the IO and the accumulation of concepts I label ESGO nest their activities, and in both models the cultural rules of the wider gathering “socially organize the behavior” in smaller events (Goffman 1964:135; see also Goffman 1983:5). Yet the ESGO model has tangible advantages. ESGO (1) avoids mixing foci of analysis (e.g., people as “ambulatory units” with interactional engagements like “platform performances”), (2) avoids restrictive modifiers (e.g., “celebratory” events and gatherings rather than “formal” meetings), and, therefore, (3) offers greater utility.
On this last point, ESGO’s general applicability is a significant advantage. For example, although seemingly similar in scale to IO’s formal meetings and platform performances, ESGO’s situations and gatherings are flexible in form and in their opportunity for varied participation. Goffman’s definitions of situations and gatherings can be informal and unscripted, whereas activities in the IO cannot. 4 Likewise, some gatherings certainly have mutually shared “groupness” similar to IO’s formal meetings and platform performances, but, in describing assemblies of poker players in a casino, Goffman (1961b:11) noted that this kind of collective affinity is certainly not a requirement for an event to occur. 5 Finally, regarding the confining nature of IO, the modifier in “celebratory social occasions” unnecessarily hamstrings the focus of Goffman’s analysis: festivals, protests, conferences, and riots could all hold formal and informal, celebratory and contentious, activities.
Resources, Patterns, and Properties
Assembling a few ideas from Goffman’s underdeveloped ESGO model, I propose a set of three components to garner a better understanding of how occasions work. Of note, these different levels of encounters, situations, gatherings, and occasions do not simply mimic each other. Smaller interactions may or may not reproduce aspects of a larger gathering. 6 This framework allows one to compare occasions and connect larger occasions with their own embedded encounters, situations, and gatherings. These components serve as the scaffolding for what Goffman (1963) called the occasion’s “structuring social context” (p. 18).
Resources
Four kinds of resources flow through the ESGO model. These resources are privately or collectively held assets that might be extracted, bolstered, nurtured, restricted, or liberated through an occasion. The first variety of resource might be the most obvious: economic. An occasion such as the quadrennial FIFA World Cup, for example, requires massive amounts of private and public funding and may bring a limited amount of economic resources back into a surrounding community (e.g., visitor spending, fees, and taxes). An annual block party or an arts fair necessitates comparatively lower levels of economic resources yet generates modest financial gains for participants. A public protest might require no economic resources. Economic resources, however, are unlikely the sole measure of a particular occasion.
Just as economic resources can be exploited and nurtured during an occasion, so too can physical resources be used or fortified. Physical resources can be public (e.g., streets and sidewalks) or private (e.g., opera houses, cafés, and bars) spaces. A community dance, for example, might be hosted in a public park or a local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. These resources can be purchased, rented, donated, or occupied, and they can be clustered together or dispersed over a wide geographic area.
A third resource is an amalgam of groups, individuals, and their talents, which could be called human + social resources. Occasions have their organizers, workers, leaders, participants, and even unwelcome guests. Warner (1959), in his study of the Yankee City parade, for example, noted that “everyone was involved,” from aristocrats to “the clam-diggers of the river flats” (p. 107). Occasions set individuals (e.g., artists, politicians, out-of-town visitors, investors) in coordination with organizations (e.g., municipal governments, media, cultural institutions). A small cadre of actors might meet in a situation to plan for a larger occasion, an event they may or may not participate in.
Last, there are symbolic resources. Like the sacred symbols in Durkheim’s rituals or Warner’s significant symbols in a parade, meaningful signs and icons can be nurtured, broadcast, contested, and revered. Symbolic resources are image- and idea-based goods that can be linked to, or promoted within, an occasion. Cultural goods can also be actively generated, poached, or challenged in cases of riots and protests, or invoked retroactively, as media and other storytellers grasp a particular symbolic facet of the occasion to serve a kind of synecdochical purpose.
Patterns
Although he is not the only scholar to think of social life in terms of patterns, 7 Goffman’s (1983:4) definition of occasions includes the phrase “pattern of conduct,” citing environmental psychologist Roger Barker’s “standing behavior pattern” in the IO. This is an attempt to think through the shape of events as a kind of social geography. As both physical and social place, some occasions are more tightly controlled and limited in their scope (e.g., a dance competition), others are more expansive (e.g., a protest), and some have a mixture of tightly private and thoroughly open social spaces (e.g., Rio de Janeiro’s Carnivál). Differences in the spatial arrangements of occasions can shape the smaller and embedded gatherings, situations, and encounters among individuals and groups, both inside and surrounding the larger activities and resources.
A citadel pattern consolidates and isolates events within a bounded and definable space. The resultant occasion is tightly controlled, as entry and egress are limited, activities are regulated with little external influence, and roles are likely to be strictly defined. Such gatherings and situations (e.g., a professional convention) are confined and regulated.
A core pattern is looser than a citadel pattern, with mixed levels of admittance (e.g., some activities are more accessible than others), and perhaps using public and private spaces. Take, for example, a traditional jazz funeral in New Orleans: a religious ceremony is held inside a church, followed by a march to the cemetery with a coterie of family and friends around the casket and a brass band in front, which is followed by a “second line” of rowdy revelers that anyone can join (Turner 2009). A core-patterned occasion might have an assortment of official and unofficial gatherings and situations that are all part of the larger occasion.
A confetti pattern likely brings together the widest array of actors, organizations, and experiences. This arrangement affords the least amount of control over encounters, situations, and gatherings, allowing possible “shadow” events to occur. This could be a holiday (Etzioni 2000), like Día de los Muertos, when intimate vigils occur in homes and large events occur in public gatherings, and more solemn activities are held in smaller towns while more lively and irreverent events happen in bigger cities, such as Oaxaca.
These patterns are typifications of social geography, and they are real and observable to participants and analysts alike. The shape of each occasion influences the distribution and use of the aforementioned resources. A more confined occasion can better regulate varied activities. Conversely, the more dispersed the occasion, the greater freedom of access, the greater potential struggle over resources, and the wider the potential impact across a variety of groups and organizations.
Properties
Many of Goffman’s key ideas around this topic can be reformulated into five properties that track how resources flow through these patterned activities. I cast them as longevity, repetition, porosity, density, and turbulence. The first and second properties are the most straightforward: longevity and repetition. For Goffman (1967:2), an occasion is a “temporary . . . shifting entity,” and as such, each level of ESGO is transitory and potentially sequential. The Buenos Aires San Telmo flea market, for example, occurs on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., repeating on a weekly basis in the same location. The different gatherings within the event might have different temporalities, as a stall might close at 2 p.m. rather than 4 p.m. The length of time and terms of repetition are thus features worth cataloging at different strata of the ESGO.
Goffman’s (1963:198–215) work often pivots on issues of entrée, engagement, and activity in groups: comparing “tight” social engagements, in which attitudes and interactions are restricted, and “loose” occasions, when they are more lenient. Three other properties along these lines present potential for deeper analysis. The third property, porosity, is an assessment of access. In Behavior in Public Places, Goffman (1963:24, 179–90; see also Goffman 1967:132–33) offered the paired ideas of “contained” and “uncontained activity,” in which a lack of control over participation leads to a greater diffusion of attention, more porous boundaries of social exchange, and even the opportunity for countering and alternative activity. Compared with Goffman’s (1983:7) treatment of celebratory social occasions, in which participants are “admitted on a controlled basis,” the idea of porosity addresses how different groups and individuals have different access to events.
The fourth property is density. This is a Durkheimian term Collins (2005:116–17, 127) elaborated that signifies the quality of prolonged engagement, when participants maintain a degree of attention and membership to an activity. Goffman (1963:24) introduced the terms focused and unfocused interaction to explain how people are differently obligated to social exchange (e.g., the focused interaction of a heated marital row vs. the unfocused interaction between a professor and her daydreaming student). Commitment to copresence is likely easier in a smaller social context, where one’s actions are more legible to the group.
The last property is turbulence, which has to do with the spectrum of harmonious motivations and “disruptive activity” (Goffman 1961a:199) occurring within and around the occasion. This property is different from porosity and density in that it addresses the presence and range of unscripted and even opposing activities. Turbulence might be more noticeable (and more effective) in a smaller gathering, and it might be easier to accomplish in a larger occasion (but perhaps have a weaker effect in a large group). Disruption, of course, depends on perspective—disorder for one person might be opportunity for another; in contrast, the idea of turbulence allows multiple perspectives.
In summary, particular individuals and organizations (e.g., organizers, municipal government, a nonprofit arts group) within a social geography (e.g., a neighborhood, city, cultural scene) mobilize resources (e.g., funding, spaces, talent, resonant symbolic images) to create an occasion (e.g., block party, parade, the World Cup) within a finite time period (e.g., a long weekend). Participating actors collaborate within a temporary but repeatable pattern of semiorganized activity that on one hand holds a shape and activates its planners’ intentions (e.g., to attract industry professionals or tourists, improve community visibility) and on the other hand cannot possibly dictate each participant’s actions, motivations, and interpretations of such events, and might include uninvited and unwelcome participants. A variety of properties shape and inform participants’ experiences in these collective events, from inclusion and exclusion, and from “buying into” versus challenging the occasion itself. 8
Discussion
This outline of four resources, three patterns, and five properties provides a scaffolding for the analysis and comparison of these moments of copresence. Reviewing a few familiar and ubiquitous events can demonstrate the utility of this approach, offering a quick sketch of the various dynamics at work. By comparing focused and commemorative events alongside two examples of somewhat unfocused activities, the following discussion aims to introduce the nimble quality of the proposed framework.
First, and in keeping with the anthropological tradition, we can look to a few highly effervescent rituals: bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings (Knudsen 1968; Lidz 1991; Rodriguez 2013). The contemporary U.S. bar or bat mitzvah commonly involves a religious service in a temple, followed by a festive reception at another location. Conventional weddings follow a similar pattern: a two-part occasion of a ceremony at which nuptials are exchanged followed by a celebration. Both types of events might be citadel patterned, in the sense that they are invitation-only. These high-density occasions cultivate prolonged engagement and membership with their activities. Barring any dramatics at the altar, weddings and the like are rather low in turbulence.
As vastly larger phenomena, sporting events or stadium concerts might appear to be quite different, and yet the same tools can be applied. A football game, for example, is a high-density, low-porosity citadel-patterned event inside the walls of a stadium that requires tickets and demands closely monitored activities. This event, however, is often preceded by a highly porous and turbulent set of activities in the parking lot (i.e., tailgating) that is, for many participants, just as much a part of the proceedings as the game itself. Turbulent activity in the stadium is unlikely to be tolerated. Sports events can be compared with more accessible occasions. Political rallies and Pride parades (Kates and Belk 2001), for example, are highly porous events exposed to undesirable turbulence from proximate unofficial situations and gatherings. An event such as a wedding or a football game has fixed boundaries. Wedding crashers are rare, and turbulence from parking lot tailgating is unlikely to disrupt the event within the citadel of the stadium. Recalling Warner’s (1959) analysis of Newburyport, an occasion such as a parade uses public spaces with more porous social geographies. Warner detailed how Newburyport’s “grand historical procession” was highly scripted, and although contemporary parade organizers may try to limit or regulate participation (by defining membership policies and roles), controlling for turbulence in these occasions can be a major challenge. Indeed, organizers might find that little can be done to prevent counterprotests.
On the other hand, turbulence could also be a desirable outcome in cases such as a political protest or rally, from Occupy Wall Street to a parade of white supremacists (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Rosental 2013). 9 Such events might have low-porosity initial gatherings—to determine how a spatial resource like a park might be used, and how symbolic resources will be coordinated and deployed—but at the protest or rally that follows, participants may welcome, or even provoke, turbulence. Examples do not have to be so dramatic. We can use the more everyday case of a mime or busker: street performers often poach the resources of a focused occasion, targeting crowds as they wait for an official event or casually assemble in a public plaza. These congregations are not meeting for the purpose of witnessing the unofficial entertainer: buskers create encounters that exploit more official resources, from the physical space of a sidewalk queue to the economic resource of any proffered tips. Street performers may be escorted away in due time, or passively tolerated because they contribute just the right amount of curiosity to be enjoyable to some passersby. A busker outside a music festival one year, in fact, can be invited to perform on stage a year later (Wynn 2015).
This brisk tour of varied social phenomena illustrates the dynamic and multidimensional quality of occasions and provides a structure for description and examination. The sociology of occasions shows how social actors engage in large group activities differently; how symbolic resources are deployed, but challenged; and how economic and spatial resources can be used for formal and official proceedings, but how they can also be poached for alternative purposes. 10 The ESGO perspective provides tools for understanding how an occasion may bolster resources in one case, while exploiting assets in another. It links different lived experiences, perspectives, and on-the-ground interactions with larger institutional efforts and cultural concerns. Comparisons can be made across cases (between a bat mitzvah and a football game) and within them (between a festival occasion and the gathering of a queue that a busker exploits).
Conclusions: Occasions as Mesosociology
The sociology of occasions, as outlined here, should be seen as a contribution to mesosociology (Fine 2010; Maines 1982; Turner 2005). Occasions have several qualities similar to other mesosociological forms, like organizations, roles, social movements, and networks. Goffman (1983:9–11) stated that occasions allow individual participants to “affirm their affiliation and commitment to their collectivities, and revive their ultimate beliefs,” and they offer a “loose coupling” between micro-level phenomena and structural forces. Indeed, occasions provide a “gap-bridging” function (Krause 2013) between the micro- and macro-levels of social life, demonstrating how structural issues are funneled to individuals through varied meso-level activities and, conversely, how individual actions within and through occasions potentially shape large organizational, historical, and societal phenomena (e.g., the political sphere and economic markets). Occasions are also like organizations, social movements, and networks in their scalable and mutable nature: occasions can be big or small, complex or simple. And finally, like networks but unlike roles and social movements, occasions have a matryoshka-like nesting quality: smaller events are set within bigger ones, reproducing and possibly challenging the qualities of their larger forms.
As Smelser (1997:28) wrote in Problematics of Sociology, mesosociology is our significant yet “most vague” level of analysis. The ESGO model clarifies Goffman’s structuring social context through its framework of resources, patterns, and properties. There are tangible benefits to the sociology of occasions as a systematic way to examine a rarely explored aspect of social life. And yet, more examples and comparisons are needed to show how occasions can be sites where actors from local organizations, communities, and corporations come together, where groups produce shared resources, and where collective activities and individual experiences are shaped.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Andrew Deener, Claudio Benzecry, Howard Becker, Jack Katz, Alexandre Frenette, Patrick Inglis, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.