Page 198 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

176 Helga Kotthoff

Aspects of social interaction are ritualized (symbolically loaded); e.g., a per-
son presents a self. Goffman calls this “communicating a line”:

Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him either in face-to-
face or mediated contact with other participants. In each of the contacts, he tends to
act out what is sometimes called a ‘line’ – that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal
acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of
the participants, especially himself … The term face can be defined as the positive
social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has
taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of ap-
proved social attributes – albeit an image that others may share. (1967: 5)
“Face” is an image of the self formed from recognized social attributes that a
person claims for her- or himself and that in turn are confirmed by others. A per-
son’s “line” refers to the coherence that is expected in the presentation. Every
person is involved in confirming the lines of others; hence, their lines are con-
structions of the same order. Faces of persons must show consistency and they
are thus institutionalized in interpersonal encounters. That certain “lines” have
been assigned to a person often becomes evident only when the person no longer
fulfills the expectations implied in them. Normally one feels emotionally bound
to one’s personal face; it guarantees security and self-esteem. A personal face,
however, comes into being by means of a typification in which both the person
and her environment are involved. Within the confines of a culture, both social
and situative typifications can be readily identified. We can interpret by which
manner of speaking, hair style, style of dress or behavior someone such as a pro-
fessor presents herself as a progressive and easy going type (communicating a
“line” in Goffman’s sense), and with what means a conservative habitus (in
Bourdieu’s [1990] sense) is created. In intercultural contact, by contrast, there is
little certainty as to how to interpret such stylistic devices and identify the types
they are meant to create.
Goffman mainly described US American and Western face politics, which
attributes a sacred value to the individual and her/his autonomy. Other anthro-
pologists (such as Shweder and Bourne 1984) have emphasized that many tradi-
tional cultures have a sociocentric conception of personhood. The difference
between an individualistic and a sociocentric conception of personhood has
an impact on communicative styles. Matsumoto (1988) and Yamada (1997)
contrast American ideals of independence to those of Japanese interdepen-
dence. With Geertz (1983: 59) we can contrast Western conceptions of egocen-
tric personal autonomy with sociocentric conceptions of personhood:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less
integrated motivational cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness with
emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole, and set con-
trastively both against such wholes and against the self’s social and natural
background. We will see that in the former Soviet Union, to a much higher ex-