Page 442 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

420 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

Representations of self and other are embedded in processes of social cat-
egorization. Already Goffman (1963: 2) linked the term social identity and the
concept of social category together: “When a stranger comes into our presence,
then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and at-
tributes, his ‘social identity’.” He thus refers to the individual’s category mem-
bership as social identity. In every interaction individuals consciously and un-
consciously place themselves in relation to others and thereby perform a
stranger- and self-categorization. Duszak (2002: 2) even speaks of the “impossi-
bility of non-othering” (emphasis in original) and refers to social identities as
the products of categorization processes “that fulfill the human needs of organ-
izing experience for future access and use.”
The concept of social categorization goes back to the sociologist Harvey
Sacks. In the mid-1960s Sacks studied interaction processes, which he referred
to as social or membership categorization. His Lectures on Conversation (and
related topics from the social sciences), held in the 1960s and 1970s at the Uni-
versity of California, were first published by Gail Jefferson in 1992, after
Sacks’s death, and thereby stimulated new interest in categorization research.
Sacks defines “membership categories” very broadly (but also very statically)
as “known things,” as units of societal knowledge.

1.3. Category variety
There are a great variety and number of categories. Sacks (1992) refers to a small
number of category collections that are applicable to everyone, such as gender,
age/generation, confession, nation, etc., as basis collections. Some categories are
more persistent than others: for example, individuals, other than transsexuals,
usually retain their congenital biological gender for their entire lifetime, and we
usually never change our nationality. Besides this, there are many categories to
which people belong for only short periods of their lives. Between the ages of
ca. 13 and 19 years persons belong to the age category “teenager,” which, how-
ever, only constitutes a transitional stage and is followed by other age-related
categories. Unlike such transitional categories, there are permanent ones which
people keep for a lifetime, e.g., ethnic membership (“Asian”). In everyday life we
encounter special categories that can be traced back to lifestyle preferences, as for
example, heavy metal fan, environmentalist, inline-skater, and sexual preferences
(heterosexual, homosexual, transvestite) and many others (Spreckels 2006).
There are categories that, without contextual knowledge, are neutral or at
least can be (Portuguese, student, barber) and those whose designation can by
definition contain an evaluation, thus, e.g., derogatory designations and invec-
tives like Wog, Pollack or suck-up, idiot, slut, etc. This type of category, in
which societal evaluations are anchored, are of particular interest to Jayyusi
(1984) in her study Categorization and the Moral Order.