A Theory of Occasions: The Presentation of the Self in Non-Everyday Life

• In Event: 3268 - Trespassing /Poaching /Raiding /Transcending, Session II: Culture, Action, Practice, and Occasion

Abstract

Especially since the work of Irving Goffman, sociology has contemplated the everyday, the interactions and norms of day-to-day life (for example, the clothes on wears or the different ways one interacts at one’s job and in one’s time off). Also, historical sociologists have brought into the spotlight the specific, the one-time occurrences that impact a society on a fundamental level (for example, the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. society). However, there is a mezo-level of events that has not been well theorized: the occasional. These are events that are common in a society but not in the life of an individual - for example, the birth of a firstborn or the loss of a parent. These events may be repeated in an individual’s life but they are rare, and this combination of qualities sets them apart from both the specific event and the everyday event. This paper seeks to provide a starting point for theorizing this space between: the occasional.
Since the occasional is usually more impactful to the life of the individual and those around the individual as opposed to a total society, my argument begins with the work Goffman does to theorize everyday life. I then incorporate Garfinkel and Bourdieu in order to bridge the gap between the everyday and the occasional. I use the example of weddings in order to highlight an occasion when several aspects of both everyday life and broader society - for examples, gender, race, age, family, and religion - come to the front of the stage. Through this example of weddings and the theorists’ work on the everyday and the societal, I argue that the occasional deserves specific theoretical and empirical attention due to its distinctiveness from these two other categories.

Author

• Abigail Jorgensen, University of Notre Dame