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Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Face The vernacular of placing does not require words. I had not realized, when designing this study, how much what I call "Face" would figure into the activity of placing. People can be placed by virtue of the way they dress or how often they show up at particular hangouts or organization meetings. When a person's Face is recognized by members of a self-selected community, then no longer is this person virtually invisible, no longer is she outside the borders of the community. Since a number of informants mentioned the importance of recognizing others' faces, and having their own recognized as well, I decided to use the term Face to describe forms of nonverbal placing. Face is the combination of identifying factors, such as race, dress, and nonverbal uses, that communicate a particular placement. For instance, a woman who wants to place herself as married can wear a wedding ring -- even if she isn't in fact married. A White man walking into the C.S.U.N. Student Union TV room, where Black students often gather, will probably be placed as an outsider. Theorists who have also used the term Face include cross-cultural communication scholar Stella Ting-Toomey and sociologist Erving Goffman. Ting-Toomey (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988, p. 85), refers to face as the image of one's self as projected in a relational context. She discusses the relationships between private self-image and public self-image (face), self-face (concern for one's own public image) and other-face (concern for the other interactant's face), and negative-face (concern for autonomy) and positive-face (concern for inclusion) (p. 88). Ting-Toomey claims that individualistic and collectivistic cultures have different approaches to facework--the ways in which one manages face. (p. 85) While Ting-Toomey addresses facework norms across cultures, Erving Goffman concerns himself with what he calls the microprocess of face engagement (Giddens, 1987; Goffman, 1967). Face engagement involves the focused verbal and nonverbal interaction between individuals, during which they are directly attending to the communication cues exhibited by the other(s). Goffman defines Face as "an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes--albeit an image that others may share . . ." (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). Communication cues he discussed include facial expressions, body dispositions and displays, voice levels, and spacing between people interacting with one another. He is also interested in how social settings influence the spacing during interaction, and the physical (spatial) and temporal "brackets" that circumscribe encounters. (Giddens, 1987, p. 120) Goffman, like Ting-Toomey, is interested in the relationship of face to self, which he claims is divided into many parts (Goffman, 1967). He employs a dramaturgical metaphor to illustrate the way particular parts of the self, like characters, are "performed" during face engagements. According to Giddens (1987), Goffman acknowledges that performances are "just as frequently used to reassure others of genuine motives and commitments as they are used to disguise insincerities" (p. 120). Thus, people place others by Face and in turn are placed by their Face, and they can influence how they are placed by manipulating their Face. Face can also become a mask people assume, dependent on the context. Placing often occurs through language, too, and what someone says and how they say it can always change how their Face is "seen." Face is invitational: it draws others to participate in negotiating its meaning both relationally and contextually. And through the vernacular of Face, individuals can constitute community while affirming it. They can also refuse or subvert community membership. This Face section begins with a description of the ways
in which individuals establish Face over time, especially as newcomers
to a community. Then, various forms of placing will be examined, including
with ways in which informants have contested their placement, based on
different conceptions of Face. Next> Establishing Face
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |