Introduction

This chapter charts the emergence and development of the concept “situation” in sociology and related fields, with special focus on the ways that the writings of Erving Goffman intersect with these developments. It begins with an examination of the borrowing of situation from the vernacular and its elevation into a key term of thinkers like John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, but also a wide range of others who developed it in varied directions. Each section charts the conceptual linkages of various thinkers, focusing primarily on three traditions: pragmatism, existentialism, and functionalism. The result is a genealogy of the “situation” that reveals Goffman’s situational sociology as a thoughtful response to those traditions.

But the chapter also shows that “situation” is not just another social science term; it is an oppositional concept. That is, the term historically has served the function of opposition to another related term in the same semantic field. This opposed term is “nature” and its cognates “instinct,” “reflex,” “heredity,” and so on—all elements of biological determinism. In the thought of the pragmatists, the existentialists, the Chicago sociologists, and generations of social scientists after them, the argument for the importance of “situation” is often accompanied by an argument against the role of “nature” (and later other determinisms) in social behavior. Whereas early twentieth-century anthropologists followed Franz Boas in developed “culture” as the oppositional term to “nature,” pragmatist social scientists advanced the term “situation.” The term thus became an intellectual marker, a carrier of significance in the social sciences not just as an explanatory concept but also a rhetorical device, a way of marking off the territory of a particular type of analysis. As the pragmatist terms “habit,” “attention,” and “adjustment” fell away from disuse, “situation” remains.

So much of this study unearths well-trodden territory. The history of pragmatism in sociology, the role of the “situation” in philosophy, William I. Thomas on “definition of the situation,” Goffman’s interactional sociology—all these topics have been examined and told before. But the present chapter has two key advantages over many earlier analyses. First, it examines its authors not by reporting from secondary or tertiary sources, or rehashing often stale narratives, but by going to the original texts themselves.