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nearly everyone who passes, is able to warn of the approach of a suspicious character."
Within the circle of persons who have biographical information about an individual  who are
knowing in regard to him  there will be a smaller circle of those who are acquainted with him
`socially', whether slightly or intimately, and whether as an equal or not. As we say, they not
only know `of' or `about' him, they know him `personally' as well. They will have the right and
the obligation of ex-changing a nod, a greeting, or a chat with him when they find themselves in
the same social situation with him, this constituting social recognition. Of course, there will be
times when an individual extends social recognition to, or receives it from, an individual he does
not know personally. In any case, it should be clear that cognitive recognition is simply an act of
perception, while social recognition is one individual's part in a communication ceremony.
Social acquaintanceship or personal knowing is necessarily reciprocal, although of course one
or even both of the acquainted" persons can temporarily forget they are acquainted, just as one or
both can be alive to the acquaintance-ship but temporarily forgetful of almost everything about
the other's personal identity.42
For the individual who lives a village life, whether in town or city, there will be few who
merely know of him; those
((footnote))
41.A description of the functions of the corner-man may be found in J. Phelan, The
Underworld, London, George G. Harrap, 1953, Chap. 16, PP. 175-86.
42.Further treatment of acquaintanceship and types of recognition may be found in E.
Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, New York, Free Press of Glencoe, 1963, Chap. pp.
7,
112-23.
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that know about him are likely to know him personally. In contrast, by the term `fame' we seem
to refer to the possibility that the circle of people who know about a given individual, especially
in connection with a rare desirable achievement or possession, can become very wide, and at the
same time much wider than the circle of those who know him personally.
The treatment accorded an individual on the basis of his social identity is often accorded with
added deference and indulgence to a famed person because of his personal identity. Like a
small-town person, he will always be shopping where he is known. The mere fact of being cog-
nitively recognized in public places by strangers can also be a source of satisfaction, as a young
actor suggests :
When I first became a little well known and had a day when I was feeling down, I'd actually say
to myself, `Well, I think I'll go out for a walk and be recognized.'"
This kind of promiscuous minor acclaim presumably pro-vides one reason why fame is sought;
it also suggests why fame once obtained is sometimes hidden from. The issue is not only the
nuisance in being chased by reporters, auto-graph hunters, and turned heads, but also that a
widened range of acts become assimilated to biography as newsworthy events. For a famous
person to `get away' where he can `be himself' may mean his finding a community in which
there is no biography of him; here his conduct, reflecting merely on his social identity, can have
a chance of being of interest to no one. Contrariwise, one aspect of being `on' is acting in a
fashion designed to control implications for biography, but doing this in what are ordinarily
non-biography creating areas of life.
((footnote))
43. Anthony Perkins, in L. Ross, `The Player-III', The New " Teske, 4 November 1961, 88.
((88))
In the everyday life of an average person there will be long stretches of time when events
involving him will be memorable to no one, a technical but not active part of his biography.
Only a serious personal accident or the witness-ing of a murder will create moments during
these dead periods which have a place in the reviews he and others come to make of his past.
(An `alibi', in fact, is a presented piece of biography that ordinarily would not have become part
of one's active biography at all.) On the other hand, notables who come to have a book-length
biography written about them, and especially those such as royalty who are known from the
start to be destined for this fate, will find they have experienced few periods of life which are
allowed to remain dead, that is, inactively part of their biography.
When considering fame it can be useful and convenient to consider ill-fame or infamy, this
arising when there is a circle of persons who know ill of an individual without having met him
personally. The obvious function of ill-fame is social control, of which two distinct possibilities
must be mentioned
Formal social control is the first. There are functionaries, and circles of functionaries,
employed to scan various publics for the presence of identifiable individuals whose record and
reputation have made them suspect, or even `wanted' for arrest. For example, during a mental
hospital study, I knew a patient who had `town parole' and also a record of having molested
very young girls. On entering any of the neighbouring movie houses he was likely to be spotted
by the manager and made to leave. He was, in short, too ill-famed to attend movies in the
neighbourhood. Well-known `hoods' have had the same problem, but on a scale larger than
could be effected by theatre managers.
It is here that one deals with further examples of the occupation of making personal
identifications. Floorwalkers in stores, for example, sometimes have extensive records of
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the appearance of professional shoplifters along with that identity peg called the modus
operandi. The production of personal identification may in fact be accorded a social occasion of
its own, as in the police line-up. Dickens, in describing the social mixing of prisoners and
visitors in a London jail, provides another example, called `sitting for one's portrait', whereby a
new prisoner was obliged to sit in a chair while the guards gathered and looked at him, fixing
his image in their minds so as to be able to spot him later."
Functionaries whose job is to check up on the possible presence of the ill-reputed may
operate in the public at large instead of in particular social establishments, as in the case of
police detectives who range over a whole city, but do not themselves constitute this public. One
is led then to consider a second type of social control based on ill-fame, but this time an
informal type of control involving the public at large; and this time the famed can be seen to be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]