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others. Thus, Hu outlined how orientation to both one's own, and other's face
was an omnipresent social dynamic which under-ran all social encounters.
Fundamentally, aside from providing an insight into the workings of
Chinese everyday life (see also Ho 1976), this early paper, with its emphasis on
the normative behaviour of members of a culture as being guided by a dual set
of concerns for both oneself and others within the wider community can be
regarded as the starting point for face and facework studies as they have come
to be developed in western social sciences. The translation of this eastern
concept to western sociological discourse came with Goffman's (1967) seminal
essay'On Face-Work'.
Goffman's development of the concept was not only informed by these
early Asian writings (see Goffman 1967, n5), but also grounded in more general
concerns with the expressive and performative nature of everyday interaction.
For instance, in his work on the presentation of self in everyday life (Goffman
1969), persons were posited as essentially 'performers', regularly engaged in
impression management in an attempt to create a desirable public image or
'character' for presentation to wider society. Social reality was essentially a
dramaturgical affair, where the self was prepared and presented for acceptance
and support by wider social audiences as part and parcel of the practices of
everyday life. However, it wasn't until 1967 3 that Goffman employed the
metaphor of facework to account for the mutual system of interpersonal support
and set of moral obligations that underlay this presentational milieu.
Goffman asserted that, whenever persons come into communicative
contact with another, they intentionally or unintentionally act out a 'line', that is,
a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which they express their view of the
situation, themselves, and fel low-partici pants. These communicative lines of
action form the basis for face, defined by Goffman as '... the positive social value
a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken
during a particular contact ... an image of self delineated in terms of approved
social attributes'. (Goffman 1967,5). 'Approved social attributes' and 'claims' to
positive social values were thus reliant on mutual recognition and ratification by
co-participants during social contacts. In this sense, an individual's
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