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communicative action could be seen to index commonly recognised social
values, rather than just being an egocentric outburst of expressive acts. Face
then, although being claimed by persons as individual participants in social
encounters, was intrinsically grounded in the social situation, '... not lodged in or
on [the individual] but rather ... diffusely located in the flow of events in the
encounter' (1967,7).
Central to the understanding of how face could be claimed, recognised
as indexing some positive social value, and ratified was the idea of set of
obligations persons brought to social encounters - obligations both to oneself
and one's fellow participants. To oneself persons were expected to show'self-
respect' and 'demeanour - both necessary if one was to present an image of
self or make some face claim that could be supported by others. To one's fellow
participants in the encounter, persons were expected to show 'considerateness'
and 'deference', geared towards supporting and ratifying the self presented or
face claimed by others. This dual orientation to both self (what Goffman termed
a 'defensive' orientation) and others'face (a 'protective' orientation) led to a
state'-where everyone temporarily accepts everyone else's line ... a working
acceptance ... based not on agreement of candidly expressed heart felt
evaluations, but upon a willingness to give temporary lip service to judgements
with which the participants do not really agree ... [a] mutual acceptance of lines'
(ibid., 11).
The overarching interactional framework within which face claims were
made and supported Goffman referred to as ritual equilibrium (1967).
Equilibrium was not a fixed prescriptive state, but rather a fluid and dynamic
one, contingent on the flow of expressive acts that constituted any given social
encounter. Such equilibrium was thus seen to be reliant on participants' face to
face interactional practices. The name under which this array of equilibric
practices was subsumed was facework (ibid. ), defined by Goffman as.
... the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing
consistent with face. Face-work serves to counteract "incidents%that
is, events whose symbolic implications threaten face ... they often
become habitual and standardized practices; they are like traditional
plays in a game, or traditional steps in a dance. Each person,
subculture, and society seems to have its own characteristic repertoire
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