The border between intimacy and anonymity in innocuous action: The greeting as a social form

Abstract

In response to Freud’s notion that large things reveal themselves in small indications, this article analyses the greeting as a social form, using the resources of classical sociological theory and particularly the works of Simmel and Durkheim. The focus in not upon external aspects of the content studied, say, the difference between war as a macro-event and coquetry as a micro-event, nor on the social organisation of the event as an orderly phenomenon, but on the collective representation and its unstated configuration of layered meanings that discloses a tension in modern life around the enigma of acknowledgement. The example allows us to bring together a focus on language and embodiment through analysis of the gesture. In particular, the greeting raises the problem of the ambiguous relationship of intimacy and anonymity that haunts modernity. The method is illustrated through an analysis of the cliché as a circuit of commonplace representations and then traced as a narrative to disclose its form as mirroring a fundamental problem for the social actor’s relationship to the gesture of acknowledgement as a problem of self-worth.