210 Nancy T. Ammerman
to be, whether our actions fit the roles we have assumed. And every situation carries a
tension between assuming those roles, fitting in, declaring our identification with the
group, and, on the other hand, doing something that emphasizes our uniqueness, our
differentiation. Whether because our actions arouse doubts in others or because we
ourselves seek to declare our independence or because the situation challenges existing
assumptions, human society has never allowed identity to be unproblematic. Modern
society is different in the number of roles and communities available for the choosing,
but not different in these basic dynamics of identification and differentiation.
More than a generation ago, Goffman (1959; 1967), Garfinkel (1967), and Berger
and Luckmann (1966) began the task of theorizing how persons construct, present, and
conspire to protect the fragile stability of each other’s selves. Their work began to lay
out the ways in which each social situation calls for the creative work of its participants,
each picking up the strands of the drama as it unfolds. Players take roles that make sense
to and of themselves and others (Mead 1934), aligning their actions with scripts and
categories that will be recognized and can be responded to by the other players. More re-
cently, Hall, among others, has pointed to the ways in which we identify with and “per-
form” the positions to which we are assigned, talking our way into ongoing stories that
are always partial and incomplete (Hall 1996). The ability to align our actions with the
actions of others, mutually defining and working within a recognized script, marks us as
sane and competent members of our society. To break character or to challenge the basic
story line of the script, these theorists taught us, is to risk insanity or to incite revolution.
Although scripts and characters are constantly remade by the small dramas of everyday
life, those dramas are also the agents that keep existing social structures in place.^7
In the generation since, the “postmodern” fragmentation of everyday life has
prompted many to speculate about the increasing complexity of identity construc-
tion, emphasizing the incoherence of the scripts, rather than their solidity. Even before
adding relationships built in cyberspace to the mix, many have posited a fluidity of
identity that makes coherence seem obsolete.^8 Bauman and others argue that the no-
tion of any “core” self is impossible, that we are tourists and vagabonds, rather than
pilgrims with a sense of destination (Bauman 1996). We have no core itinerary guiding
our movement through the world. A tentative step in the direction of order is taken by
the French theorist Michel Maffesoli, who describes our postmodern situation as a new
“time of tribes” (Maffesoli 1995). He argues that “we [social scientists] have dwelled so
often on the dehumanization and the disenchantment with the modern world and the
solitude it induces that we are no longer capable of seeing the networks of solidarity
that exist within” (p. 72). Leaving aside the traditional institutions that are presumed to
hold society together and define its citizens, he turns his focus to the solidarity created
in everyday gatherings. Sounding often like Durkheim (1912/1976), he looks for the
affective force of sociality and custom (a “religion of humanity”) that binds people to-
gether in ever-shifting gatherings. Local face-to-face groups, as seemingly anonymous
as the passengers on a bus, constitute, he proposes, a “neo-tribalism characterized by
(^7) Their insistence on the power of the scripts is echoed in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus,”
a set of practical dispositions or master patterns into which we are socialized so that our
actions in any situation are exactly suited to our position in that field of interaction. See Swartz
(1998).
(^8) This is a form of community and identity that needs much more attention. See Cerulo and
associates (1992) for an excellent treatment of the subject.