Close Encounters of the Third World

If we accept the notion of encounter as "any joint act between two or more persons \nwhere the interactants are maintaining symbolic, visual, auditory and at times, tactile \ncontact" (Goffman, 1961 ), then clearly social encounters are always problematic \nsince &s;&s;we literally do not know what to do with respect to another person until we \nhave established his meaning for us and our meanings for him" (McCall and \nSimmons, 1966). The arrival at such consensus is a complex process, one which, \nanalytically at least, continually oscillates between the statics of cognition and the \ndynamics of expression. A working agreement whereby interaction can take place \noccurs between the parties if there is sufficient congruence between the two processes. Central to such theory is the concept of "role." Role is envisaged as the prime \nunit of analysis, adding an intermediary dimension to the philosophical problem of \none and many and an alternative to the alleged dichotomy of sociological holism and \natomism (Dawe, 1970). Theoretically, role is introduced to overcome the divergence \nof society and the individual (Dahrendorf, 1968) and to void the impasse of analyses \nfound to be incapable of transcending the group or personality (Cooley, 1929; Mead, \n1934). Nevertheless "role" itself is not without difficulty: the abundance of introduced distinctions [e.g. "ascribed-achieved" (Linton, 1936), role-set (Merton, 1968), \n"latent-manifest" (Gouldner, 1970), etc.] demonstrates its multiple interpretation \namong those holding differing, and even similar, theoretical positions.