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These symbolic practices appeared to me not incidental or secondary,
but fundamental and primary to the joint enactment of sociability as an
alignment issue. Although such symbolic things did appear to be happening, the
difficulty from my own perspective as researcher lay in formally capturing,
presenting and analysing of these selves within the heuristic framework outlined
above. In order to incorporate the idea of the symbolic self into the analysis I
turned to representing the nature of these selves in terms of what might
generally be referred to as their presentational qualities and characteristics.
In order to do this I decided upon employing linguistic categories that I
thought best referred to what participants were doing in their conversational
contributions. Thus, verbs (both passive and active) as categories provided a
convenient form of representation. The validity of these labels as descriptors will
hopefully be evidenced in the following data excerpts. The result is what I
present below as a basic typology of English and German sociable selves (see
table 7.1). These are not a priod categories which I have brought to the analysis
from existing studies or conceptual schema, indeed the absence of 'selves' as a
concept in extant studies of German - English differences somewhat precluded
this. They are rather ones which have emerged from the conversational data
and observational data. They represent what I have observed to be archetypal
selves routinely proffered in English and German sociable conversation.
Table 7.1 English and German 'Sociable Selves'
Negative Positive
English The Narrating / Narrated Self The Gossiping Self
The 'in the Know' Self The Griping Self
The Affected Self The Re-invoking / Re-invoked
The Abased Self Self
German The Examining Self The Confirmative Self
The Knowledgeable Self The Agonised Self
The Affirmative Self The Pre-invoking / Pre-invoked
The Demeaned Self Self
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