Streetcorner Politics: How Living Together Happens in Everyday Life Civil Interactions

This paper draws on ethnographic data to analyze the normative properties of urban encounters in Paris, France. Rather than treating civility exchanges as mere instances of ceremonial conduct, we focus on the reflexive dimensions of interacting in “a world of strangers” (Lofland 1973). We show how today’s Parisian “culture of civility” (Becker, 1971) helps reconsidering the “Goffmanesque” (Emerson 2009, p. 537) approach to “public life” (Goffman, 1971) and the interaction order: not only do these “fleeting” encounters and “ceremonial interactions” prove to go beyond face-work issues, but they also put to test a practical sense of what people have in common, what they owe one another, and what they should stand and fight for among others, as mere citizens. By combining long-term participant observation ethnography and interviews, the research unveils the vivacity of emotions involved in civil interactions and the importance of reflexivity in how to be and do good in everyday situations of public life. Civility therefore no longer stands for a way of dealing with the “interaction order” and getting away with it, but rather as a local perspective for perceiving and acknowledging society as a whole through practical, day-to-day consequences and aspects (Rawls 2006). Civility is therefore an activity whereby democratic culture can be studied in the making. These orientations of attention, these modest attempts at accommodating with differences, showing interest, care, and even responsibility for strangers and for how our shared world goes, play an important part in the process of defining what a political community is – an “art of living together” that is ultimately both a means and an end.