(Salle F08)
Laurier, Eric
(University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh)
Café counter sociability : gestures between staff,
strangers and regulars
Since Cavan’s seminal study of sociability in bars in the 1970s,
inspired by Goffman’s work, there have been few serious studies
of this important site of interaction amongst staff, strangers and
habituees. Cavan described how a person’s presence at the bar carried
with it obligations to enter into conversation with others, particularly
regulars. In this paper I will examine the counter in UK and
US cafés as a different setting with quite distinct conventions and
possibilities for encounters amongst unacquainted persons in society.
Given that the persons are unacquainted and have limited rights
to, and resources for. Talk to one another, gesture is of particular
signifi cance in these encounters in initiating, avoiding, declining,
pacing and ending encounters. Using three videos of café customers
being served at a counter this paper will consider how regulars
and strangers display and recognise one another’s membership of
these categories. In one café regulars are able to remain at counter
throughout their stay in the café, drinking their coffee there. In the
other two cafés which feature in the clips, customers only remain at
the counter while ordering their drinks and waiting for them to be
prepared, after which they leave for seats at tables.
The paper will seek to describe how strangers are invited through
glances, the handling of cups, cutlery, money etc. and the adjustments
of their upper body directions at the counter into ongoing
conversations between staff and regulars. Relatedly, we will describe
how strangers respond through smiling, glancing, shifts of upper
body and handling of cups, money, cutlery etc. Of course staff themselves
play a vital part in the handling of encounters through their
parallel streams of gestures and talk to customers at the counter,
where a part of their responsibilities is toward the production of
friendliness, fairness or equally risking their opposites. We will use
Charles Goodwin’s work to consider the importance of the setting of
gestures in locating their sense and Heath et al.s emphasis on the
implication of objects in the production of gestures and those gestures’
part in the configuration of objects.
