This article is based on an ethnographic study of an accredited mortuary science progam. It describes a variety of ways in which this program and its students' social lives normalize work with and around the dead. It also draws contrasts between the successful mortuary science students' emotional reactions to the work of funeral direction and those of unsuccessful students (and my own), and explains those contrasts in terms of biographical backgrounds. Drawing on these observations, I introduce the concept of "emotional capital" and explore how it may be implicated in processes of professional socialization and of occupational selection and exclusion, and in the social reproduction of status distinctions in general.

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This article reexamines the stigma of physical disability using the empirical example of wheelchair users' treatment in public places. It draws upon conversational interviews with wheelchair users, field notes recorded during participant observation in public places while using wheelchairs, and previously published autobiographical accounts. The analysis of these materials primarily focuses upon the many public encounters in which wheelchair users request and receive various forms of assistance. Our analysis demonstrates that wheelchair users' place in public life is more uncertain and unsettled than the concepts deviance and stigma suggest. We argue for an empirical reassessment of the social definition of various physical disabilities through ethnographic study of relations between typical and atypical people and analytic attention to situated processes of identification.Some years ago, Erving Goffman (1963b) introduced the concept of stigma into the study of social life. It has been our standard appellation for physical disabilities ever since-until recently, that is. Students of social life can no longer casually describe persons with disabilities as stigmatized without fear of argument. The possible objections are varied.First, it is arguable and has been argued (e.g., Murphy, Scheer, Murphy, and Mack 1988) that the concept of stigma is so inclusive as to be uninformative. Not only does Goffman (1 963b, p. 4) lump individuals with all variety of physical disabilities, "blemishes of personal character," and despised tribal identities under the conceptual heading of the stigmatized. He also suggests that the only "unblushing American" is a "young, married, white, urban, northem, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports" (Goffman 1963b, p. 128). In comparison, Goffman implies that everyone else is at least periodically stigmatized. Analogies among the treatment of the widely disparate categories of people who fall short of that identificatory ideal may be instructive for some purposes, but they can also be misleading. There are undoubtedly revealing parallels between the treatment of persons with various disabilities, homosexuals, African Americans, women, lower-class white males, and others, but there are

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This paper proposes a sociology of the person that focuses upon the socially defined, publicly visible beings of intersubjective experience. I argue that the sociology of the person proposed by Durkheim and Mauss is more accurately described as a sociology of institutions of the person and neglects both folk or ethnopsychologies of personhood and the interactional production of persons. I draw upon the work of Goffman to develop a sociology of the person concerned with means, processes, and relations of person production. I also propose that the work of Goffman, Foucault, and others provides insights into the contemporary technology of person production and into how its control and use affects relations of person production. I conclude with a brief outline of the theoretical connections among institutions of the person, folk psychologies, the social constitution of the person, and the prospect of a distinctively sociological psychology.Durkheim ([1909] 1982:235) once observed that "man is less for us the point of departure as the point of arrival." He then predicted that, departing from the study of society, sociology would arrive "at a psychology, but one far more concrete and complex than that of the pure psychologists" (ibid.:236). Yet, as Durkheim recognized, blocking the scholarly path from the lofty heights of society to the individual's "inmost depths" was a "socially defined, publicly visible" person (Harre 1984:26). Thus, he (Durkheim [1897(Durkheim [ ] 1966[1915] 1965 and, more elaborately, his nephew and student Mauss ([1938] 1985) proposed a sociology of the person, inviting students of social life to follow their lead.Although self-identified sociologists have generally ignored that invitation, selfidentified anthropologists have been more responsive. Yet, their cross-cultural analyses of abstract conceptions of the person (e.g., Morris 1994) and even more abstract typologies of such conceptions (e.g., Shweder and Bourne 1984) are far removed from the concrete and complex psychology that Durkheim envisioned. Durkheim and Mauss's lead has evidently mislead them. As Foucault (1977:23) suggests, their exclusive concern with "general social forms" obscures the complex and often contested character of collective conceptions and diverts attention from the processes and mechanisms through which persons are concretely realized. A sociology of the person must take a different direction in order to arrive at the complex and concrete.Goffman pointed the sociology of the person in such a direction when he translated this Durkheimian project into microsociological terms. Although Goffman's inconsistent use of expressions such as "person" and "self " invites conflicting interpretations of his work, 1 the collaborative manufacture of public persons was arguably one of his abiding concerns.