* The references that follow are mot meant to indicate the most important sources I have consulted. They are listed here simply as a convenience so as to lighten the burden of too many footnotes: Henry, Jules, Jungle People: A Kaingáng Tribe of the Highlands of Brazil (New York, Augustine, 1941)Google Scholar. Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ² (New York, Doubleday, 1959)Google Scholar. Id. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings (Chicago, The Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar. Coser, Rose L., Insulation from Observability and Types of Social Conformity, American Sociological Review, XXVI (1961), 28–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Freund, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents (New York, Norton, 1962)Google Scholar. Slater, Philip, On Social Regression, American Sociological Review, VIII (1963), 339–364CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Blau, Peter, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York, Wiley, 1964)Google Scholar. Lorenz, Konrad, On Agression [transl.] (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966)Google Scholar. Schwartz, Barry, The Social Psychology of Privacy, American Journal of Sociology, LXXIII (1968), 741–752CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Updike, John, Couples (New York, Knopf, 1968)Google Scholar.

(1) By “in public” I mean in front of others—or to be a little more precise still, in the presence of persons whose participation is limited to what Schachtel calls the “distance senses”, seeing and hearing: Schachtel, Ernest G., On Memory and Childhood Amnesia, Psychiatry, X (1949), 1–26Google Scholar,—It should also be noted at the outset that not all intimacies, as they are here defined, are ‘sexual’ in the ordinary sense of this term. Thus the carefree affectionate horseplay between parents and children, or between siblings, or between close friends, or between members of a solidary ethnic or regional subgroup, or even between a person and his pet animal can also qualify as intimacies, insofar as such affections tend to be given freer and fuller expression in private than in public places.

(2) Clearly, to explain that people behave in X manner because they have been so conditioned does not explain anything. All it does is make us reiterate our question to ask why they are being so conditioned. As for the further clarification that they are so conditioned because they are under the empire of cultural norm X', it does not advance us either. On the contrary, since it only leads us to rephrase the original (and, I believe, scientifically anthromore fruitful) question: “Why behavior pattern X ?” to the narrower, more problematic question: “Why cultural normX'?”

(3) Henry, op. cit. Two comments are necessary at this point. The first is that what I affirm to be a matter of fact—namely, the universality of this distinction and segregation between high and low intensity acts of affection—is perhaps more an assumption of fact than a bona fide matter of fact. This assumption, which the reader is asked to accept for the sake of the argument I am about to develop, is based on a broad though unsystematic survey of anthropological monographs and on direct oral as well as written replies by a sample of over 50 anthropologists who have done field work among non-Western peoples. Second, the fact that in a number of societies intimacies are on certain occasions (e.g., during rites of defloration, rites of marriage) ceremonially performed in full view of the public does not constitute, I believe, a disconfirmation of my general proposition— not any more than the existence of public executions constitutes disproof of the prohibition against intra-group killing.

(4) Goffman, , The Presentation…, op. cit. pp. 112–134Google Scholar.

(5) Again a number of caveats are in order. First of all, by “nastiness” I mean (without, I believe, stretching ordinary usage too far) the tendency deliberately to act in such a way toward others as to make them feel keenly demeaned and excluded. Second, concerning the French, I do not believe that the nastiness I attribute to them is but a figment of my imagination, or of my own nastiness. It is, after all, France that begot the philosopher who bequeathed on us this dramatic definition of hell: L'enfer, c'est les autres (Hell is Other People). It is France also which begot sadism—and by sadism I do not refer to the moral aberration as such but to the fully articulated philosophy of living that florishes to this day in intellectually respectable French avant-garde circles. Cf. Bataille, Georges, L'éerotisme (Paris, Plon, 1962)Google Scholar. And on a much more mundane, though no less significant level, it is about their treatment at the hand of the French more than of any other people in Europe that foreign tourits seem to complain the most. Not so long ago, in fact, (New York Times, 7.IV.65, p.45) France's government became so concerned that it launched (without, of course, any success) an utterly preposterous campaign aimed at mollifying Frenchmen's conduct toward foreign tourists. The campaign consisted of providing every incoming tourist with a book of ‘smile checks’ to reward especially cooperative and courteous gendarmes, chambermaids, taxidrivers, bell-hops, train conductors, cafée waiters, etc. (By the end of the year, the government promised, those with the most checks would win a free trip to Tahiti, the West Indies, or the U.S.) I should also add concerning this unflattering characterization of the French, lest it be foolishly attributed to Francophobia on my part, (a) that I regard this nastiness as but one aspect of an enormously complex and multifaceted people who are in several respects among the most charming, attractive, and remarkable in the West, and (b) that I would tend to attribute this nastiness of theirs not—it should go without saying—to their genetic makeup, but to a peculiarity of their national political structure. Specifically, I think this nastiness is at least partly attributable to their centuries-old experience of being essentially an administered rather than a self-governing nation. The tendency in an administered society is for people to feel relatively little need for one another, as essential public services and collective decisions are generated not by free association, but by the organs of the State. This absence of significant constraints to cooperate leads progressively to the dissipation of the spirit of cooperation and of social responsibility from the population. Such a state of affairs has been further compounded in France's particular case by the divide et impera manner in which the central government has traditionally ruled the country, especially during the three centuries usually referred to as the Ancien Réegime. Cf. Tocqueville, Alexis de, L'Ancien Réegime et la Revolution² (Paris, Gallimard, 1952)Google Scholar and Weitman, Sasha R., Bureaucracy, Democracy, and the French Revolution [Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation] (St. Louis, Washington University, 1968)Google Scholar.—These two factors, then, the non-necessity to cooperate and the divisive style of national leadership, may account in large part for the proverbial nastiness, cliquishness, and snobism of the French toward one another, no less than toward outsiders. For generhilarious essay, incidentally, on this general subject see Twain's, Mark “The French and the Comanches” (1879)Google Scholar, a selection from a larger work written, we are informed, “as a study in comparative anthropology” devoted to showing that, appearances notwithstanding, the French really are every bit “as advanced as any other semicivilized nation” (Fragment from manuscript “A Tramp Abroad”, in Twain, Mark, Letters from the Earth (New York, Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 181–189)Google Scholar.

(6) One might want to explain this difference in public demeanor by pointing the differential degree of anonymity in large and small localities. But the anonymity of a community, unlike its geographical location and climatic properties, is not an externally given characteristic. Rather, it is nothing but a variant (albeit a collecther, tively sanctioned variant) of the more general phenomenon of social irresponsibility and unconcern to which I shall be alluding shortly. In effect what else do we mean when we say of a setting that it is ‘anonymous’ if it is not that in it people feel free to disregard some of the most elementary rules of sociability, and thereby temporarily to define and treat one another as noncivilized persons? (The concept of the non-person is introduced in Goffman, , The Presentation…, op. cit. pp. 151–153)Google Scholar.

(7) Let us only mention in passing that this gross and superficial distinction between witnesses and participants raises one of the most complex, exciting, and profound questions in sociological theory, the question of how much and what kind of involvement (visual, oral, tactile, proxemic, etc.) in collective activities constitute group membership. It is because he fails to appreciate the sociological significance of this fundamental question that McLuhan, Marshall, (Understanding Media: the extensions of man (New York, Me Graw Hill, 1964)Google Scholar, part I passim) is led to make the extravagant claim that through television humanity is presently being ‘retribalized’ on a global scale.

(8) For a splendid historical account of the post-medieval evolution of norms of adult modesty in the presence of children in Western societies, and of how these norms came to be expressed and enforced through the interior design of homes and even through the ecology of cities, see AriÈes, Philippe, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Réegime (Paris, Plon, 1960)Google Scholar, trans, by Baldick, R.: Centuries of Childhood: A social history of family life (New York, Knopf, 1962), pp. 100–127, 390–400Google Scholar. Also relevant here is the custom in polygamous societies for the husband not to sleep with any of his wives and concubines in the presence of the others. Either each of his spouses has her own dwelling, in which case the husband visits and sleeps with each one separately, or else all the women live together in the same dwelling (e. g. as in a harem), in which case the husband sends for one of them at a time and sleeps with her in his own quarters, also in seclusion from the others.

(9) Cf. Slater, Philip, Toward a Dualitic Theory of Identification, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, VII (1961), 113–126Google Scholar.

(10) LÉevi-Strauss, Claude, Les structures éeléementaires de la parentiée (The Hague, Mouton, 1967)Google Scholar. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'echange dans les sociéetées archaïques, reprinted in M. Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, P.U.F., 1966), 143–279.

(11) Marx and Engels themselves subscribed to the absolute deprivation theory of revolution as well as to the relative deprivation theory of revolution, although they espoused the former in 1848 and the latter in 1849. (Cf. Davies, James C., Toward a Theory of Revolution, American Sociological Review, XXVII (1962,) 5–19)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The absolute deprivation theory, it should be noted, is perfectly consonant with their overall materialist interpretation of history, while the relative deprivation theory, being explicitly social-psychological and non-economic (as is made crystal-clear by explanathe passage cited in Davies, p. 5) is thoroughly at odds with that type of interpretation. Whether Marx and Engels realized this contradiction I do not know. But by espousing the relative deprivation theory they were in effect joining the ranks of those ‘reactionaries’ who, like Alexis de Tocqueville op. cit. maintained that revolution was more the product of a state ot mind than of a state of the economy. (It would seem therefore that science too makes strange bedfellows).

(12) Here ends the discussion of the phenomenon of intimacies proper. Before proceeding to the more general theory under which it is subsumed, I should say that the explanation advanced here is not the only one available. There are currently at least two other sociological explanations of this phenomenon, one by Goffman, Behavior,.., op. cit., the other by Slater, P. (On Social Regression, American Sociological Review, XXVIII (1963), 339–364)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which are at least as interesting and compelling as mine. Goffman treats public intimacies (‘mutual involvements’) as particular instances of the broader category of challenges to “the moral order of situated activities”, whereas Slater treats them as cases of ‘social regression’, i.e. of libidinal withdrawal from larger collectivities and their ongoing enterprises. I do not present these explanations here because their authors, both of whom are exceedingly literate, have psychoalready done so much better than I ever could. Nor do I argue here the merits and demerits of their respective explanations relative to mine because to do so at this, after all, highly abstract and speculative stage, would bear little scientific fruit. Much more than theoretical polemics, what is needed now is the accumulation of a body of detailed documentary evidence on critical social processes (such as intimacies) which public opinion (understandably enough) considers too trivial, too private, or too dangerous to deserve our finest scientific efforts. It is only on the basis of such evidence that.we shall ever be able to assess the relative merits of competing interpretive schemes such as the inclusion/exclusion paradigm presented here, Goffman's normative order perspective, Slater's psychoanalytical model, and the currently popular paradigm of gain-motivated transactions.

(13) Durkheim, ÉEimile, La division du travail social. ÉEtude sur I'organisation des sociitis supÉerieures (Paris, Alcan, 1893), p. 103Google Scholar.

(14) Ibid. p. 139.

(15) Passions have but one aim: their own exhaustion (Durkheim, , op. cit. p. 93)Google Scholar. Or, as Coser, L. puts it in The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1956), P. 49Google Scholar, they provoke conflicts (which he calls nonrealalistic ) that “are not occasioned by the rival ends of the antagonists, but by the need for tension release of at least one of them”.

(16) I should not like to create or to leave the impression here that I have actually defined acts of social inclusion and exclusion. All I have done is offer various examples of what I mean by these terms, which is a considerably easier task than to provide them with the kind of conceptual definition that will prove scientifically fruitful.

(17) By the same token, I suppose, we are thereby also depriving other men—not quite as meritorious as we, to be sure, but almost as meritorious—from claiming a share of our own woman's love.

(18) Proposition Two may strike the reader as highly overstated. Various examples of acts of inclusion may come to his mind which do not on their face appear to also represent acts of exclusion. The reader may conceivably be right: Proposition Two may indeed turn out in the end to have been overstated. But before I agree to such a conclusion, I would argue, firstly, that a pointed analysis of acts of inclusion would reveal in most instances that just about all such acts of inclusion are exclusive in one form or another, to some degree or another. Thus even the most universalistic of the proselytizing religions (especially Christianity and Islam) require of their new members that they undergo a formal conversion, which consists usually of reneging membership in their previous religious group and taking an oath of allegiance to their new faith. (Cf. Solomon, Victor, A Handbook of Conversions to the Religions of the World (New York, Stravon Educational Press, 1965)Google Scholar. Secondly, I would also argue that if so many acts of inclusion disare indeed commonly carried out without provoking the antipathies of the excluded it is only because the actual manner and context in which such acts of social inclusion usually take place are richly endowed with various and sundry palliative devices, most of which (like walls, for example) we take so much for granted as to be virtually blind to them, and all of which serve essentially the same function: to avoid creating ‘hard feelings’ among the leftinclusion out. This theme is elaborated in the next section.

(19) Not to be confused with the psychoanalytic concept of ‘ambivalence”, which refers to a psychological (i.e. intra-psychic) phenomenon. What the notion of ‘ambivalence’ used here refers to is a sociological phenomenon, namely, the property of cerof tain objects or events to have significance [X] to members of set A and at the same time the very opposite significance [-X] to those of set B.

(20) This is especially true of such socially contagious collectivities as the segalso mentary lineage societies. Cf. the discussion by Fallers, Lloyd A., Political Sociology and the Anthropological Study African Polities, European Journal of Sociology, IV (1963), 311–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(21) See for example, P. Slater, op. cit.; E. Goffman, Behavior..., op.cit.; Peter Blau, op. cit.; Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1967). — It was not a sociologist but behavior physiologist, Lorenz, Konrad (op. cit. p. 79)Google Scholar, who, basing himself on naturalistic studies of ducks, fish, geese, and the like declared on the subject of ‘good’ manners that ‘we do not, as a rule, realize either their function of inhibiting aggression or that of forming a bond. Yet it is they that effect what sociologists call group cohesion'’.

(22) Merton, R. K., The Role Set, B.J.S., VIII (1957), p. 114Google Scholar; COSER, op. cit.

(23) For a different interpretation, see Schwartz, op. cit.

(24) For a somewhat different interpretation of deference gestures, see Goffman, E., The Nature of Deference and Demeanor, American Anthropologist, LVIII (1956), 473–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(25) See for example, Coseb, Lewis A., op.cit. pp. 32–48Google Scholar.

(26) Jews, as everyone knows, have been the all-time favorite scapegoats of European societies. The principal area son for the Jews' extraordinary knack for eliciting the vilest hostilities against themselves is not their religion per se, not their alleged historic role as Christ-killers, to say nothing of the other fantastic crimes attributed to them. Rather, their principal ‘crime’ has been and to this day continues to be that they impress others as forming relatively exclusive communities—“a state within the state”, as some of their more sophisticated detractors have been fond of saying. (This expression, incidentally, is said to have been coined by Richelieu in reference Protestants, not to Jews). Jews are viewed as exclusive—and therefore, sociologically speaking, they are exclusive because they speak their own dialect, they follow their own customs, they worship their own God without any attempt at proselytizing their religion (i.e. without any attempt at inviting others to join). They are also exclusive in that they are endogamous, in that they have great pride in themselves as nation, in that they appear to be always and ever ready to assist one another times of hardship, without regard to the national-geographic boundaries separating them from their brethren. In short, and this is the only reason for this lengthy digresssion, the tragic fate of the Jewish nation in exile illustrates more tellingly than any other historical example I can think of the profound perils of social solidarity (cf. Proposition Three of the theory). This is the terrible predicament that has plagued and haunted the Jewish people for centuries, and which triggered the rise of the Zionist movement as a self-conscious and deliberate effort to, if you will, ‘privatize’ Judaism, by gathering the scattered fragments of the Jewish nation and erecting solid walls around it—walls that not only should provide Jews with a fighting chance to repeal the onslaughts of anti-Semites, but that should also contribute substantially to the removal of the root cause itself of anti-Semitism. (I might add therefore that the hope, which is widely cherished in America, even among Jews, that ignorance is the root cause of anti-Semitism, and therefore that only the spread of education can stamp it out once and for all, is as naive and futile as would be the homologous belief that ignorance is at the root of jealousy, and that only a better education can becalm the murderous passions of the cuckold.)

(27) For a marvellously Pirandellian exposition of this process of societal intervention, see Slater, (1963), op. cit. pp. 351–356Google Scholar

(28) The classic treatment of the sociological significance of the third party is Wolff, Kurt H. (ed.), The Sociology Georg Simmel (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1950), pp. 140–169Google Scholar. For a more recent elaboration of this theme, see Caplow, Theodore, Two Against One: Coalitions in triads (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1968)Google Scholar.

(29) John Updike's latest book (op. cit.), however, may do for the novel what Roger Bannister a few years ago did for the 4-minute mile, to break down what had hitherto been an insurmountable barrier— in this case the intimacies barrier.

(30) Freud, Sigmund, op. tit. p. 30Google Scholar.—For an interesting elaboration of this theme, cf. Comfort, Alex, Darwin and the Naked Lady: Discursive essays on biology and art (New York, Brazillier, 1962), chap. VGoogle Scholar.

(31) Goffman, , The Nature…, op, cit. p. 497Google Scholar.

(32) Durkheim, (1893), op. cit.Google Scholar

* My thanks to my sociologist and anthropologist colleagues at S.U.N.Y. (Stony Brook) and at Tel-Aviv University for helping me hammer out the ideas of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Randall Collins, Lew Coser, Emmanuel Marx, Merton Hyman, Dan O'Neil, Philip Slater, Art Stinchcombe, Gene Weinstein, and Kurt Wolff for their encouraging comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to the few anthropologists (less than 20%) who were good enough to reply to the one-page ethnographic query I sent them, especially Dorothy Billings, D. L. Guemple, Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, R. F. Salisbury Richard Slobodin, Ruth Useem, and Roy Wagner.