ABSTRACT
Face-to-face interaction is a fluid, moving, “running” process; during its course the participants take successive stances vis-à-vis each other. Sometimes they fence, sometimes they move in rhythmic psychological ballet, but always they move through successive phases of position. The initial reading of the other’s identity merely sets the stage for action, gives each some cues for the lines to say. For certain purposes it may suffice to describe interaction as going on between persons who each enact a role or occupy a status. To begin with the term interaction tends to obscure the fact that much more than two flesh-and-blood persons are responding to one another. Some of the invisible actors will be legends and myths that enter the drama and affect the action of the main human actors. The interactional situation is not an interaction between two persons, merely, but a series of transactions carried on in thickly peopled and complexly imaged contests.
