ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the problem of Goffman's devotion to the sacred-cum-ritual and constrast it with status-power theory. Furthermore, fulminated Goffman, using their non-naturalistic approaches, the critics had failed to uncover any concepts that 'reorder' our understanding of social life or embrace a 'larger number of facts' or gain a better insight into 'ordinary behavior'. Along with the omission of power as an analytic category, two additional stumbling blocks pervade Goffman's work such as one is derived from Durkheim, renders social interaction as a species of religious conduct, and another one is derived from Parsons and other Functionalists, buries the status-power realities of interaction in an abstract 'situation'. Before examining the advantages of the status-power approach, it is important to affirm again that status accord and ritual are virtually identical. The status-power metaphor let us call it that is superior in a number of ways to the ritual metaphor.
