According to Erving Goffman, all face-to-face interactions have a spontaneous yet determined structure (Smith, 1999), and begging interactions are no exception, as this chapter will show. However, the analysis that follows goes beyond Goffman's thinking, since begging interactions are not seen through a single interactionist metaphor/frame (such as the theatrical metaphor) but through three disjunct ‘cartographies’ (or theoretical mappings) chosen for their extra-interactional resonance.

Goffman has been criticised for relying on the reader to validate his analyses (Cioffi, 1971) but his method has its advocates (Lofland, 1980; Manning, 1980; Edmondson, 1984). The method of successive cartographies, like Goffman’s, depends on reader validation. Crudely stated, it succeeds if it establishes the phenomena as warranting its analysis; that is, if it makes the reader (as sociologist) take the phenomena seriously. Howsoever, the broad scale of the cartographies used here does not retain extremely fine details of the conduct observed, and a high level of abstraction is maintained so that the concepts of self and identity do not disappear into a microanalysis. For what is aimed at is a tropical report (White, 1978) that fathoms the obvious without losing sight of its surface. This, of course, means that, though begging comes into focus as a sophisticated behavioural routine, the ‘perspectives by incongruity’ (through which it does so) violate ethnomethodological precepts – as did Goffman's (Watson, 1989).

The three cartographic frames that will project begging as an interaction depend on the theses:

• • that the emotion of envy is an engine of Durkheimian social effervescence (Blum, 1994);

• • that a softcore frame is a denial of the pornographic frame it displaces (MacCannell, 1989);

• • that a ‘scene’ is a near-row in which interactants collaborate to avoid a violent closure (Frank, 1976, 1982).

The choice of these cartographic frames in its turn depends on a fieldworker intuition that they open up rather than close down begging interactions to reveal a structure to begging interactions that has significance for theories of self, of face-to-face interaction in general, and of the public performance of consumer society. The analysis as a whole can be summarised in the simple proposition: coalescing interactants work together through their envy-activated, intersubjective selves to divide into discrete identities.