Welcome

Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgy

As long as everyone thinks you’re a dork, they’ll never notice the actual dorky things you do. That’s what sociologist Erving Goffman was thinking about when he thought up dramaturgy theory. Okay, imagine you’re sitting in the audience of a theater and watching a play. This play can be anything, a café shop, a school classroom, a game of football (European), as long as it has people interacting in some way. This will be our stage and scene. Now, as you watch, you notice everybody is assigned a certain role and has to act in a certain way to maintain it. This is called acting, if you didn’t already know. Each actor has a costume, too, no? Something that helps put the finishing touches on their role and pulls the whole thing, manner and costume, into a solid mask that portrays each role.

Now, if you’ve ever acted before in your life or are just a really big fan of movies, you will know that the most helpful way to practice is through method acting (living in the role for so long that you start to convince yourself you are it). Turning back to our metaphor, let’s pretend that each actor on stage is wearing a double-sided mask, convincing both themselves, the other actors, and the audience of their roles as well as the roles of other actors. Okay, so now that everyone is convinced, let’s pretend that one of our actors is really, really bad, like no matter how much method acting they do, they will never be a good actor, it’s just not for them. So this bad actor, right? His mask is always crooked, never says the right line in the right order. He thinks he’s doing an amazing job, but all the other actors know he’s not really up to snuff and might even come across like an asshole (do not excuse the language). He’s not properly interacting with the scene because he can’t form the role that everyone expects/wants them to play.

Let’s take this a step further. Let’s say something with the mask is wrong, maybe it’s crooked or something and the actor wearing it can’t properly see the scene out of it. This causes them to be a bad actor even though they may actually be good because they keep bumping into things and spilling the coffee all over the café’s hostess. They also can’t perform their role properly but once they get into a better costume (mask) they’re phenomenal! Now let’s zoom out to see the whole scene. Each person is assigned a role, has to maintain a mask and make sure it’s accurate to what the scene needs, while also interacting with the other actors and, let’s be honest, the audience, too. But if each player is just personifying a role and convincing themselves they are it, does the actor actually exist? Or is it just a mix of current masks being worn? What more identifies the actor than their role in the current play? 

Goffman uses this to illustrate the inner workings of all social interactions, how people maintain certain social roles and how they change according to situation and malfunction, too. It’s based on the idea that all people act in social settings to maintain roles other people assign them (aka. barista, student, soccer player, author, you-the reader). His version of this metaphor is so much more complex and covers front stage and back stage, and a whole bunch of other things like props. Goffman also questions the existence of self as a whole (this could be at least three more posts if I had the energy), which I won’t get into right now. The most important thing is that while acting successfully in the assigned social roles, the masks are maintained. This is called impression management and is vital to dozens of other theories like social deviance, social identification theory, symbolic interactionism, etc, etc, etc.

I know this is technically sociology theory and “but you were an anthropology major, Hattie, why-” because most of anthropological theory is just “don’t be a dick” until people discover religion and start taking it seriously. This is just so much more interesting. Anyone who doesn’t like theory, likely has the right idea and will probably actually accomplish something with their lives. I, on the other hand, am good with my beans and living out in the middle of the woods only coming back home so that my mother can do my laundry (Henry David Thoreau reference). 

If you want to learn more about this week’s theory, feel free to continue with Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or someone else’s summary of his work because that might be more helpful. This video is a good, quick explanation as well if I didn’t do a good enough job or if you just want to learn more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z0XS-QLDWM). 

This week we also remember Mei, the beloved cat of two of my beloved friends and coworkers, who passed away peacefully yesterday evening. Mei, who lived a very prosperous 19 years, was named after the animated character from Avatar: The Last Airbender, in case you were wondering (so clearly she was very cultured).