With the former, the ‘mark’ comprising the stigma is visible and obvious, as when somebody is in a wheelchair or carries a white stick and is accompanied by a guide dog. This links to another distinction: that between discredited stigma and discreditable stigma. The former refers to what a person ‘ought to be’, the latter to what she ‘is’. Stigma, he maintained, involves a gap between the two. Critical to this is his distinction between virtual and actual social identity. My personal interest, however, hinges on his sensitization of the concept of stigma. Goffman wrote about many institutions, including asylums. Ritzer: ‘a professor’s office is front stage when a student visits, back stage when the student leaves, and outside when the professor is at a university basketball game’. But front and back stage and outside can and do vary. Outside is neither front nor back stage, as when our surgeon or lecturer (more likely but now not necessarily male) visits one of London’s Soho walk-ups incognito. What of back stage? Ideally this is an audience-free zone where surgeons and lecturers can switch off and chill. Lecturers might also resort to mystification for example, that is, increase the social distance between herself and her students by covertly drawing on a non-assigned textbook.Īll this so far concerns front stage activity. Lecturers, like many others, also want to (be seen to) be concerned and empathic, to convey that each student is special and we could go on. A lecturer might well wish to hide the fact that she: (a) routinely takes drugs prior to lecturing, (b) has saved the wrong powerpoint on her memory stick, (c) spent several painstaking hours to prepare the material with which she is intimately familiar, (d) has plagiarized a colleague’s research, (e) is winging it, or (f) has just failed an appraisal by her head of department (loosely adapted from Ritzer’s Contemporary Sociological Theory and its Classical Roots). Let’s substitute the university lecturer for the surgeon. But I return to the notion of structure below.Īctors typically try to present an idealized representation of self, which means that they have to conceal stuff. To a point, Goffman argued, fronts come to be institutionalized, meaning that actors select rather than create them. A no-nonsense business-like manner heralds a very different performance from a meek self-deprecating one. a medical degree or fellowship) and on the other there is manner, which informs the audience what to expect (e.g. On the one hand, there is appearance, which includes the actor’s credentials (e.g. The idea of the personal front admits of further division. the surgeon needs an operating theatre) – and the personal front – that is, what Ritzer calls the actor’s ‘expressive equipment’ that audiences have come to expect (e.g. A further distinction is made between the setting – that is, the physical scenery without which the performance is not possible (e.g. This refers to a situation in which an actor is giving a ‘set’ performance, as when the surgeon is operating. Goffman distinguishes between front stage and back stage. This is a matter of actors marshalling the techniques they have acquired – in the drama school of life – in order to cope, to re-establish equilibrium. Hence Goffman’s interest in impression management. How do we as actors handle disruptions that threaten our performances?Īctors have to gain the upper hand over or subdue their audiences. There are disturbances and it is these contingent interruptions to performances that fascinate Goffman. Not that this always goes smoothly, as it were in accordance with the script. The self is a product of the dramatic interaction between actor and audience. This is most obvious in his classic Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman often chose to emphasize the ‘theatrical’ nature of our performances on the social stage, hence the depiction of his corpus as dramaturgical. It was this tension – and in particular the discrepancy between our spontaneous and socialized selves – that intrigued Goffman. Mead distinguished between the I, or the spontaneous self, and the Me, or the socialized self, accenting the ongoing tension between the two. Erving Goffman may or may not have been a symbolic interactionist, but he was undoubtedly influenced by G.H.Mead.
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