Erving Goffman

In his interview, participant 001, an art major male Latino student described how he had to learn to navigate higher education as a student who was lacked academic preparation. Commuting to school everyday with the help of public transportation for a total of 6 hours per day, the student developed particular skills that help in the context of gaining the academic preparation he sought after. Despite the potential risks in revealing their status, students were able to skillfully develop an…

Self Presentation The Sociologist and writer, Erving Goffman are widely known for his social theories presented in his book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”. His work created a basis for sociology which is the study of a functioning human in society and for modern America. In this essay, his different theories will be discussed through a personal experience I had in my life while engaging in interpersonal communications. I will first start out with who I am and how I…

the social construction of racial identity that emanates from a racial hierarchy that promotes disparity within institutions such as public health and mass incarceration. In Stigma: Note on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), sociologist Erving Goffman defines stigma and explains how stigmatization leads to the fear of being discredited. Natalia Molina, author of Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879 – 1939, describes how the public health system in Los Angeles…

Hochschild’s article talks about why people feel the way they feel in certain moments of their lives. Hochschild talks about how Erving Goffman found in one of his studies that individuals are always trying to conform and fit in through their outward appearance and expressions, as well as trying to decide their next move. A term that Hochschild introduces in this article is emotion work…

Through the detailed works of Erving Goffman’s: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life compared to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, assessed the daily social occurences of everyday life that create the basis of people’s behavior through social interactions. The extensively observe the interactions of people in a variety of scenarios as their learned behavior is applied to those certain situations. Their observations reveal how the social interactions of…

Many feminists have pointed that classical Hollywood film has been associated with the “male gaze” in most case. British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey (1975) expands on this conception to argue that in cinema women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure for male viewing that male audience tend to take the female character in film as his own personal sex object because, he can relate himself, through ‘looking’, to the male character in the film. Not only in…

Well, the idea that any occasion of face-to-face interaction can be interpreted as a theatrical performance is called Dramaturgy (Goffman, E. 2008). A sociologist by the name of Erving Goffman coined this term in 1959, he believed the idea that life is like a never-ending play in which all people are actors. In his writing, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman outlined how we have roles, front stage, faces and more in our everyday social interactions. Our interactions in the…

provide a sense of security when there is the potential for harm. On the front stage, the police display themselves as approachable and dependable. As seen in On the Run and Cop in the Hood, the police can take on two different acts on the front stage. It was prevalent in the ethnographies that the police take on an aggressive front stage display in order for citizens to comply in a manner that officers desire at a particular moment. In On the Run, this is seen during the threats of arrest.…

words and actions. Symbolic interactionism just doesn’t focus on the communication part, but also the symbolic part. What someone wears and how they display themselves helps build society, which what assisted Erving Goffman in developing his expanded theory of dramaturgical analysis. Goffman used acting as a way to describe social interaction, and that people used patterns of a “scripted.” Humans are seen as role-taking actors with a script to follow. He also believed that role-taking was an…

The word “stigma” originated from the Greek language refers to the actions and gestures used to express something that is noticed as unusual and bad enough. The term stigma has been studied by Erving Goffman. According to Goffman (1963) stigma refers to an attribute that deeply discredits the possessor. Stigma has a great influence on the self esteem of the individual. The role and status of the individual from the common man’s normalcy change to a strange man. The perception of the society…