James D. Dyer
De Kim DeVries
ENG 5870
Spring 2009
Goffman, Ethnography and the Classroom
I have thought that Goffman’s work was fundamentally important to the social sciences since I first read it six or seven years ago, and I have continued to reread, and cite, this book ever since. The Presentation of Self in Every Day life is not a complex concept, but it became very complex once I started to think it through with Goffman’s assistance. All of us act out the social roles we are given every day, but there is a saying that goes something like “if you pretend to be something for long enough, it becomes what you are.” I think that most people just become the roles that they are given or find for themselves and act them out unconsciously on the stage of the world. However, by conceptualizing of one’s various social positions, responsibilities, and attachments in a ‘dramatistic” frame, and by thinking of others actions and interactions in the same way, one can focus in on details of behavior, communication, action, and reaction that are not obvious until you start thinking in this way. So, first the Bard said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Then, five hundred or so years later, Goffman came up with the idea that observing life AS drama would enable one to get new insights into the behavior of people and groups that would not be obvious to another observer.
I would say that it was an important revelation, and one that should not have taken so long for someone to come up with. Particularly for ethnography, and even more particularly for “classroom ethnography,”of th sort we are engaged in this semester. Every good teacher knows that their job is a daily performance before an audience, and they wear their teacher role comfortably most of the time. Many of them are much different people outside of their classrooms than they are within, and in my experience they realize that as well. Your average student however, probably does not know this unless they have a teacher whom they also in another context, and they are unlikely to understand that they too are part of the play.
That does not mean that the students are stupid, it just means that they have never thought much about the line from Shakespeare or read what Goffman had to say. They wander about, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are acting out a script. I would suggest that many people would be offended at the idea that someone thinks that they are “acting” their lives. After all, this is their life you are talking about, and they are like Popeye, of course, saying “I yam what I am,” but why? We don’t like to think that we are what we are because of our interactions with others, and the expectations of our parents, and the expectations of our cultures of origin. We want to believe that we are self-willed, and self-determinate beings. One of my students recently wrote, “I don’t like being fake,” not “I don’t like being a fake,” or “I don’t like faking people out,” but actually being an impostor in her own skin, in regards to a talk her manager at work had with her recently telling her that she had to smile at her fellow employees who she felt were singaling her out and treating her unfairly.
When something happens that causes one to examine themselves and those around them, it is possible to see the staging, the carefully written scripts, the special-effects magic, and the space behind the curtain. Goffman’s book just makes it possible to see the stagecraft created by different “definitions of the situation,” without having to go through an “eye opening experience” of some sort. Also, the dramatistic perspective gives us a ready made lexicon with which to talk about our social roles and those roles inhabited by other actors on the world stage.
In fact, when I heard that we were going to be doing ethnography this semester, I figured that I would use this book as one of my references, even before I knew we would be reading it. Just because it is such a useful lens through which to view human behavior if you want to figure out what is really going on behind the scenes of any given situation.