Yikes! I was working on my portfolio and discovered I hadn’t posted Goffman. I think it was a psychological slip. I was not fond of that reading and had to really fish for a response. I’m so sorry this is late! See you Tuesday. Faye

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I had an extremely hard time taking anything useful from this article perhaps because the points Goffman makes have been generally accepted in today’s society even though they may have been controversial in 1959, the year he authored Presentations of Self in Everyday Life.  Goffman states that in Anglo-American (and he uses this term) society, individuals will both “give” and “give off”  an impression. The actor tries to control or give an impression by using agreed upon symbols in the ‘presentation of self’, while the receiver acknowledges that the actions performed by the actor are motivated by something other than the information being conveyed (2). When one engages in social interaction, they in fact engage in a contract with the other. The actor behaves in an agreed upon way for the role being portrayed during that interaction and in subsequent encounters. This contract allows the receiver to decide their own actions as a result of these encounters using inference. Of course, it is in the best interest of the actor to control the impression he gives off, while it is incumbent upon the receiver to pretend that the actor is simply trying to convey information. According to Goffman, deception exists on one side, feigning the other. He uses the example of girls in a dormitory faking phone calls in order to control impressions, in this case the symbolic representation of the number of phone calls as popularity. He then goes on to discuss at length how a character in a novel is portrayed as changing his behavior in order to control the impression that he gives off. At one time the character is “Kindly Preedy”, at another “Methodical and Sensible Preedy”  and again, at still another, “Local Fisherman Preedy” (5). We have generally accepted  that in not just Anglo-American societies that role playing is an important part of not only negotiating social interactions but perhaps our lives as well. One popular self-help book suggests dividing and organizing your life by your roles, for example, basing activities on your student role, or your mother role, or your colleague and teacher role. As to how this applies to research, ethnographic researchers have to be aware that they are not seeing the “whole” person during study; rather, they are seeing someone who is most likely behaving in the expected role at the time. However, having both sides agree upon the proper behavior for the role of researcher can be a difficult one as Brueggemann illustrates. Purcell-Gates suggests choosing not only a role on a continuum but a careful approach before entering the field.  

Aside from concepts generally accepted in today’s society, another reason that I had a problem with the article is that some comments, which can be attributed to zeitgeist, seemed to portray subtle sexism (the girl’s dormitory) and exclusiveness (the Anglo-American comment).  I know that Goffman wrote in 1959, but as he was a professor at Berkeley, he had to have come into contact with other cultures and schools of thought. One student characterized Goffman as being indifferent to the movement and remembers him as avoiding political activism. In fact, Marx states that Goffman told another student hat he would become involved in the controversies of the day, “When they start shooting students from the steps of Sproul Hall I guess I’ll get involved, but not until then” (http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/ascervg.html). This former student describes Goffman as having both a dark and light side in the classroom, playing the role of an intellectual mentor and champion of deviance while at the same time making insensitive comments in front of physically challenged students and being, in general, somewhat of a bully. I bring this up not to indict Goffman, but to try and demonstrate that some of this bubbled to the surface in his work. I find these slips more remarkable than the content. It might be interesting to pursue how Goffman and other researchers attempt to control the impression that they inevitably give off through their writing.