Erving Goffman and the Theater of Social Encounters

1

• Erving Goffman and the Theater of Social
  Encounters
• What does the chapter title mean?

2
Erving Goffman as a radical empiricist What
does that mean?

• insistence on staying close to empirical reality
• a distrust of premature theorizing
• society to be found in small-scale interaction

3
Erving Goffman Labeling Theory

• Asylums and the study of total institutions
• Labeling as a social process with profound
  social consequences
• one learns the role of mental patient
• others interpret ones behavior in terms of the
  label

4
Erving Goffman Dramaturgical Model of Social
Life

• life really is like a theaterthe theater of
  social encounters
• there are sociological reasons for this (pp. CM
  p. 234)
• the vocabulary of theatre can be applied to
  social life

5
Goffmans concepts such as role performance and
role distance challenge overly-deterministic
notions of roles and social structures
6
A Brief Word about Ethnomethodology

• an offshoot of symbolic interactionism
• a focus on what makes basic social interaction
  possible
• Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodogical
  experiments
• the fragility of particular social realities
  (CM pp. 237-8)