Everyday Life Traving Goffman Analysis

Erving Goffman
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life The Main Argument, and the Starting Assumption As in Berger & Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality, this work is an attempt at analyzing our daily life world from the perspective that all of our actions we perform - and the interpretations and meanings we give to these actions - are fundamentally social in nature. In carrying out this analysis, therefore, the perspective Goffman adopts is that of the analogy of the everyday life to the theatrical, or the dramaturgical, performances. So, in this perspective, we cannot merely act for the sake of that action. Rather, all actions are social performances - with the aim of not only achieving whatever the "inherent" purposes the action may have had, but also that of giving off and maintaining certain desired impressions of t he self to others. So, human actions are seen as inherently involving this social and relational aspects with the desire to give off the impression that people want others to have of themselves. This is a starting assumption, not a deductively arrived conclusion. With this assumption kept in mind, then, Goffman's task in these pages is to outline several techniques people employ in
However, what is "true", or what is "false", or what is "honest" and what is a "lie", are socially defined and cannot be defined in absolute terms. Therefore, the important point in this section is that it is not a sociologists' task to be concerned with the question of what is a misrepresentation in any absolute sense and what is not. Rather, a sociologist must focus on the question of, in what ways can the process of creating certain impressions be disrupted through the