Can We Scale Up Goffman? From Vegas to the World Stage
نویسنده
چکیده
It is an all-too-common lament among sociologists that Erving Goffman, though his writings remain widely read and respected today, failed to spawn an ongoing and cohesive research tradition. His idiosyncratic methods of data collection, the uniqueness of his biographical trajectory, and even his prickly personality have all been invoked to explain the lack of a distinctly Goffmanian school of research (Gamson 1985; Scheff, Phillips, and Kincaid 2006; Smith 2006; Shalin 2014). It is also the case that microoriented sociologies, such as symbolic interactionism and especially ethnomethodology, have been pushed to the margins of sociology as a consequence of the ascendency of quantitative methods. This paper is, on one level, an argument for continuing to read Goffman as a seminal figure in the sociology of everyday life. But it is more than this. It is an argument that we should be ambitious about using Goffman to generate and develop theories about other levels of social reality, including the most macro of them all: the global level. I make this argument through recounting my own experience attempting to replicate Goffman’s famed ethnographic research as a casino dealer in Las Vegas.
منابع مشابه
Erving Goffman (1922–1982) developed a dramaturgical theory of the self and society inspired by Mead’s basic conception of social interaction
inspired by Mead’s basic conception of social interaction. In the selection below, excerpted from the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman presents a theory that likens social interaction to the theater. Individuals can be seen as performers, audience members, and outsiders that operate within particular “stages” or social spaces. Goffman suggests that how we present our selv...
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