Dramaturgy

Week 5 Reading: Goffman, E 1971, ‘Performances”, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, pp28-82

Actual self, performance of self, audience, frontstage and backstage were all aspects that were addressed this week when looking at Dramaturgy.

When looking at Dramaturgy I found it unable to completely understand the issues of frontstage and backstage from just the reading and lecture. After completing the tutorial though and being able to talk about these theories in greater detail with the rest of the class I was able to gain a more complete understanding. When seeing others examples of their foreground and background experiences it became a lot easier to see my own examples and attach these to further my understanding.

The group presentation split us up into groups and gave us questions to consider then report what we came up with back to the rest of the class. One of the questions that I was given was addressing presentation of self and the actual self. What we found was that before you can look at presentation of self you first have to address what is actual self. This is then contradicted with the fact that, how can you actually consider something to be ‘actual’ self. Is it defined by a common set of characteristic that we have on a variety of different performances? Do we even have an actual self because in one way or another (no matter how small) we are always performing for different audiences?

After this week I started assessing my own life. I started looking at: how I act around different groups of people; the similarities or differences that, each ‘performance’ contains and how others act around me in those different situations. Who knew everyday life was so layered?