Originally dramaturgical
sociology was derived from the greatest playwright in the English language:
William Shakespeare but the term was first adapted into sociology by Goffman.
Simply ‘dramaturgy’ can be defined as “A sociological perspective stemming from
symbolic interactionism” but for Goffman sociological dramaturgy is the “creation, maintenance,
and destruction of common understandings of reality by people working”.
When looking at Dramaturgy this week subject matter examined actual self,
performance of self, front stage, backstage and the audience.
After reading this week’s reading
and looking over the lecture slides and recording I was very confused and I
struggled to understand and get my head around the whole idea. Through the in
detail tutorial discussions and examples the concept soon began to sink in and
I was able to adapt my own everyday examples to the idea. What this idea did
for me was open up the assessment of my own everyday activities and how I
‘perform’ differently dependant on my surroundings, groups of friends and location
eg: my workplace.
What I have found interesting is
that we undoubtedly create a number of ‘personas’ or faces for ourselves
with the idea of impressing the specific audience and these are dependent on
our situations and ‘audience’- friends or family. I feel that for most of us we
are aware that our performance at work would vary from our performance with our
friends and again with our family and for me until now I have ‘performed’ in
this manner without realisation. I have since analysed the idea of dramaturgy
with friends and family and looked at the different ‘performances’ they have
amongst their audiences.
Do you feel that you vary your ‘performances’
depending on your audiences? Which performance do you deem as your true performance? Why do you feel that you do this?
