ABSTRACT
When I fi rst encountered the work of Erving Goffman as a fi rst-year college student in 1986, I was more irritated than intrigued. The world Goffman seemed to portray in his essay “On Face-Work” and in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the fi rst two things I read, seemed to me to be one in which people cared far more than they should about what other people thought about them. Reading Goffman reminded me of my parents and their seeming obsession with what the neighbours, people at church, other parents and just about anybody else in our small southern Indiana town thought about them and, by extension, their children. In contrast to their point of view, I believed people should just be real, be themselves, be authentic, or however else I might have put it at the time.
