ABSTRACT
As a general designation for Erving Goffman’s distinctive sociological perspective, “dramaturgy” became popular in the early 1960s. Of course, the term specifically originated in Goffman’s first monograph, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (hereafter Presentation), the book that shot Goffman to sociological fame in 1959. Goffman (1959:xi) opened that book by declaring that “the perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones”. Despite the varied approaches of Goffman’s subsequent books, which extensively mobilized game, ritual, and frame figures and in which the dramaturgical model was not especially prominent, the term dramaturgy somehow came to stick as an all-purpose, general characterization of Goffman’s sociology. For example, Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) famous assessment completely absorbed Goffman’s sociology under the dramaturgical tag. The model of the theatrical performance, which Goffman acknowledged as suffering from “obvious inadequacies” on the first page of Presentation, now came to stand for the totality of his sociology. Yet, for anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with Goffman’s sociology, this seems a travesty—a passing off of the part for the whole, a whole that was considerably more complex than the term dramaturgy allowed.
