ABSTRACT
As performance studies was developing as a field of investigation during the 1970s and early 1980s, it was in general more directly influenced by sociological models, particularly as represented in the work of Erving Goffman, whose writings in this area exerted an influence at least equal to, and perhaps even greater than Turner's in the anthropological study of performance. Many of the concerns and metaphors of later role and performance theory in sociological literature are clearly already in place in Evreinoff's rather fanciful analysis, including not only the particular dynamic of the social self as defined internally and externally by culturally conditioned roles, but also the reinforcement of those roles by the costumes, properties and physical settings provided by the "stage management" of society. Goffman's definition nevertheless addresses what seems to be an essential quality of performance, that it is based upon a relationship between a performer and an audience.
