“…everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role… It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.”
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
This week, ahead of our session on interviewing, we were tasked with making a short (2-8 minute) voice recording introducing ourselves. The suggestion was to address the five Ws: who, what, where, when, why. I was downtown in the centre of Mérida, when I decided to sit on a seat in a park and record my introduction. I’d just been experimenting with filming some material for my Unit 1 assessment.
We review our recordings in relation to that week’s reading: Goffman, E. (1959). ‘The presentation of self in everyday life’. Reading Goffman, I get a bit frustrated and struggle to engage with the text. He seems unable to escape his preoccupation with liars, impersonators and charlatans. He leans heavily on examples of people in extraordinary or unusual circumstances – the text is premised on an analogy with stage actors. I want him to turn his eye to the nuanced and subtle ways we shape the character we present in response to our contexts, and how this develops over time.
Listening back to my recording, I give a lot of attention to my family and childhood, and the economic and political situation I grew up in – how this seemed to change drastically between the 2000s and 2010s, as I was leaving home and finding my place in the world. I talk about my education and work, and I reflect on why I am taking this MA in Intercultural Practices, and my relationship to interculturality – particularly in my work, travel and living situation.
There are times when I fall into repeating scripts I’ve previously developed for myself – ways of presenting myself or my history that I rely on when meeting new people. In my recording, I position myself as a person of a certain class and education. Much of the details I choose to share, embellishing the bullet points of my life, are around the economic forces that have impacted my life. Is this me asserting a status, signalling an awareness of my privilege or trying to make excuses for a perceived lack of success in my life?
While my impression is that Goffman is more interested in trying to understand other people and how they act (rather than himself), I am interested in how he portrays the presentation of self as a complex mix of conscious and unconscious action and of sincerely believed and falsified impressions. I’m aware that some of the shorthand descriptions I use to identify myself, and in particular the work that I do (“writer”; “consultant”; “specialist”), haven’t always felt natural to me. They’re terms I adopted because they seemed the simplest way of communicating about myself in a particular context and to a particular audience. Sometimes, I had an uneasy feeling because they didn’t feel entirely true – I wanted to qualify them, give context – but why take up more time and space when the simple explanation is still factually accurate? Over time, I’ve repeated and repeated these terms, and the unease has faded. They’ve become part of how I identify.
“A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.”
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
Leave a Reply