How does the dramaturgical perspective enable our understanding of everyday life?. (UPSC CSE Mains 2023 - Sociology, Paper 1)
- The management of everyday life is the focus of a sociological perspective called dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is a version of symbolic interaction that views social situations as scenes manipulated by actors to convey their desired impression to the audience.
- Goffman a Canadian sociologist used a phenomenological approach to understand how individuals perceive the interactions they observe and take part in. He concentrated on small-scale, face-to-face interaction.
- Goffman described his work as a dramaturgical approach, it is an analogy taken from the theatre. Individuals learn their role and the context in which the role is played. Roles are not given, they are learnt through a process of interaction, they are the sets of expectations which others have of our behaviour.
- To Goffman, all the world was a theatre. Like actors, each of us uses our appearance to establish our character—something we do each morning as we choose which clothes to wear, how to style our hair, and whether this would be a good day to show off any tattoos or piercings that we have. And like actors, we can use facial expressions, eye contact, posture, and other body language to enhance, reinforce, or even contradict the things we say. For example, waiters at expensive restaurants are acutely aware of being on stage and act in a dignified and formal manner. Once in the kitchen, however, they may be transformed back into rowdy college kids.
- Goffman suggests that interaction is a performance, and this performance is shaped by the external environment and the audience of the action. Individuals aim to create an impression on others, and this impression is called the self.
- Actors act towards an audience to make an impression. They can manipulate symbols to create a particular response to their behaviour. Goffman undertook a participant observation study in the Shetland Islands (in the far north of Scotland), to illustrate his idea of impression management. In the Shetland Islands, the poor crofters deliberately let their houses get run down because they wanted to create an ‘impression’ that they were so poor that the landlord would believe that they could not afford to pay any extra rent.
- The process of establishing a social identity is linked to the concept of ‘front’ which is ‘that part of the individual’s performance which functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance’.
- Therefore, individuals learn about the ‘front’ through socialisation and act to standardise their behaviour so that others can understand it. A ‘front’ is a collective representation which provides the ‘proper setting’, ‘appearance’ and ‘manner’ for the social role. So, the actor has to fulfil the duties of a social role and be able to communicate the characteristics of the role to others.
- Social interaction is the process of reciprocal influence exercised by individuals over one another during social encounters. Usually, it refers to face-to-face encounters in which people are physically present with one another for a specified duration. However, in contemporary society we can also think of social encounters that are technologically mediated like texting, skyping, or messaging. In terms of the different levels of analysis in sociology–micro, meso, macro, and global–social interaction is generally approached at the micro-level where the structures and social scripts, the pre-established patterns of behaviour that people are expected to follow in specific social situations, that govern the relationship between particular individuals can be examined. However, as the sociological study of emotions indicates, the micro-level processes of everyday life are also impacted by macro-level phenomena such as gender inequality and historical transformations.
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