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A review by lottie_d
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
2.0
Oh my god this was such a slog.
First off; it is the neurodivergent's dream to have a book which outlines why social interactions are the way that they are and helps you understand them in the context of routine theater. This dialectic has worth beyond its significance as a historical document or a way of understanding why older people in business still see socialization this way, which is why I can't bring myself to give it only one star.
However, the author's claim that Anglo-American society's modes of socialization resemble theater because it meets a psychobiological impulse is part and parcel with all of the other flaws that a flimsy philosophy book masquerading as "social psychology" from the 1940s naturally takes on when it's read 80 years into the future.
There's so many things that made this book hard to read. It's incredibly padded with too-long explanations that only confound the point before the author has to give a "for example" to save the reader. The writing style is so thick with fluff that it reads like how a person would swim in molasses. The analysis is tinged with misogyny and racism, which is in the fashion of the times but in the hindsight of work done within other dialectics, does undermine the thesis in terms of who exactly is staging which performance for what motivation and how on earth that could be biological in any way.
Glad to have this finally out of the way.
First off; it is the neurodivergent's dream to have a book which outlines why social interactions are the way that they are and helps you understand them in the context of routine theater. This dialectic has worth beyond its significance as a historical document or a way of understanding why older people in business still see socialization this way, which is why I can't bring myself to give it only one star.
However, the author's claim that Anglo-American society's modes of socialization resemble theater because it meets a psychobiological impulse is part and parcel with all of the other flaws that a flimsy philosophy book masquerading as "social psychology" from the 1940s naturally takes on when it's read 80 years into the future.
There's so many things that made this book hard to read. It's incredibly padded with too-long explanations that only confound the point before the author has to give a "for example" to save the reader. The writing style is so thick with fluff that it reads like how a person would swim in molasses. The analysis is tinged with misogyny and racism, which is in the fashion of the times but in the hindsight of work done within other dialectics, does undermine the thesis in terms of who exactly is staging which performance for what motivation and how on earth that could be biological in any way.
Glad to have this finally out of the way.