♪ (light jazz music) ♪ (chattering)
"All the world's a stage
and all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits (knife slicing)
and their entrances, (baby crying)
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
The sociologist Erving Goffman took these lines
from As You Like It very seriously.
In his dramaturgical account of human interaction,
he argued that we display a series of masks to others,
enacting roles,
controlling and staging how we appear,
ever concerned with how we are coming across,
constantly trying to set ourselves in the best light.
According to Goffman, (page turns)
we play a range of different parts (speaking angrily)
determined by the situations we take ourselves to be in
and how we think we are coming across.
We adapt what we are depending on who we are interacting with.
This is most apparent
in awkward situations (cheering)
where we suddenly find ourselves trying to play two inconsistent roles.
As for example, when we accidentally encounter friends
from very different social groups and have to juggle masks.
The analogy with acting only goes so far for Goffman, though,
because in his view, there is no true self,
no identifiable performer behind the roles.
The roles just are the performer.
He challenged the idea that each of us has
a more or less fixed character, a psychological identity.
At least in the role of author
of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he did.
♪ (light jazz music) ♪