Abstract
The idea of treating Goffman’s celebrated The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as canonical and as fit for placement in the sociological lexicon, along with graver works such as Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life or Weber’s The Protestant Ethic, might seem profane. This study of Goffman, formulated on the island of Unst in the Shetlands, Scotland, but conceived in relation to Anglo-American society in the 1950s, has long been treated as unique, enigmatic and in some way not part of ‘respectable’ sociology. Yet, despite this reputation, the study formed the platform for Goffman’s ascent to stellar status, marking him out by repute, citation and collected studies as the pre-eminent American sociologist of the second half of the 20th century. Much curiosity exists about that island study, undertaken between 1949 and 1951 and rewritten twice, first as a monograph in 1956 and then as a paperback in 1959. The peculiarity of Goffman’s study might lock it in its time as an account of the minutiae of the ritual order as conceived in a micro-sociology uniquely formulated at the inception of the service industries.
The need to chronicle the changes in society 60 years after the issue of Goffman’s study is self-evident but, oddly, nobody to date has really rectified this omission, until Shulman’s study came along. Too often, appraisals of a classical work in sociology are captive to it. This is not the case with this lively, insightful and omnivorous study of American culture which adds greatly to the enormous expansion of reflections and commentaries on Goffman and all his works. By an awesome immersion in Ritzer’s notion of ‘cathedrals of consumption’, Shulman has artfully deployed Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor to lay out the performative and ritual properties increasingly shaping contemporary American culture. Drawing on Goffman’s conceptual arsenal, perhaps too assiduously at times, Shulman illustrates well the way that staging increasingly applies to modes of cultural display in a vast number of areas. The outcome is a study that affirms the ubiquity of Goffman’s insights as American culture exponentially expands in ways that endorse their prophetic properties. The study has much to commend. It is written in a very accessible style, is well structured and sub-headed, has a useful glossary of Goffman’s concepts and is well indexed with a useful bibliography. Given the range of cultural resources Shulman deploys in this study, which make it original in its own right, it is perhaps understandable that the study has no conclusion.
Only occasionally does Shulman drift towards criticism of what is on offer, where prospects of deception have become so alluring. After Chapter 1 (useful) on self-presentation and dramaturgy, Chapters 2 and 3 move on well to consider performance, ritual and identity. Chapter 4 deals with ‘work places as stages’ which shape organisations. But it is really in Chapters 5 to 7 that the virtues of the study become more apparent as a validation of Goffman’s insights. In these chapters, in particular, Shulman displays an ethnographic awareness of the detail of the culture he inhabits that is awesome and which is almost equivalent at many times to Goffman’s powers of analysis and insight. In Chapter 5, the link between image and performance is well drawn, most notably the way both are interconnected in terms of commodification and consumerism. There are some delights in Chapter 6, which deals with role play in popular culture. Two instances come to mind. The first is a brilliant ethnographic account of the staging of professional wrestling (pp. 190–202). The other relates to the emergence of ‘hell houses’ (pp. 208–9). These imitate houses of horrors, but are deployed as warnings to sinners by Evangelical groups in the USA.
The final Chapter 7, ‘The Internet: Society’s Newest Stage’, is perhaps the most pertinent and useful one in the study. It remedies a long-standing need for a well-focused essay on the burgeoning social media in all its permutations, where Goffman’s notion of stigma finds new outlets in social media. Shulman captures well the ways performance online generates risks. These are explored in relation to the emergence of cyberbullying where realms of shame expand endlessly to punish failures and to reveal hidden secrets. Shulman concludes his chapter and the study with a wonderful section on ‘filter bubbles’. These reflect the self-confirming and insulating properties the use of the internet facilitates. They also draw attention to the contradictory gifts of the internet where, in one form, opinions can be insulated from contradiction but, in another, that capacity for restriction is to be off-set by what Shulman terms the prospects of ‘virtual engulfment’ (pp. 234–6). What emerges is that the little worlds Goffman explored do persist but now in a continual state of malleability and limitless extension.
It is no disparagement of this work that it is unusually accessible to the general public, but also especially to undergraduates. At a time of conceptual drought, it opens out many new areas well worthy of further exploration. Goffman was always generous in his coining of new concepts and in his deployment of metaphors. Shulman extends many of these into appraisals of popular culture, which seem to suggest that in contemporary sociology there is no escape from the legacy of Goffman’s appraisals where all of the world seems staged and presented. An opening is presented for the application of critical wits that would separate the authentic from inauthentic. The outcome of Shulman’s work is that sociology is still in business in offering appraisals of shifting landscapes.