Introduction

Dramaturgy—the comparison between social life and theater—is the most influential of Erving Goffman’s metaphors. Exciting, intriguing, and visually striking, the image of actors on stage, performing characters in scenes, invites us to take a seat in the audience and enjoy the show. Throughout Goffman’s work, we find recurring themes of mystery, deception, and illusory appearance, encouraging readers to question what might lie behind the scenes. His tone is conspiratorial, promising to share with us the secrets he has learned about the performative intricacies of human social behavior. Goffman’s canonical texts, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Interaction Ritual (1967), and Relations in Public (1971), document the ways in which teams of actors display and uphold tacitly agreed-upon versions of social reality. Later and more esoteric works, such as Frame Analysis (1974) and Gender Advertisements (1979), deal with the power of presented knowledge claims and discursive forms of truth.

Yet, despite this intellectual concern with dramatic distortion, Goffman is careful to keep himself hidden, remaining elusive and inscrutable behind the page. We rarely see Goffman-the-person, as he eschewed subjective inference in favor of dry observation, while Goffman-the-author had an understated voice that was intentionally measured. Rather than wearing his heart on his sleeve, he cloaked himself in mystery and left the audience guessing. Professionally, Goffman was famously reluctant to align himself with any disciplinary field, theoretical perspective or ideological position, rarely gave interviews, forbade lecture recordings, and sealed his personal archives (Shalin 2013). Ironically, this self-obscuration only serves to increase the audience’s fascination with who Goffman was and what he was intending. Imagined in posterity, through this tantalizing lens, he cuts more of a celebrity figure than anyone could have done in real life.

There is no shortage of critical reviews, analytical accounts, and personal recollections by Goffmanian scholars (Ditton 1980; Burns 1992; Manning 1992; Winkin 1999; Scheff 2006; Smith 2006; Jacobsen 2010; Raffel 2013; Scott 2015; Hood and van de Vate 2017), and an impressive repository of documentary resources, the Erving Goffman Archives (Shalin 2013).