Consider the medical visit just mentioned. People convey impressions not only through how they act and dress but also through how they arrange the appearance of the settings in which they interact. If you showed up for a medical visit and your physician were wearing a bathing suit, wouldn’t you feel just a bit uneasy? You are the same person regardless of what clothes you wear, but if you dress for a job interview as you would dress for a party (to use our earlier example), the person interviewing you would get an impression you might not want to be conveying. How we dress is also a form of impression management. But we also spend a lot of time on the backstage, by ourselves, when we can do and say things in private (such as singing in the shower) that we would not dare do or say in public. Much of our everyday interaction is on the frontstage, where an audience can see everything we do and hear everything we say. Backstage, they can do whatever they want, and the audience will have no idea of what they are doing (as long as they are quiet). In a play, of course, the frontstage is what the audience sees and is obviously the location in which the actors are performing their lines. Again using his dramaturgical metaphor, he said that some interaction occurs in the “frontstage,” or front region, while other interaction occurs in the “backstage,” or back region. Goffman wrote about other aspects of social interaction that affect our efforts to manage these impressions. How a student behaves with a professor is probably very different from how the same student behaves when out on the town with friends. Goffman’s work, in sum, aligns with Wright and Barkow, as well as the oft-quoted Shakespearean claim that “all the world’s a stage.” However, Dogen’s observation suggests that, whatever the role(s) we play and how we play them, adherence to the truth in the presentation of ourselves in everyday life affects our practice.\): Social interaction involves impression management. Meticulous research covers the interaction of black Americans with the white ruling class in southern states, the use of status symbols in the Anglo-Saxon world during “performances” designed to establish claims regarding non-material values, and how public officials incorporate and exemplify the officially-accredited values of their societies purely for effect. He addresses the functions of setting, manner, front, backstage, and appearances, as used in the theater and replicated in social situations. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework for detailed analysis. Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow similarly argues that the primary function of the self is impression management instead of decision-making, as is commonly believed. In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright posits that consciousness is largely “a press agent” singing our praises. This is the point where we start to feel who we are and can move in the direction of being either truthful or deceitful in a direct, personal way. What does sociology have to do with Zen practice? Remember this saying of Dogen: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self to study the self is to forget the self to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.” An aspect of the self is the persona, which Jung described as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” Why it’s worthy: In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed Goffman’s book as the tenth most important sociology book of the twentieth century. The projected views and outcomes vary depending on the groups we interact with and the setting of the interaction. We achieve this purpose by having a collective “definition of the situation,” where all agree on an expected outcome defining how everyone should behave. What it’s about: The central idea of this classical work of sociology is that people are constantly engaged in a process of “impression management” to project a favorable view of themselves.
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