The Influence Of Dramaturgy

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Dramaturgy Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that focusses on the management of everyday life. Erving Goffman is credited as being one of the chief proponents of this field. He compares the human world to a theatre and drew comparisons between humans in everyday life and actors that played roles on-stage. Dramaturgy tries to understand how order and ordering is established by a performance. Dramaturgy questions how each performance is enacted, what symbols are used to reach what effect. Feedback helps validate the various claims. Life is a Stage Dramaturgy analyses social interactions as a series of theoretical performances.Normal life is now like a play and humans are the actors in the play of life. The roles they play are the images …show more content…

It believes that everyday social situations are manipulated by people to convey a specific desired impression. Each actor therefore makes a series of decisions or choices that help establish who he is and his character to the general audience. These decisions range from how we dress each day: casual or formal, how we style our hair to even decisions like what sort of body language are we displaying, do we maintain eye contact while talking and choosing from a range of available facial expressions. Our choices influence how the things we say are perceived. Having eye contact and smiling as we compliment someone reinforces what we are saying and therefore is accepted to be genuine as opposed to being distracted and looking elsewhere while saying the compliment. According to Goffman, every individual is engaging in impression management by his conscious decision to present himself in a certain way and his continuous performance to ensure that a particular image of himself is established. The Two Sides of a …show more content…

It helps establish a scene. On stage a gardener’s identity is established by his shovel and hose. Likewise in real life, props play a major role. A professor in a university might have a number of books on the subject he teaches arranged in his office to create an impression that he is an authority on the subject. At his home however, there may be more paintings and art displayed rather than books that reflect his real passion for art. Even human beings can be used as props to put on a performance. A company may put out an ad that shows people from different countries in order to create an impression that they have a global customer base. This may not necessarily be true and actors of different ethnicities may be included just to make the ad seem more