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Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience
Erving Goffman will influence the thinking and perception of generations to come. In Frame Analysis, the brilliant theorist writes about the ways in which people determine their anwers to the question "What is going on here?" and "Under what circumstances do we think things are real?"
600 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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1244 people want to read
About the author
Erving Goffman
51 books514 followersErving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.
Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.
Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 4, 2023
In part, this book is too long to provide anything that would be a reasonable review. And I think that if I was going to give you some advice and you hadn’t already read any Goffman before, I probably wouldn’t suggest you start here. Maybe start with his Presentation of Self in Society or even Stigma. It isn’t that this isn’t a good read – but I think the other books are quicker reads and will probably give you as much of his ideas as you need to be getting started with.
This book reminded me of a text version of his Gender Advertisements. I don’t think I’d paid quite enough attention to how Goffman does his research as much as I was forced to with this book. Basically, he spent lots of time gathering examples from, well, everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, plays, television shows, everything.
So, what are frames? Well, they are sort of stereotyped ways in which we understand how the world works. You know—you walk into a room and there are benches and glass screens with clerks behind the screens and people are handing over slips of paper to these clerks and the clerks are handing them money in return—you’re in a bank. You fill in a withdrawal slip and join a queue. When you get to the counter you hand over the slip and the teller flips the withdrawal slip and asks you, “did you write anything on the back of the slip?” You say “No, was I meant to?” She says, “No, it’s just that it says ‘hand over all your money’—You suddenly register in your mind there had been a security guard at the front door with a gun and you can feel your heart-rate increase—you aren’t sure if you should smile, laugh uncomfortably, sincerely say it wasn’t you who had written the note—then you hear someone call out, ‘Smile! You’re on Candid Camera.’ So, we have moved through a series of ‘frames’. The first involving the frame of being in a bank. The second in being a customer in a bank. The third in being caught up in a practical joke in a bank, that might have easily gotten out of hand and got you shot. Then in another form of practical joke.
Knowing which frame you are in at any one time is, therefore, pretty important. This book gives endless examples of various frames. Most of the rest of this review will be quotes from the book – but this book is very long and the examples only give a taste of what it has to say. If you can get hold of this book and don’t really want to read the whole thing – read the introduction. He does a wonderful thing where he deconstructs his motivations for writing about frames – it is lovely. I think if I was writing this book today I would spend much more time on different aspects of the frames than Goffman has. Not least, I would spend much more time on the props that establish frames. Then the power relationships that allow frames to make sense. I know he has done much of this work elsewhere – but I couldn’t help feeling that more needed to be said there about how power and props allow frames to work. Anyway – some quotes.
All the world is not a stage—certainly the theatre isn’t entirely. 1
A game such as chess generates a habitable universe for those who can follow it, a plane of being, a cast of characters with a seemingly unlimited number of different situations and acts through which to realise their natures and destinies. Yet much of this is reducible to a small set of interdependent rules and practices. 5
In that sense it has been argued, for example, that opposing rooters at a football game do not experience the ‘same’ game. 9
The game of checkers incorporates an understanding of the governing purpose of the participants, whereas the traffic code does not establish where we are to travel or why we should want to, but merely the restraints we are to observe in getting there. 24
Let me repeat: in our society the very significant assumption is generally made that all events—without exception—can be contained and managed within the conventional system of beliefs. We tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable. 30
Repetition always commits us to imagining an unknown cause, so true is it that in the popular consciousness, the aleatory is always distributive, never repetitive: chance is supposed to vary events; if it repeats them, it does so in order to signify something through them; to repeat is to signify…(p.191 of Roland Barthes Structure of the Fait-Divers) 33 (footnote)
In sum, observers actively project their frames of reference into the world immediately around them, and one fails to see their so doing only because events ordinarily confirm these projections, causing the assumptions to disappear into the smooth flow of activity. 39
Something of a joke is made about young people practicing smoking in front of a mirror in order to acquire a sophisticated look. But behind the joke seems to be an understanding that ‘expressive’ behavior, as found, for example, in greetings, statements of love, facial gestures, and the like, ought never to have been practiced, is rather always to be a by-product of action, never its end. 63
When a novel is made into a movie and then the movie is ‘adapted’ as a musical comedy, we assume the second effort will be further away from the original text than the first. A second issue will be the frame itself: as story presented as a novel seems more likely to appear in fuller form than when scripted as a puppet show. 78
We have charity balls so that the next day news coverage will appear, the coverage and not the ball serving to advertise the charity. 79
Indeed, a belief that the truth will out is a fundamental element in the cosmology of Western man. 111
Being part of the audience in a theatre obliges us to act as if our own knowledge, as well as that of some of the characters, is partial. 135
Were the persons on stage to orient to the audience as persons to adjust the conversation to—by filling in, censoring, and so forth—the dramatic illusion would be entirely lost. One character could say to another character what could be said to a roomful of strangers. The audience would be ‘in’ nothing. On the other hand, if the audience were not filled in somehow, it would soon become entirely lost. What is done, and done systematically, is that the audience is given the information it needs covertly, so the fiction can be sustained that it has indeed entered into a world not its own. 142
Obviously, there are media restrictions that must be accepted: for example, in the early days, soprano high notes could blow out transmitter tubes, so crooning came into vogue. 145
Similarly, when the audience witnesses an actor forgetting his lines and hears the prompter providing them, the whole dramatic illusion can be threatened, not merely the flubber’s contribution to it. Again the issues is the syntactical level at which the error occurs. We may speak metaphorically of an actor in literal life forgetting his lines and having to be prompted, but it is hard to think of an everyday flub that cuts as deeply into unstaged reality as a missed line does in a dramatized event. Something like a man forgetting the first name of his wife when introducing her would have to be drawn upon. 206
It turns out that the study of how to uncover deception is also by and large the study of how to build up fabrications. The way in which strips of activity are geared into the world and the way in which deceptions can be fabricated turn out, paradoxically, to be much the same. In consequence one can learn how our sense of ordinary reality is produced by examining something that is easier to become conscious of, namely, how reality is mimicked and/or how it is faked. 251
Backstage at a Strip hotel, where some of the most gorgeous girls in the world prance around—some half-clad, some unclad. The sight of a strange man in the wings and they scurry for cover. Girls who march around stage almost stark naked, blush and cover their bosoms as they pass from the stage to the dressing room. Quoted from Murray Hertz 255
Something of the same design allows a waitress to pacify customers by taking their orders—or, even less, by placing water on their tables—for dinner can begin considerably before eating does. 265
It may be said, in fine, that in most cases the film actor plays himself, and the work of the director consists not in compelling him to create something that is not in him, but in shoing, as expressively and vividly as possible, what is in him, by using his real characteristics. 280
Undercover police apparently feel it appropriate to assume almost any disguise, for their ‘real’ status protects them from being permanently identified with the guise they temporarily take on. Nonetheless, there are certain guises the police are loathe to fall into, especially those requiring the practice of homosexual acts. 283
Thus, when a hotel guest re-enters his room and finds someone in it, the person is almost certainly to be someone in the guest’s party, a housekeeper, a hotel official, a stranger who has mistaken rooms, or a thief. A returning guest may be momentarily puzzled concerning ‘who’ is in his room, but this puzzlement occurs within a narrow matrix of likely possibilities, most of which are quickly called to mind. These possibilities, incidentally, also provide a choice of covers an intruder can use to dissemble the ‘real’ reason for being present, a reason usually is nicely covered by the same matrix. 303 footnote
Thus, the tendency of the patrolman to be and act suspicious arises not simply from the danger inherent in his function but from his doubts as to the ‘legitimacy’ of the victim. Middle-class victims who have suffered a street attack (a mugging, for example) are generally considered most legitimate; middle class victims of burglary are seen as somewhat less legitimate (it could be an effort to make a fraudulent insurance claim); lower-class victims of theft are still less legitimate (they may have stolen the item in the first place); lower-class victims of assaults are the least legitimate (they probably brought it on themselves. Footnot 306
The most familiar example, perhaps, is what unfolds when an individual answers the phone and is greeted by a strange voice that addresses him warmly by name while awaiting recognition. 307
I would like to add that arms and explosive devices figure largely in misframing stories because these instrumentalities have a special framing power, that of transforming ordinary activity into what, retrospectively, comes to be seen as an ill-fated taking of things for granted, in short, erroneousness. 316
Many a good film has been spoilt for some by the laughter of others in the wrong places. 367
Legitimate stage productions in the sixties seemed to consist very largely of the theatre of frames: the content differed, but the devices were all the same. Insult comedy became widely popular. TV emceeing, as in the talk shows. Became trickier, with much explicit reference to backstage elements of the show (censorship, sponsors) and much joking point made of mistakes, errors of timing, and slips, in fact exactly what ordinarily would have been strenuously disattended; and flooding out by performers seemed to be actively encouraged and made much of. 420
He who cleans off his dinner plate can be seen as starved, polite, gluttonous, or frugal. But usually the / context, as we say, rules out wrong interpretations and rules in the right one. 440-41
A gun, having this power, can give to its holder an expectation that he can radically restructure what is to occur and curry off a scene that overrides the existing one. Should his intent or capacity (which may mean his perceived suitability for the role) be given no credit, then indeed a fiasco can occur… 447
Information concerning an event must sometimes be taken from what is relayed through an individual, he being the sole available channel. These are the circumstances, of course, which produce the ‘cry wolf’ myth warning us, among other things, against the vulnerability of told worlds. Note, any narrowing of even this channel, as in telephone and telegraphic communication, further increases vulnerability. 450
The issue is that the recordings themselves are put together in accordance with the constraints and aims of show manufacture. There is actually very little coverage, since each network has only a handful of crews in a handful of cities. Of the film shot for a story that the central office has decided on, only a very small part will eventually be used and that in patches. Part of the sound is likely to come a library of cans, and the film shown is likely to contain shots filmed at different times and at different places and to include strips specifically designed long beforehand as dateless fillers. 452
Dear Abby: After nearly 20 years of marriage my husband has asked me for a divorce. He says he needs a wife, not a housekeeper.
Two years ago, in the middle of a heated argument I told my husband that his love-making did nothing for me—that I had only been putting on an act.
Abby, it wasn’t exactly the truth. I only said it to hurt him. He hasn’t touched me or kissed me since that day.
I would do anything to have my husband back the way he was. I have a find home, wonderful children, and I don’t want a divorce. Please tell me what to do. 462
It might be added that the highest political office in a state seems to bring its incumbent into a special relationship with realities. He is taken as representing then. Should it prove, then, that he is being deceived or is deceiving, his reputation is not the only thing that suffers; the reputation of realities suffers, too. 470
Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information, but in giving shows. 508
An in fact, it seems that whenever an individual during ordinary talk directly quotes someone who is absent, the quoted strip will carry paralinguistic and kinesic efforts to mark the quoted person’s age, sex, class, and so forth, these efforts serving to vivify the presentation. And this whether or not mimicry is intended. 518
News broadcasters on national prime time read their lines in a close to faultless manner, effectively maintaining the sense that something other than mere reading is occurring. When a word is flubbed, these performers tend to recover themselves with minimal reference to the mistake, either blandly repeating the spoiled strip as if no repetition were involved or proceeding as if neither notice nor correction were required. In contrast, announcers on new special-interest local stations not only make an appreciable number of mistakes but also exercise considerable liberty in dealing with the trouble. They give open voice to apologies, self-castigations, exasperation, and may even let the audience into their confidence concerning the trouble they have always had with various words, phrases, languages, and pronunciations. 543
Whatever the reason, the life of talk consists principally of reliving. 547
Playwrights, after all, must start from where their audience starts: the belief that individual lives do indeed have a structure and course, and that the determinative forces can be identified. 557
Tales, like plays, demonstrate a full interdependence of human action and fate—a meaningfulness—that is characteristic of games of strategy but not necessarily characteristics of life. 559
This book reminded me of a text version of his Gender Advertisements. I don’t think I’d paid quite enough attention to how Goffman does his research as much as I was forced to with this book. Basically, he spent lots of time gathering examples from, well, everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, plays, television shows, everything.
So, what are frames? Well, they are sort of stereotyped ways in which we understand how the world works. You know—you walk into a room and there are benches and glass screens with clerks behind the screens and people are handing over slips of paper to these clerks and the clerks are handing them money in return—you’re in a bank. You fill in a withdrawal slip and join a queue. When you get to the counter you hand over the slip and the teller flips the withdrawal slip and asks you, “did you write anything on the back of the slip?” You say “No, was I meant to?” She says, “No, it’s just that it says ‘hand over all your money’—You suddenly register in your mind there had been a security guard at the front door with a gun and you can feel your heart-rate increase—you aren’t sure if you should smile, laugh uncomfortably, sincerely say it wasn’t you who had written the note—then you hear someone call out, ‘Smile! You’re on Candid Camera.’ So, we have moved through a series of ‘frames’. The first involving the frame of being in a bank. The second in being a customer in a bank. The third in being caught up in a practical joke in a bank, that might have easily gotten out of hand and got you shot. Then in another form of practical joke.
Knowing which frame you are in at any one time is, therefore, pretty important. This book gives endless examples of various frames. Most of the rest of this review will be quotes from the book – but this book is very long and the examples only give a taste of what it has to say. If you can get hold of this book and don’t really want to read the whole thing – read the introduction. He does a wonderful thing where he deconstructs his motivations for writing about frames – it is lovely. I think if I was writing this book today I would spend much more time on different aspects of the frames than Goffman has. Not least, I would spend much more time on the props that establish frames. Then the power relationships that allow frames to make sense. I know he has done much of this work elsewhere – but I couldn’t help feeling that more needed to be said there about how power and props allow frames to work. Anyway – some quotes.
All the world is not a stage—certainly the theatre isn’t entirely. 1
A game such as chess generates a habitable universe for those who can follow it, a plane of being, a cast of characters with a seemingly unlimited number of different situations and acts through which to realise their natures and destinies. Yet much of this is reducible to a small set of interdependent rules and practices. 5
In that sense it has been argued, for example, that opposing rooters at a football game do not experience the ‘same’ game. 9
The game of checkers incorporates an understanding of the governing purpose of the participants, whereas the traffic code does not establish where we are to travel or why we should want to, but merely the restraints we are to observe in getting there. 24
Let me repeat: in our society the very significant assumption is generally made that all events—without exception—can be contained and managed within the conventional system of beliefs. We tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable. 30
Repetition always commits us to imagining an unknown cause, so true is it that in the popular consciousness, the aleatory is always distributive, never repetitive: chance is supposed to vary events; if it repeats them, it does so in order to signify something through them; to repeat is to signify…(p.191 of Roland Barthes Structure of the Fait-Divers) 33 (footnote)
In sum, observers actively project their frames of reference into the world immediately around them, and one fails to see their so doing only because events ordinarily confirm these projections, causing the assumptions to disappear into the smooth flow of activity. 39
Something of a joke is made about young people practicing smoking in front of a mirror in order to acquire a sophisticated look. But behind the joke seems to be an understanding that ‘expressive’ behavior, as found, for example, in greetings, statements of love, facial gestures, and the like, ought never to have been practiced, is rather always to be a by-product of action, never its end. 63
When a novel is made into a movie and then the movie is ‘adapted’ as a musical comedy, we assume the second effort will be further away from the original text than the first. A second issue will be the frame itself: as story presented as a novel seems more likely to appear in fuller form than when scripted as a puppet show. 78
We have charity balls so that the next day news coverage will appear, the coverage and not the ball serving to advertise the charity. 79
Indeed, a belief that the truth will out is a fundamental element in the cosmology of Western man. 111
Being part of the audience in a theatre obliges us to act as if our own knowledge, as well as that of some of the characters, is partial. 135
Were the persons on stage to orient to the audience as persons to adjust the conversation to—by filling in, censoring, and so forth—the dramatic illusion would be entirely lost. One character could say to another character what could be said to a roomful of strangers. The audience would be ‘in’ nothing. On the other hand, if the audience were not filled in somehow, it would soon become entirely lost. What is done, and done systematically, is that the audience is given the information it needs covertly, so the fiction can be sustained that it has indeed entered into a world not its own. 142
Obviously, there are media restrictions that must be accepted: for example, in the early days, soprano high notes could blow out transmitter tubes, so crooning came into vogue. 145
Similarly, when the audience witnesses an actor forgetting his lines and hears the prompter providing them, the whole dramatic illusion can be threatened, not merely the flubber’s contribution to it. Again the issues is the syntactical level at which the error occurs. We may speak metaphorically of an actor in literal life forgetting his lines and having to be prompted, but it is hard to think of an everyday flub that cuts as deeply into unstaged reality as a missed line does in a dramatized event. Something like a man forgetting the first name of his wife when introducing her would have to be drawn upon. 206
It turns out that the study of how to uncover deception is also by and large the study of how to build up fabrications. The way in which strips of activity are geared into the world and the way in which deceptions can be fabricated turn out, paradoxically, to be much the same. In consequence one can learn how our sense of ordinary reality is produced by examining something that is easier to become conscious of, namely, how reality is mimicked and/or how it is faked. 251
Backstage at a Strip hotel, where some of the most gorgeous girls in the world prance around—some half-clad, some unclad. The sight of a strange man in the wings and they scurry for cover. Girls who march around stage almost stark naked, blush and cover their bosoms as they pass from the stage to the dressing room. Quoted from Murray Hertz 255
Something of the same design allows a waitress to pacify customers by taking their orders—or, even less, by placing water on their tables—for dinner can begin considerably before eating does. 265
It may be said, in fine, that in most cases the film actor plays himself, and the work of the director consists not in compelling him to create something that is not in him, but in shoing, as expressively and vividly as possible, what is in him, by using his real characteristics. 280
Undercover police apparently feel it appropriate to assume almost any disguise, for their ‘real’ status protects them from being permanently identified with the guise they temporarily take on. Nonetheless, there are certain guises the police are loathe to fall into, especially those requiring the practice of homosexual acts. 283
Thus, when a hotel guest re-enters his room and finds someone in it, the person is almost certainly to be someone in the guest’s party, a housekeeper, a hotel official, a stranger who has mistaken rooms, or a thief. A returning guest may be momentarily puzzled concerning ‘who’ is in his room, but this puzzlement occurs within a narrow matrix of likely possibilities, most of which are quickly called to mind. These possibilities, incidentally, also provide a choice of covers an intruder can use to dissemble the ‘real’ reason for being present, a reason usually is nicely covered by the same matrix. 303 footnote
Thus, the tendency of the patrolman to be and act suspicious arises not simply from the danger inherent in his function but from his doubts as to the ‘legitimacy’ of the victim. Middle-class victims who have suffered a street attack (a mugging, for example) are generally considered most legitimate; middle class victims of burglary are seen as somewhat less legitimate (it could be an effort to make a fraudulent insurance claim); lower-class victims of theft are still less legitimate (they may have stolen the item in the first place); lower-class victims of assaults are the least legitimate (they probably brought it on themselves. Footnot 306
The most familiar example, perhaps, is what unfolds when an individual answers the phone and is greeted by a strange voice that addresses him warmly by name while awaiting recognition. 307
I would like to add that arms and explosive devices figure largely in misframing stories because these instrumentalities have a special framing power, that of transforming ordinary activity into what, retrospectively, comes to be seen as an ill-fated taking of things for granted, in short, erroneousness. 316
Many a good film has been spoilt for some by the laughter of others in the wrong places. 367
Legitimate stage productions in the sixties seemed to consist very largely of the theatre of frames: the content differed, but the devices were all the same. Insult comedy became widely popular. TV emceeing, as in the talk shows. Became trickier, with much explicit reference to backstage elements of the show (censorship, sponsors) and much joking point made of mistakes, errors of timing, and slips, in fact exactly what ordinarily would have been strenuously disattended; and flooding out by performers seemed to be actively encouraged and made much of. 420
He who cleans off his dinner plate can be seen as starved, polite, gluttonous, or frugal. But usually the / context, as we say, rules out wrong interpretations and rules in the right one. 440-41
A gun, having this power, can give to its holder an expectation that he can radically restructure what is to occur and curry off a scene that overrides the existing one. Should his intent or capacity (which may mean his perceived suitability for the role) be given no credit, then indeed a fiasco can occur… 447
Information concerning an event must sometimes be taken from what is relayed through an individual, he being the sole available channel. These are the circumstances, of course, which produce the ‘cry wolf’ myth warning us, among other things, against the vulnerability of told worlds. Note, any narrowing of even this channel, as in telephone and telegraphic communication, further increases vulnerability. 450
The issue is that the recordings themselves are put together in accordance with the constraints and aims of show manufacture. There is actually very little coverage, since each network has only a handful of crews in a handful of cities. Of the film shot for a story that the central office has decided on, only a very small part will eventually be used and that in patches. Part of the sound is likely to come a library of cans, and the film shown is likely to contain shots filmed at different times and at different places and to include strips specifically designed long beforehand as dateless fillers. 452
Dear Abby: After nearly 20 years of marriage my husband has asked me for a divorce. He says he needs a wife, not a housekeeper.
Two years ago, in the middle of a heated argument I told my husband that his love-making did nothing for me—that I had only been putting on an act.
Abby, it wasn’t exactly the truth. I only said it to hurt him. He hasn’t touched me or kissed me since that day.
I would do anything to have my husband back the way he was. I have a find home, wonderful children, and I don’t want a divorce. Please tell me what to do. 462
It might be added that the highest political office in a state seems to bring its incumbent into a special relationship with realities. He is taken as representing then. Should it prove, then, that he is being deceived or is deceiving, his reputation is not the only thing that suffers; the reputation of realities suffers, too. 470
Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information, but in giving shows. 508
An in fact, it seems that whenever an individual during ordinary talk directly quotes someone who is absent, the quoted strip will carry paralinguistic and kinesic efforts to mark the quoted person’s age, sex, class, and so forth, these efforts serving to vivify the presentation. And this whether or not mimicry is intended. 518
News broadcasters on national prime time read their lines in a close to faultless manner, effectively maintaining the sense that something other than mere reading is occurring. When a word is flubbed, these performers tend to recover themselves with minimal reference to the mistake, either blandly repeating the spoiled strip as if no repetition were involved or proceeding as if neither notice nor correction were required. In contrast, announcers on new special-interest local stations not only make an appreciable number of mistakes but also exercise considerable liberty in dealing with the trouble. They give open voice to apologies, self-castigations, exasperation, and may even let the audience into their confidence concerning the trouble they have always had with various words, phrases, languages, and pronunciations. 543
Whatever the reason, the life of talk consists principally of reliving. 547
Playwrights, after all, must start from where their audience starts: the belief that individual lives do indeed have a structure and course, and that the determinative forces can be identified. 557
Tales, like plays, demonstrate a full interdependence of human action and fate—a meaningfulness—that is characteristic of games of strategy but not necessarily characteristics of life. 559
November 11, 2009
A classic, of course, but not a pleasant read. I discovered moments of brilliance, and probably missed a good many others because I don't have the background to analyze society as deeply as Goffman does, but I frankly found a lot of the book to hash over things that we all know from everyday life. Of course Goffman draws comparisons between commonplace things in unusual ways, but here the book runs into its other flaw: he draws his net too wide. His "frame" can be any assumption that underlies anything we do--so broad that the concept dissolves.
August 16, 2008
Before I read this I had actually forgotten how enjoyable Goffman is to read -- he uses really entertaining examples to illustrate things, and his manner of writing is really refreshing, especially for sociological theory. He seems possible obsessed with horses, too. He mentions "horses with mathematical inclinations" and there is a lengthy anecdote about the autopsy of this horse that the owners claim was killed by aliens. Also, he did a lot of fieldwork in Las Vegas, so many of his examples are about how casinos operate, which is fairly interesting.
October 27, 2015
Didn't finish it. I read the first two chapters and only skimmed the rest of the book after I realised I wasn't really getting anything out of it. I expected more methodological information and concepts. However, in this book Goffman explains different aspects of frames and then analyses those with different examples. A lot of this seems common sense or even not useful or interesting. Or stimulating.
December 29, 2008
In his earlier work, Goffman showed how individuals had meaning only in the context of particular situations and through the roles they had in those situations. Frame Analysis is an attempt to formulate this central insight in a more abstract way. In some ways less satisfactory than his earlier books, it is nevertheless a major work by a great sociologist.
May 29, 2017
This is a monumental text that has influenced so many theorists. It is extremely long with example after example. And just when you think he's done, there are five more examples. I genuinely think this book could have been half the length. Overall, this is incredibly insightful. I gave three stars because of length, but theoretically it deserves FIVE big stars.
August 26, 2011
Everyone references this book, and I wonder how many have ever read the entire thing. I definitely skimmed a good deal of it and skipped a couple of chapters. This book is unnecessarily long. The point that Goffman makes is not that complex and could be explained in less than 100 pages. I read it, because it's one of those things that you're supposed to read, I guess. However, I found it boring, repetitive, and not so enlightening. Perhaps if I had read this in the 1970s, I would have been more impressed. Who knows?
July 24, 2011
READ JUL 2010
Interesting, albeit challenging read on how one interacts in the world and with others. Goffman uses many analogies (sometimes too many) to illustrate how we interpret and transform (frame) actions and dialog. Best quote, "The individual comes to doings as someone of particular biographical identity even while he appears in the trappings of a particular social role" (p. 573).
Interesting, albeit challenging read on how one interacts in the world and with others. Goffman uses many analogies (sometimes too many) to illustrate how we interpret and transform (frame) actions and dialog. Best quote, "The individual comes to doings as someone of particular biographical identity even while he appears in the trappings of a particular social role" (p. 573).
June 20, 2022
Você já deve ter se perguntado por que, afinal de contas, determinada pessoa de seu círculo de relações familiares ou sociais acredita piamente no que acredita e se comporta dessa ou daquela maneira quando os fatos reais colidem com a base de sustentação de suas crenças. A indagação, que, em geral vem acompanhada por espanto e decepção, tem sido cada vez mais frequente.
Esse fenômeno, que turva a compreensão individual da realidade e, visto sob uma perspectiva mais ampla, dificulta o debate público em termos racionais, é tão antigo quanto o próprio estudo do comportamento dos indivíduos em sociedade. No entanto, sua análise ganhou especial relevância nos últimos anos, por duas razões, basicamente. A primeira é a ascensão de governantes populistas iliberais ao poder em diversos países. Trata-se de uma cepa de políticos que agem deliberadamente para tornar permeável a fronteira entre fato e ficção, estimulando a crença numa "realidade alternativa", que seria tão válida quanto a verdade factual. A segunda razão é a pandemia de Covid-19, que levou bilhões de pessoas a pensar e agir sob o signo do medo.
O sociólogo canadense Erving Goffman é um dos pensadores que mais nos ajudam a compreender o que está por trás desta aparente desconexão do indivíduo com a realidade e como ela é percebida pelos outros.
Memes e frames
A antevisão e o brilho intelectual de Goffman - inversamente proporcional a sua vaidade pessoal - são tais que seus escritos sobre as interações cotidianas e as molduras, ou frames, por meio das quais os indivíduos "enquadram" suas visões de mundo, seguem mais relevantes do que nunca.
O "enquadramento", portanto, tem a ver, antes de tudo, com a posição que o indivíduo busca ter no mundo, ainda que, para isso, tenha de relativizar o que entende como verdade factual
Departamento de realidade
Algumas pessoas creem piamente que o verde das fardas livrará nosso país de suas desgraças e desavenças. Em seus momentos de maior devaneio, cogitam que alguns tanques nas ruas trariam de volta nossa tradição de ameno convívio, acabariam com as desordens, nos livrariam da corrupção e do paradeiro econômico, da inflação e de tudo mais que nos faz minúsculos em relação ao mundo civilizado. É possível, tudo é possível. Nos espaços siderais da imaginação, tudo é possível. Alguns chegam mesmo a crer que, paraísos políticos, uma vez estabelecidos não se desfazem. Esquecem que na antiga Roma, governantes sábio e justos foram substituídos por dementes como Nero, Calígula e Cômodo.
E o futuro?
Se recairmos na polarização iniciada em 2018, estará redondamente enganado quem pensar que acordaremos do pesadelo quando a Justiça Eleitoral der por encerrada a contagem dos votos.
Seria tudo muito engraçado se nós também não nos tivéssemos transformado numa caricatura moderna daquela que antigamente já éramos. Hoje nada mais parece nos impressionar. Pobres sempre fomos mas, ao final da Segunda Guerra, não era comum presenciarmos indivíduos disputando uma vaga para dormir embaixo de algum viaduto, ou para chegar primeiro a cata de comida. A própria violência tornou-se mais violenta, gratuita e cruel.
Esse fenômeno, que turva a compreensão individual da realidade e, visto sob uma perspectiva mais ampla, dificulta o debate público em termos racionais, é tão antigo quanto o próprio estudo do comportamento dos indivíduos em sociedade. No entanto, sua análise ganhou especial relevância nos últimos anos, por duas razões, basicamente. A primeira é a ascensão de governantes populistas iliberais ao poder em diversos países. Trata-se de uma cepa de políticos que agem deliberadamente para tornar permeável a fronteira entre fato e ficção, estimulando a crença numa "realidade alternativa", que seria tão válida quanto a verdade factual. A segunda razão é a pandemia de Covid-19, que levou bilhões de pessoas a pensar e agir sob o signo do medo.
O sociólogo canadense Erving Goffman é um dos pensadores que mais nos ajudam a compreender o que está por trás desta aparente desconexão do indivíduo com a realidade e como ela é percebida pelos outros.
Memes e frames
A antevisão e o brilho intelectual de Goffman - inversamente proporcional a sua vaidade pessoal - são tais que seus escritos sobre as interações cotidianas e as molduras, ou frames, por meio das quais os indivíduos "enquadram" suas visões de mundo, seguem mais relevantes do que nunca.
O "enquadramento", portanto, tem a ver, antes de tudo, com a posição que o indivíduo busca ter no mundo, ainda que, para isso, tenha de relativizar o que entende como verdade factual
Departamento de realidade
Algumas pessoas creem piamente que o verde das fardas livrará nosso país de suas desgraças e desavenças. Em seus momentos de maior devaneio, cogitam que alguns tanques nas ruas trariam de volta nossa tradição de ameno convívio, acabariam com as desordens, nos livrariam da corrupção e do paradeiro econômico, da inflação e de tudo mais que nos faz minúsculos em relação ao mundo civilizado. É possível, tudo é possível. Nos espaços siderais da imaginação, tudo é possível. Alguns chegam mesmo a crer que, paraísos políticos, uma vez estabelecidos não se desfazem. Esquecem que na antiga Roma, governantes sábio e justos foram substituídos por dementes como Nero, Calígula e Cômodo.
E o futuro?
Se recairmos na polarização iniciada em 2018, estará redondamente enganado quem pensar que acordaremos do pesadelo quando a Justiça Eleitoral der por encerrada a contagem dos votos.
Seria tudo muito engraçado se nós também não nos tivéssemos transformado numa caricatura moderna daquela que antigamente já éramos. Hoje nada mais parece nos impressionar. Pobres sempre fomos mas, ao final da Segunda Guerra, não era comum presenciarmos indivíduos disputando uma vaga para dormir embaixo de algum viaduto, ou para chegar primeiro a cata de comida. A própria violência tornou-se mais violenta, gratuita e cruel.
November 24, 2017
Novelists really should understand frame analysis since they do it all the time whether they realize it or not. This is an exhaustive treatment of the subject.
November 25, 2018
Goffman was an amazing thinker. This book is a bit informal and so he introduces it. It allows the reader to theore though. This work is a bit different from his classic "self" or "stigma" books.
Read
July 25, 2020read as part of my academic education
July 5, 2009
far, far too long, but a startling analysis of experience processes that i would never think about, being always and fully present.
June 7, 2016
This book provided the intellectual fodder for my dissertation.
December 3, 2016
Only really 2 of the chapters were useful.
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