6 Self
G.H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press, part III, chapters 1, 2, 3
http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs2/mindself/Mead_1934_toc.html
In ITALIAN:
http://www.ibs.it/code/9788809745605/mead-george-h/mente-s-e-e-societ-a.html
Check the University Library System:
http://www.cbt.biblioteche.provincia.tn.it/oseegenius/resource?uri=589612&v=l&dcnr=3
Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, Introduction & Chapter 1
http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/goffman.pdf
In ITALIAN:
http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/volumi/scheda_volume.php?vista=scheda&ISBNART=05962
Check the University Library System:
http://www.cbt.biblioteche.provincia.tn.it/oseegenius/search?q=La+vita+quotidiana+come+rappresentazione&v=l&f=catalog_source%3ANRA&h=any_bc&s=10&o=score
E. Goffman, "Characteristics of total institutions", in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Doubleday, 1961, pp. 3-124
Download the pdf
Download the pdf in ITALIAN:
http://www.ristretti.it/areestudio/cultura/libri/asylums.pdf
(see also a recent paper by Seamus Mac Suibhne, Erving Goffman’s Asylums 50 years on, BJP January 2011: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/198/1/1.full.pdf+html)
http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/volumi/scheda_volume.php?vista=scheda&ISBNART=05962
Check the University Library System:
http://www.cbt.biblioteche.provincia.tn.it/oseegenius/search?q=La+vita+quotidiana+come+rappresentazione&v=l&f=catalog_source%3ANRA&h=any_bc&s=10&o=score
E. Goffman, "Characteristics of total institutions", in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Doubleday, 1961, pp. 3-124
Download the pdf
Download the pdf in ITALIAN:
http://www.ristretti.it/areestudio/cultura/libri/asylums.pdf
(see also a recent paper by Seamus Mac Suibhne, Erving Goffman’s Asylums 50 years on, BJP January 2011: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/198/1/1.full.pdf+html)
The facility to adapt a role: The Stanford´s jail experiment
RispondiEliminaIn this section, the authors pointed for the class (all of the y/or influence for the academic research of the Chicago school) exam the forms of the adaptation by the individual to integrate the social structure.
In Mind, Self and society, Mead explain a suggestive idea for your time: that he and your followers will call social behaviorism, like the form to study the process of birth the “I” form, like a result of the interaction with the environment and the relation with others “I”. In effect, the theory explains that the fist communication of the person with the idea of the social means, is the child game, because the kid learn to adapt different characters of the real life; this characters are for Mead the roles, and in the way the child grown, perceive that roles like a form for make a bound with the others and identify the best connection for conform different groups in the evolution of their life. This discover for the individual is that Mead calls: the relation with the generalized other that is the framework of norms and rules in the society.
In this sense, Mead explores two definitions: the “I” and the “Me” form. The first is the sum of the initial perceptions of the world for the individual, and the second is the reunion of impressions that this “I” induce in the others into the generalized other, when the “I” work in the development of some role, like a follower of the rules and norms of the “generalized other”. For this at the end, the “I” will be a set of lots of “Me” and this set is the identity of the “I”.
In this line, Goffman study the develop of the role, and compare this concept with the process in the theater work, when the “I” is the representation in the scene, and the “Me” is the stuffs that work in the backstage. However in my opinion, the most important study of this author for explore the extreme adaptations of the role for the human social been, is with your work “Asylums”, where he deep in the concept and consequences of the internalize the role in the total institutions, that is to say, social scenarios for work or to live, that share for individuals in a specific space with a time more than the normal, and that just broken the normal interaction of different social groups for the person.
In consequence, the effect of the isolate the individuals off the society in a limited time and space is the born of the totalitarian characteristics, like all the activities is convert in a forced community activities, the system of the life is only one and is pre-deteminated for the institution and for this, all the activities are sequential and repetitive. For this, in this extreme social scene, is when see more clear the effects and the necessity of play a specific role for make the adaptation, and the anullation of the original “I” form.
One of the experiments that apply this theory is the Stanford´s jail experiment in the 70s decade, where the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo and your researchers, recruit a group of men with similar education and life, for demonstrate that in a extreme conditions of total institutions, the desindividualization and despersonalization process, just erase the original “I” and only show the “I” of the “Me” reunion of my group (guardians and prisoners).
For a movie adaptation of this experiment, I recommend this excellent film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOGyLLagHg4
E. Goffman (1961). "Characteristics of total institutions", in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Doubleday, Garden City: pp. 3-124.
RispondiEliminaIn the selected pages of the book, Goffman dwells on the relationship between inmates (or more precisely, people subjected to a total regime which also includes soldiers in military camps) and staff of these institutions (which are those who work inside these regimes but are allowed to maintain contact with the outside social world). Goffman describes the key features of such total institutions: all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same authority. Daily activities are carried out in the immediate company of others and everyone is treated similarly and are obliged to interact together. Furthermore, all phases of the day are scheduled and forced upon the inmate by the system. Everything is part of a rational plan that should help to carry out the aim of the institution.
As a result, inmates and staff live in the same spatial area but are two different groups that act in split worlds and only interact together when forced to do so by the system: there is therefore no free communication, no equality and the inmates are not only deprived from information, but also from the possibility to separate their work from their private life since these are interwoven and are all bound to the same authority, while the staff members do have the liberty to spent their free time after work under a different authority. Key words that describe the interaction between the worlds could be considered 'surveillance', 'bureaucratic management' and 'authority'.
The interaction between the two groups is coloured by the perception the two groups develop of each other. The image-of-the-other scarcely results in sympathetic identification with this 'other'. Even when it occurs that members of the group do exchange sympathies, these relations are considered in terms equal to the incest-taboo. However, institutions do also develop practices that are designed to develop sympathy between these two different groups. These institutionalized "get-togethers" are installed to overcome the social distance between the two and may (and often) result in a trade-off: less restrictions in exchange for a lesser integration in the own group and its counter-values. Many examples of mixing between inmates and staff are described by Goffman. He termed this reduction of the created social distance 'institutional ceremony'. Examples are the celebration of Christmas together, an internal newspaper edited by the inmates under control of the institution's staff and group therapy. Another major point of Goffman is the staging argument. The way the total institution presents itself towards the inmates and the staff to socially construct the difference between these two categories. Yet, the institutional ceremonies may cause staging issues since this reduces the distance contradicting the way the institution was staged, causing personal strain or role conflicts.
In my view, Goffman tried to analyse the interaction between people in an unnatural situation: a total institution. In these, social distance is created through "staging" of which the bureaucratic approach is one part and (as far as I am concerned this approach contains the danger of dehumanizing the inmate). Yet, the interesting part of Goffman's analysis is the institutional ceremony he describes as an institutionalized way to reduce this social distance between the groups. What surprises me is that Goffman does not seem to perceive these ceremonies as a necessary mechanism for the proper functioning of a total institution (nor does the staff, according to his records). This may be due to Goffman's objective to merely describe the total institution and not critique it. Yet, he finds that the institution's staff protects itself from losing self-respect (among other problems that result from the interaction between inmates and staff) by perceiving inmates as not-fully-adults. A form of dehumanizing does seem a necessity for a proper functioning of the total institution... A very interesting observation by Hannah Arendt seems to conclude that a bureaucratic approach made it possible to kill so many people, yet her work (Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil) was published after Goffman's in 1963. Or the Stanford prison-experiment , conducted in 1971. Both works suggest that the absolute social distance between inmates and staff in a total institution without mechanisms to get its staff personally involved with the inmates results in inhumane conditions and Goffman - at least in this selection - seems to ignore this phenomenon.
EliminaErving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, Introduction & Chapter 1
RispondiElimina“when an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him […] that helps to define the situation”, namely in order “to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him”. All of this happens through conventional events or also through “natural signs of something not directly available to the senses”. At this point G. distinguishes into two very different kind of sign activity which refer to these two situations:
1) the expression that a person gives (verbal symbols, communication in the traditional sense)
2) the expression that a person gives off (action that others can treat as symptomatic of the actor)
Sometimes individuals will act in a calculating manner in order to give a specific kind of impression (ex. of the vacationing Englishman that appear for the first time on the beach in Spain, who got another impression than he wanted to give). “The pre-established pattern of action which in unfolded during a performances […] may be called part or routine” . When it happens is likely that arise a social relationship.
But the “mask” that we have on is not necessary a trick, it rather represent “the conception we have formed of ourselves, this mask is our true self, the self that we would like to be”.
G. calls “performance” all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observes. Inside the performance he define as “front” that part in which the individual defines the situation for those who observe him (composed by the “setting” - the scene, the contest - the “personal front”- that is the expressive equipment that include for example age, sex, clothing…, “appearance” and “manner”). The expected coherence between setting, appearance and manner represent an ideal type that provide us with a means of stimulating our attention to and interest in exception. Moreover, it seems that is a natural development in social organization the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts, namely, different routines may employ the same front. A social front tend to became institutionalized in a stereotyped expectations, so it becomes a “collective representation” (even if a front tend to be selected, not created, furthermore doesn’t exist always a perfect fit between the specific charter of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us.
- a performance presents an idealized view of the situation, in a sense that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs (concept of ceremony in the manner of Durkheim and Radcliffe, namely as a reaffirmation of the moral values of the community)