Abstract
Erving Goffman's “dramaturgy” provides a great stimulus to those who are concerned with studies of forms and implications of everyday human experience in relation to social situation. His dramaturgy is an approach using the theatrical metaphors to describe the subjective as well as the objective fact of social interaction. It assumes that one's “self” is an artificial product presented within the closed system of social situation, just as “a character” on the stage is the output of an existing script, completely detached from the wider world outside the theater.
This paper takes note of the forms which the actor may utilize to present his self in accordance with the rules of situational propriety and make his action significant to others. With proper attention to these forms, an attempt is made to explain why Goffman, for all his symbolic interactionist tendency that places stress on the creative subjectivity of the actor, intruded into his school's tabooed area of the objective aspects of situation through the influence of the Durkheimian bias that emphasizes the constraint of social fact. In answering the above question, we also discuss the structure, which, latent in every surface manifestation of experience, attaches meanings to the forms of experience.
