Generating Pluralistic Stories at the Site of Collaboration : A Study based on E. Goffman's Perspective on Dramaturgy

Abstract

Archiving local memories online developed by the affected local governments used to be a popular tool to pass down the lessons after the Great East Earthquake, however these systems have been pointed out some several issues, such as dramatically reduced number of accessing. In addition, many of the archived stories were too much focused on the listens “how to evacuate” that the precious local pluralistic stories were left out. From the previous research, Sasaki (2016) designed “collaborative” place to generate pluralistic stories of the evacuees from the town of Namie due to the TEPCO's Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power plant. Sasaki's paper concluded that the complex interaction within the collaborative place helped generate various stories, yet it is unclear why the stories have generated. Therefore, the paper analyzes and clarifies the mechanism of its generativity process by using E.Goffman's perspective on dramaturgy which includes interaction ritual of role distance. As a result, the collaborative place holds multiple layered audiences and meets various roles freely by having intimate relationship between the performer and audiences, to generate pluralistic stories which could keep a distance from the media representation of a “typical”evacuees.