The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (edition 1999)

Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-09402-7.

The thesis of this little book came close to "No shit, Sherlock" territory for me. We perform our roles in life to convince the people around us that we are who we say we are. What makes the book valuable is how Goffman broadens this simple concept by showing how broadly this observation can be applied and how deep we can take the concept into the human psyche. The book draws on ethnographies from various places in the world to show just how the basic theories play out within cultural contexts.

You might not find this book changing your behavior any, but it just might change how you interpret the behavior of those around you. ( )

If you’re a Martian, or in the far end of the autism spectrum, or a cockroach archeologist from the future, you need to read this book. It's the best description I’ve ever seen of human beings—how they go about living, and why. Ever had the inkling that everyone is faking it all the time—at such a fundamental level that the moral charge of “faking” stops making sense? Then read this book. It’s one of those Weltanschauung-changing treatises that manage to single out and name, with seemingly magical explanatory powers, dozens of important phenomena that you always knew were there, but couldn’t think about clearly because they had no names. By the end of the book you’ll have neck pain, because you’ll be nodding the entire time. A path to knowledge this clear and enlightening could only be created by the author’s commendable commitment to honesty: he isn’t here to judge, recommend, or lecture; his one unwavering desire is to find out what _is_.

Goffman’s prose is not obscure as some have claimed, but it’s dense—often enough, a single paragraph or sentence is heavy with meaning, and you’ll find yourself coming back to ruminate. It’s the kind of book that requires one to climb the walls of words with icepicks—but every meter climbed opens new, fascinating vistas. Totally worth it. ( )

A generally engaging and broad exploration of the ways in which we attempt to define the situations we live in by how we present ourselves and by how we treat others' presentations of themselves to us. ( )

How we rehearse and perform in all jobs.