In Chapter 4, he discusses fabrications: deliberate attempts to manage activity so that someone will have a false belief about the activity (p.83). In Chapter 3, he introduces keying, a systematic transformation along schema of interpretation (ex: play fighting, which resembles actual fighting). But he successively deploys concepts and vocabulary to better understand them. Some are deliberate (cons), some are accidental (comedies of error).
They are full of instances in which people misapply frames in various ways. When frames are confirmed, our assumptions "disappear into the smooth flow of activity" (p.39)-that is, once we are pretty sure which frame is operant, we tend to assume that frame and interpret subsequent interactions within that frame.Īt this point, one can see why Goffman becomes so interested in his eclectic examples. Essentially, we sample the strips available to us and use them to apply frames that can help us interpret further strips. as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them" (p.10). Strip refers to "any arbitrary slide or cut from the stream of ongoing activity. He uses frame to describe how people define a situation based on principles of organization that govern events (pp.10-11). His aim is to "try to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events and to analyze the special vulnerabilities to which these frames of reference are subject" (p.10).
Goffman borrows the term "frame" from Gregory Bateson (p.7), using it to describe the ways that we bracket social situations so we know how to interpret and react to them. Let's try to strip away these examples, then, and get to what Goffman was trying to frame up. (Although the book was published in 1974, I think the bulk of the examples came from the 1930s-1960s). There's a definite structure underneath, but it's not consistently signaled, so I sometimes had trouble remembering what the endless examples of grifters, airline accidents, and 1950s sexual peccadillos were meant to illustrate. And like Art Linkletter, he is an inveterate gossip, pulling examples of frames and frame ruptures from everywhere he can (odd newspaper stories, magazines, television shows, books on cons and magic, and repeatedly from Dear Abby columns) in addition to published research. Like Aristotle, he likes to exhaustively taxonomize the subject he's describing-in this case, frames. Here, even more than in Goffman's other books, it becomes clear that Goffman is a cross between Aristotle and Art Linkletter. So here's what you need to know about Frame Analysis. The notion of frames had been brought up in a recent reading on pitching, and I began thinking about it in terms of how teachers present themselves to students, so Frame Analysis suddenly had new currency for me. So I picked it up.Īnd it stayed on my shelf for a while longer, unread, until I began thinking about frames again. I had just reread Goffman's Presentation of Self and had read his Interaction Ritual for the first time, so he was fresh in my mind. But earlier this year I saw a copy at a used bookstore. I was not heartbroken, since my research interests had drifted away from Goffman by that point. It was always there on the shelf, I thought I'll eventually get to it.īut at some point-either in the move to Texas Tech (1999) or to the University of Texas (2001), it was lost along with a box of other books.
It's a thick book, and (between you and me) not that engagingly written, and although I briefly attempted it, I gave up and focused on my assigned readings instead. I first bought this 1974 book early in my PhD program, having read Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life during my MA studies. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience