#erving goffman

[commonsensecommentary]

“It is not unreasonable to argue that Americans are now being forced to live in a national mental asylum created for them courtesy of the madmen, madwomen, and variously gendered crazies now driving our country into economic, cultural, and military ruin for reasons that escape all rational explanation.”

[ostensiblynone]

July 2024 books

[power-chords]

LMFDFHJSDfjdklfj

[emiel-surreal]

"In almost all of these cases, some show of disaffiliation is made, as is also true of eccentrics and cultists, providing in this way a thin line that can be drawn between all of them and deviators on the other side, namely, the quietly disaffiliated--hobbyists who become so devoted to their avocation that only a husk remains for civil attachments, as in the case of some ardent stamp collectors, club tennis players, and sports car buffs.

Social deviants, as defined, flaunt their refusal to accept their place and are temporarily tolerated in this gestural rebellion, providing it is restricted within the ecological boundaries of their community."

Stigma, Notes on the management of spoiled identity, by Erving Goffman. Chapter 5, Deviations and Deviance.

[neptunes-cunt]

Every time I read Goffman group himself with the “normals” in Stigma, I remember Dramaturgical Theory and cackle

[whatisonthemoon]

Young Oon Kim, Lofland, Stark, and the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research

Both parts excerpted from Mike and Virginia McClaughry’s research:

▲ Pictured: Front row Eileen Lemmers, Patty Pumphrey, Pauline Verheyen, unknown, Doris Orme, Young Oon Kim Back row: unknown, George Norton, Galen Pumphrey, Calvin Carey, unknown

The CIA group Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, was at UC Berkeley. Erving Goffman was a Sociology professor at the University of California in Berkeley. Goffman had previously received CIA funding under MK Ultra.    71

John Lofland was invited to Berkeley to work as a Teaching Assistant to Erving Goffman, starting in the Fall semester of 1960. Rodney Stark was one of their Sociology students.

CIA funding was provided to research conversion in a deviant religious group. The project was under the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. John Lofland and Rodney Stark were assigned to be the researchers. Goffman received CIA funding and he acted as handler for Lofland and Stark.

On 21 November 1960 Young Oon Kim finally stepped foot into San Francisco Haight-Ashbury district. She was now ready to begin her real assignment – the making of the Unification Church.   59 Young Oon Kim was not gaining very many converts by preaching Moon’s religious beliefs.

In the Fall of 1961 John Lofland and Ronald Stark hook up with Young Oon Kim. The Divine Principle is a book containing Moon’s religious teachings. Lofland helped Kim re-write the Divine Principle to make it more acceptable.

Lofland also taught Kim to use interpersonal relationships to recruit people. That meant that converts should bring in their family and friends. That worked. Membership in the Unification Church then began increasing dramatically.

. . . .

John Lofland was invited to Berkeley to work on his Ph.D as a Teaching Assistant to Erving Goffman.

CIA funding was provided to research conversion in a deviant religious group. The project was under the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. John Lofland and Rodney Stark were assigned to be the researchers.

Lofland and Stark would soon take Young Oon Kim under their wing.

Interview with Stark –

Stark: I enrolled at Berkeley in the fall of 1960.

Stark gets “given a research appointment at the end of the first semester“. That is December 1960. Stark says he “went to the Survey Research Center” that was directly under the purview of the CIA Institute for Personality Assessment and Research.

As his Curriculum Vitae verifies. Specifically, it says that he was working as a “researcher for a research associate” under Charles Glock and its recently formed Survey Research Center.

John Lofland and Rodney Stark deliberately sought out a “deviant religious group” to study because that was their assignment, that’s what the grant money stipulated.

Lofland and Stark would have been reporting/discussing in to both Charles Glock and Erving Goffman throughout the whole period that they were there with the Moonies.

This shows that Erving Goffman was receiving CIA funding –

In 1995, Raymond Prince published an illustration consisting of photo reproductions of pages of the Human Ecology Fund Annual Report of July 1961.

Under “other studies, grants” and sub-heading “Other publications, monographs” we see several names that are most definitely actual full-out witting MK-Ultra operatives, such as James A Hamilton. Under ‘publications, monographs’: we see Erving Goffman show up again, clearly illustrating that he is a repeat grantee of the CIA’s largesse. (Price Anthropology Today June 2007)

In March 1962 Lofland and Stark officially moved in with the Moonies.

We said that friendship ties were in the first instance much more important than theology. That people learned the theology, but they learned it only after having already learned to trust it because their friends did.

Progress Through Theology “An interview with Rodney Stark, author of For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery” David Neff/ July 1, 2003

As Lofland and I settled back to watch people convert to this group, the first thing we discovered was that all of the current members were united by close ties of friendship predating this …with Miss Kim. …became friends with Miss Kim after she became a [?] with one of them. By the time Lofland and I arrived to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger. All had been tied to group members through friendships.

We also found it instructive that during most of her first year in America Miss Kim had tried to spread her message directly by talks to various groups and by sending out many press releases. Later, in San Francisco, the group also tried to attract followers through radio spots and by renting a hall in which to hold public lectures. But these methods yielded nothing. As time passed Lofland and I were able to observe people actually become Moonies. The first several converts were old friends or relatives of members who came from Oregon for a visit. Subsequent members were people who …close friendships with one or more members of the groups.

We soon realized that of all the people the Moonies…in their efforts to…the only ones who joined were those with interpersonal attachments.

…In short, conversion is not about working or embracing an ideology, it is about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and family members. …Of persons who did join, many were newcomers to San Francisco whose attachments were all …far away. As they formed strong friendships with group members these were not counterbalanced because distant friends and and families had no knowledge of the conversion in progress.

The Craft of Religious Studies pp 175-196 On Theory-Driven Methods RODNEY STARK

Kim tried to attract followers through press releases and advertising, but this produced no results. Instead, what made for new converts was personal relationships. If a person had a friend or family member who was a Moonie, the prospects for conversion increased dramatically.

“Conversion is not about seeking or embracing an ideology; it is about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s family and friends,” Stark says.

Stark explains, “Conversion to new, deviant religious groups occurs when, other things being equal, people have or develop stronger attachments to members of the group than they have to non-members.”

Late 20th Century Conversions: How the Moonies Did It by Julie Garner, editorial Martyrs, Myths and the Mighty, Columns magazine, U of W Alumni December 1998 issue.

John Lofland helped Young Oon Kim rewrite the Divine Principle because people found it unconvincing –

“While the second edition was far better than the first, by October, 1962, Miss Kim had begun making revisions and typing out the manuscript for the third edition. In part, this new effort came at the urging of Gordon Ross, a new member and former Woodrow Wilson scholar in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He pointed out deficiencies in the text that had hindered his study and which if not amended would in his view lead scholars to dismiss it.

This time, Miss Kim was anxious to produce an authoritative version. She finished typing the manuscript on December 1, 1962, and proofreading began two days later with Gordon Ross and John Lofland, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California who was studying the group. They finished on December 5th. A second proofreading began on the 9th and finished on the 11th.” (Mickler, Chapter 2)

John Lofland wrote his thesis. It shows his research into the Moonies was CIA funded. It says –

This investigation was supported in part by a Public Health Service fellowship to the senior author from the National Institute of Mental Health (MPM-16, 661; 5F1 MH-16, 661-02).

John Lofland, as the senior author, was paid to do this from the CIA’s main funding conduit at this time.

[villainspo]

The Devil is, unfortunately(?), completely correct. There are volumes of sociological and anthropological theory and research speaking to precisely this point. But the Devil’s supposed to be a keen student of human nature, yeah? So it just makes sense.

Source: Journey Into Mystery (2011) #627, by Kieron Gillen (writer), Richard Elson (pencils), and Rachelle Rosenberg (colors)

[c4liginous]

23/04/2024

happy birthday to the one and only jeno lee ✨🫶

today was a good day, even though i’m out of ritalin and because of that, kinda hyperactive. just sent my project to my master’s professor, hope he gives it the ok to send to the other professor who will evaluate it.

🎧 listening to: casualty of your dreams - maggie lindemann

📖 reading: manicômios, prisões e conventos - erving goffman

💭 feeling: anxious and hyper, but overall okay!

[werkvuur]

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Interessante visie op menselijk gedrag.

Hier te lezen: Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf (monoskop.org)

(en samenvatting: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - An Overview (thoughtco.com) )

[justletmeon12]

More people should refer to a blooper collection as a "corpus of troubles"

[4eternal-life]

Noriko’s Dinner Table /Directed by Sion Sono, 2005

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.

[ostensiblynone]

Secondly, advice to the stigmatized often deals quite candidly with the part of his life that he feels is most private and shameful; his most deeply hidden sores are touched on and examined in the clinical manner that is a current literary fashion. Intense debates regarding personal positions can be presented in fictionalized form, along with thorough-going crises of conscience. Fantasies of humiliation and of triumph over normals can be packaged and made available. Here the most private and embarrassing is the most collective, for the stigmatized individual's deepest feelings are made of just the stuff that verbal and vocal members of his category present in a well-rounded version. And since what is available to the stigmatized is necessarily available to us, these presentations can hardly avoid raising the issue of exposure and betrayal, even though their ultimate effect is probably helpful to the situation of the stigmatized.

—Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963)

[power-chords]

Katharine Butler Hathaway, The Little Locksmith, 1943

[ao3cassandraic]

Both Aziraphale and Crowley (though we see it more often with Aziraphale) tend to think about relating to other entities (ethereal, occult, human, or sentient-inanimate) as a series of hidebound(ish, I think they are aware of cross-cultural differences) rituals. With scripts, often, not-uncommonly scripts derived from fiction (books for Aziraphale, TV/movies for Crowley). It's very Erving Goffman.

Sushi-tasting, avaunting the local demon, reporting to Head Office, seeking out the Black Knight, announcing a demonic promotion, getting The Facts from a publican, dressing properly for a nanny job, greeting the coffeeshop owner (I love Crowley's genuinely suave "Charmed") and putting in an order... there's Ways these things are Done.

Love is no exception. There are specific ways to show love, to realize love, to enact love. Vavoom and cotillion balls and so on. And all those ways come from humans -- they have to! -- because Heaven and Hell are pretty much devoid of love, always have been. (Her supposed love doesn't count. She damned well doesn't love anybody in the GOverse; the most She seems capable of is deciding to approve of them, or not.)

Aziraphale and Crowley have largely been blocked off from these ways of enacting love due to terror at the possibility of either Head Office locating a clue. (Which, of course, they don't... but it doesn't seem to take much Earth exposure for demons to cotton on at least; look at Shax and Furfur and the rumors Shax mentions.)

So it seems possible to me that Aziraphale and Crowley don't understand or believe they're in love for the longest damn time because, y'know, they haven't done the thing, the thing the humans do that betokens being in love. Whatever they think that thing is (and minds do NOT have to descend to the gutter here, though they certainly can). They probably aren't even thinking of the same thing!

But I hope they figure it out in a putative s3.

Can we go back to this for a sec? To Aziraphale having to explain the concept of being in love to the other angels? Because I cannot imagine what a trip it has to be, falling in love with someone when that is literally not something you are supposed to be able to do. When it is something you barely understand. When the object of whatever this is isn't supposed to be able to feel this way either, except as time goes on you start to realize it's happening to him too. And neither of you can actually talk to each other about it.