#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.”

[power-chords]

Katharine Butler Hathaway, The Little Locksmith, 1943

[ahdor]

man existing really is just one performance. Goffman might of been on to something.

[justletmeon12]

I have a Thing for writers who were very clearly somehow neurodivergent but wrote at a time when that wasn't an acceptable way to exist, so they devoted their lives to trying to figure out what the hell was up with society, and most of their writing is now praised for its "unique" and "brilliant" views on humanity that are literally things I see debated on #ActuallyAutistic Twitter every fucking week.

[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)

[untypicable]

Are Open-Plan Offices Just Fancy Panopticons?

The open-plan office is the workplace equivalent of a badly thought-out surprise party: loud, disorienting, and leaving you wondering who thought this was a good idea. Promising collaboration, creativity, and egalitarianism, it instead delivers distraction, performance anxiety, and the undeniable urge to hide behind a fake potted plant. But as infuriating as they are, open-plan offices aren’t…

[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) )

[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.

[power-chords]

LMFDFHJSDfjdklfj

[justletmeon12]

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

[clever-queen]

8/1/23

I talked to m friend who mentioned 'Front Stage Time' (tasks where you 'performed' your social role) and 'Back Stage Time' (Tasks that involve resting/preparing for Front Stage Time).

He commented that I've been doing a lot of Front Stage Time, and the stage manager for my backstage (me) has not been present to keep things running smoothly.

The point being I keep finding myself wanting to do things but then realizing, "Oh that's actually pushing myself too far to do it" on stuff I'd find fun but is now work, like writing or producing videos. It's not longer Back Stage Time if it has to be observed by other people.

This is the part where I go off on a crazy tangent so I'm glad you're curious but it's not Required Reading to understand the above thought.

So like posting on tumblr is fun and it feels like Back Stage Time because it doesn't cross the threshold of too mentally demanding to construct a post.

So that's fun but why do I have to have to get so tired over things that could make me happy... or make me money more importantly (cries (I wish it didn't have to boil down to income but when it feels like that's the only way to survive it just comes off as easier to find a solution to the cause of why I feel so awful (capitalism))).

It's just trauma™

And that's okay just dear lord I wish it didn't hurt so much.