Not in gritty desert sand or blue ocean, the most statistically likely places. Instead, it screeches into an English-speaking city - London, Edinburgh, or Bath. Actually, no. Let’s have it skid across a field, startling some cows. Not far from an ivy-draped, sandstone building. Yes - a creative writing centre where, inside, aspiring authors are gazing deeply into their navels novels.

One writer, distracted by a noise outside, looks up and through the window.

Oh, what a wonderful imagination I have! she thinks as she squints into the sun. For out there in the field, fresh from the wreckage, steps a small, green chap. A bit like an ant. A Martian! she smiles and decides to write about him (it must be a ‘him’ - he’s from Mars!). [The workshop on stereotypes isn’t until the afternoon.]

As the writer resumes her writing, the alien transmits a rescue signal to his fleet. Knowing it will be a full day before his friends can reach him, he sets off to see what’s what. After a conversation with a cow ends in discord, the alien makes his way to the old building…

He peeps inside. It looks like a classroom, or a factory. Bent-over creatures wearing cardigans are hard at work: some sharpen small, pointed weapons while others tap into control panels. Though lost and in need of shelter, he is wary. Timid at the best of times [characters, you see, require three things: a goal, a motivation, a flaw], his confidence has been knocked by the incident with the unfriendly bovine. The safest thing for him to do is hang back and observe.

Below are some of his observations, which he gathers and transmits to his fleet next morning. Before doing so, he puts to practice one of the lessons he’s learnt - he adds the following (and essential) note: These observations are from my POV (Point of View) and entirely my own; they do not reflect the opinions of my employer/agent/publisher.

• I have arrived in the middle of something called a Creative Writing Weekend Retreat. This one is tutored. A Tutor is a writer who gets paid to guide other writers in writing. The Tutor provides things called ‘warm-ups’ and ‘prompts’.

• The instruments I first assumed to be weapons are actually a way to communicate stories, both real and imagined. Nevertheless, these instruments are powerful.

  [This particular Tutor likes to remind everyone that the pen, as declared by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is mightier than the sword.]

• Writers are actually a subset of a species called humans. Humans have identities and rights, which writers talk about loftily and in reference to how valid and authentic these things make their stories. Even - and especially - if their stories are not real.

• Writers appear friendly. At least, compared with the cow. These ones constantly extol the virtues of one another’s writing, even when (in my boggly eyes) the writing in question is not terribly good.

• The fear that one’s writing is not terribly good is common and experienced most acutely by those whose writing is very good. When professional writers (like the Tutor) experience this fear, it may progress to a debilitating condition known as Imposter Syndrome.

• The writers on this Retreat are here because they dream of becoming authors with ‘traditional’ publishers. Some already have deals or books out; most remain hopeful. They are all here to hone the craft of telling a good story.

• Actually, the Tutor instructs them constantly not to tell stories: Show Over Tell.

• During coffee breaks, everyone stops their writing work and gathers al fresco to drink hot liquid. It is important during breaks like this to exchange information about your teetering TBR (To Be Read), which is the term for a pile of unread books on a table by one’s bed.

• In addition to drinking hot liquid, it is important to eat biscuits. Biscuits are part of an essential food group in the diet of writers, especially if their stories are for children. Many writers state their enjoyment of this food group on their ‘profile’. (E.g., ‘Children’s author. Winner of An Amazing Literary Prize. Loves cake.’)

• To be a writer you must constantly say you are ‘Amazed’ and find things ‘Amazing’, even although writers are allegedly humans with wide vocabulary and there are over 300 synonyms for this word.

• VERY IMPORTANT. To be a Serious Writer you must aspire to own a garden shed. A shed is an uninsulated or semi-insulated wooden shack. Writers want one because Serious Writers named Virginia Woolf and Roald Dahl had one.

  (Side Note: in this language there is more than one meaning of ‘serious’. Roald Dahl was a Serious Writer but not always a serious writer.)

• Yesterday evening, a kind of Serious Writer called a Mentor visited to read a bedtime story to the group while they all drank cold liquids. Everyone signed up for ‘one-to-ones’ with the Mentor. This is understandable: Mentors (we learned in the afternoon session) provide the MC (Main Character / Hero) with guidance, wisdom or even a gift!

• ALSO IMPORTANT. As well as attending courses like this Weekend Retreat, writers should buy a set of ‘How To’ books. These are manuals that explain how to build a good story, how good stories operate, and how to fix a story if it is broken.

• One of these books is called Save the Cat! [On screenwriting, by Blake Snyder.] The Tutor on this course admitted, after several helpings of cold liquid, that she has not, in fact, read this book. Or any other writing manual. She does not even have them on her TBR pile!

• This admission, especially as it was in the presence of the Mentor, caused a flare-up of the Tutor’s Imposter Syndrome. As a result, before bed she looked in the mirror and told herself it is OK not to have read these books because she is qualified in other ways to do this work. For example, although she has not read Save the Cat!, she does have a cat.

• It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for a writer to have a cat. Or a dog. Cats and dogs are familiars for writers. That is, they are spiritual creatures often providing comfort when other humans do not understand a writer’s pain.

It is after breakfast the next day and the alien has reached this point in his list when the Tutor (emboldened by circulating photographic evidence of her cat) announces the theme for the morning workshop. Coincidentally, it is the skill of listing. “Let’s think about lists,” she says. “Does your list advance plot, develop character, deepen emotional understanding, or add to setting and mood? Does it provide substance as well as style?”

The alien twitches his antennae. He is unsure his list has done any of these things.

But before he can review it, the signal he has been waiting for arrives: a rescue saucer from his fleet has landed safely in the cow field. Without hesitation, he turns and leaves this strange building (swiping a few Hobnobs on the out).

Zooming into space, he and his kin share crumbs and discuss his data. Are pens really that mighty, and what makes telling showing a story so hard? Have humans ever written about Mars, and does that mean they had to identify as Martians? And what is it that writers are trying to prove or say about themselves by showing off their TBRs, working alone in sheds, and eating so many baked goods? None of those things, after all, will make any of them stand out. Perhaps it helps them fit in?

If you have time, why not check out the other articles I’ve written this year?

Share

I’ve been asked this question a few times now, by virtue of having been through this malarkey twice. The answer, of course, depends on the Who and What of it all. There are lists out there that are specifically for cancer—silk pillowcases (for night sweats or hot flushes), beanie hats (for hair loss and cold noggins), and pretty holdalls (for hospital visits). All wonderful ideas. My list is a bit looser, a little less attached to cancer treatment.

Please share it in case anyone else out there is wondering what to do for a friend or loved one with cancer, and please pop other suggestions in the comments!

Share

First, though, as is my habit, I want to impart some reflections from a classic sociological text… I’ll keep this unusually brief, but you may wish to leapfrog to the list, if you’ve not clicked in for my pontificating.

More than a gift

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was a nephew of philosopher Émile Durkheim and a searingly smart French sociologist. His intellectual interests and research method involved analysing other people’s fieldwork notes rather than gathering his own. When reading accounts of what he called ‘early’ or ‘archaic’ societies, Mauss spotted sophisticated patterns of gift giving. He wrote about them in his 1925 book, The Gift.

While fellow researchers understood gift-giving in these societies primarily in economic terms, Mauss argued there was more to it than that. A commodity, or gift, did indeed change hands. But it was, he observed, neither free nor given freely.

Complicated, invisible webs of expectation, reciprocity and status were produced during the exchange, but were also the reason for it. Gift giving, he claimed, was part of the function and fabric of society.

Moreover, gifts were not limited to ‘commodities’. They extended, in Mauss’s words, to, ‘courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts…’

Mauss described gift giving as a ‘total social phenomenon’ because it related to law, morality, religion, economics, and more. In much subsequent analysis, sociologists focused on the way gifts—across all cultures—demand reciprocity (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) as well as obligation, loyalty and rank (think The Godfather, or children’s birthday invitations and party bags). A more positive spin, though, is that gift giving, as social fabric, is simply part of the way we build and develop relationships—including wonderful, non-exploitative ones.

In her foreword to the 1990 edition of the book, Mary Douglas summarised it best: ‘A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction’ (p. xi.). In other words, the gift, by nature, is both material and immaterial; it is simultaneously about the object and more than the object. It enhances solidarity.

Mauss also wrote about the spiritual nature of gifts. For this he drew on Mauri tradition, in which, ‘to give something is to give a part of oneself […] one gives away what is in reality a part of one’s nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence’. I love this idea. My interpretation of it and how it manifests in my culture, is that when we gift something to someone, we are also communicating a sentiment. Often, this sentiment is simple: I am here, I am with you, I care.

So, if you are thinking about getting a present for someone with cancer, whatever shape or form the present takes, you’re giving them something far beyond the thing inside the wrapping. You’re strengthening a relationship and providing solidarity when they need it most.

SO, without further ado, I gift you this list. (It’s completely free, of course, but please share, like and subscribe…)

Ten Brilliant Gifts for Someone with Cancer

1. A journal/diary

   Keeping a journal can help everyone and anyone, but even people who wouldn’t ordinarily write find that when they have a cancer diagnosis, expressing themselves on the page does wonders. Oddly, I’ve never found writing more difficult. I imagined journaling my way through the whole thing and emerging at the end with the bones of a novel. Alas, that wasn’t to be! But having a pretty notebook definitely helped me write things down, and I’m grateful for that.

   Choose one with alternate blank and lined pages if you can, and not too large (a block of empty pages can feel daunting). You could order or commission a hand-bound book from a local bookbinding artist (see Felicity Bristow for the sort of thing I mean), or there is a gorgeous Mary Oliver journal that includes uplifting quotations. (££)

2. Poetry

   Talking of Mary Oliver… Blue Horses is a good shout if you’d like to buy someone a book. Or if you’d like to get poetry but aren’t sure what sort might be required (heavy or light, serious or funny), try a compendium - you can’t go wrong with The Dragon Book of Verse. Or send for a prescription of paper pills from The Poetry Pharmacy. Excellent in times of grief, too, and impossible to overdose. Medicine for the soul! (££)

3. A handwritten letter

   These days there’s something decadent about a stamped, addressed envelope filled with news and thoughts. A letter is such a simple, altruistic thing. For the cancer patient, it’s pure distraction and will mean the world that you took the time. To make it stand out on the doormat, ask at the counter for the special stamp issues. (And prepare to balk at the price of postage.) (£)

4. A playlist

   This is a gorgeous thing to build for someone. You can share it via a streaming service (make sure they are on it already, too!) and even invite others in your family or friend circle to join in. You can send a complete list, or start with a few songs and add one every week or on cancer treatment days. Great if you’re on a shoestring. (£)

5. Tea

   I received chests-worth of the stuff and was grateful for every cup. Unless you know the person likes it loose, I’d stick with teabags. But gift with caution: some herbal teas and green tea can affect blood clotting, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and liver function, and may interfere with cancer medication. Reach for organic and, if you’re going with mint or ginger, select a gentle variety. I especially liked Dragonfly tea - they do a nice gift-box collection. (£)

6. A morse-code bracelet

   What’s not to love about little silver dots and dashes on a chain? You can choose or customise messages (e.g. ‘Strong Woman’, ‘Love and Light’). My bracelet, gifted by a friend and fellow patient, is from Charlie Boots and the message - ‘Fuck Cancer’ - is one I wear discreetly on my wrist every day. (££)

7. An original piece of art

   I’m not talking about oil paintings in gilt frames. I was gifted a stunning mantra, letter-pressed in blue ink by Trigger Press. (See below.) They have lots of powerful and feminist quotations to choose from. And in a different tone entirely, my dad was gifted a personalised and pithy sketch by one of his favourite cartoonists, the marvellous Grizelda (get lost down a rabbit-hole of her jokes here). Genius! (££)

8. A hypnotherapy session

   This is a little higher budget so works if there’s a group of you chipping in. And you’ll need to find a reputable therapist - like of the Living Well Clinic. I got so much from my session with Anne that I gifted one forwards to another friend with cancer. Definitely ask the patient first; hypnotherapy (distinct from hypnotising!) doesn’t appeal to everyone.

   And if it doesn’t, perhaps a different complementary therapy might? For example, reflexology is safe for cancer treatment, or you could look into a subscription for a meditation app (like Calm or Headspace). (Avoid gifting spa, salon or nail pampering sessions - they’re not always suitable for cancer patients, even after treatment finishes.) (££-£££)

9. A voucher

   While we’re talking about holistic care… How about retail therapy? This is another great one for a group present. Cancer treatment can involve days - sometimes weeks or months - in bed, so a spot of online shopping is a treat. In general I would dissuade you from gifts requiring something of the cancer patient, but surely browsing John Lewis is an exception?

   From fragrance-free toiletries to ice-lolly moulds, soft slippers to sun loungers… there’s sure to be something to make the days pass more comfortably…

   Meal vouchers are a thing, too - a lovely way to provide kitchen respite (try Cook for complete meals rather than recipe boxes). (££-£££)

10. A book for lists

    Someone with cancer tends to do a lot of listing. Keeping track of symptoms, monitoring the side effects of treatment, questions for the oncologist, etc. So, if practicality is your thing, this might be what you’re after. Cambridge Imprint Printmakers makes books slim enough to slide into a card and they’re designed especially (and exquisitely) for lists. Highly recommend! (£)

I was gifted a book for lists and I used it to… list my gifts! The list became a poem. (I first shared it and you can read it here.) You’ll recognise some items from the suggestions above but may be inspired by other gifts in the poem, too. Every single one meant something unquantifiable to me. The sentiment and solidarity go on.

I hope this has been helpful. Does anyone else have gift ideas? If so, please share in the comments below!

Thanks for reading!

Share

As I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about interpretation and ‘meaning making’ recently, I was happy (and flattered!) to receive this request from a subscriber to Notes from the Edge of the Herd:

“I was wondering if you would consider writing about ‘social construction’? I’m embarrassed to say I still don’t get it! I’m thinking of sex and race and how people interpret them as being ‘socially constructed’. This seems to imply they don’t actually exist, but obviously they do?”

This is an excellent suggestion, not least because it provided me with a perfect excuse to revisit a classic that was first published sixty years ago in 1966: The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

I decided it was also the perfect excuse to rewatch The Truman Show, a 1998 film about Truman Burbeck (Jim Carrey), the unwitting star of a reality TV series in which his entire world has been artificially constructed. Adopted by a corporation, Truman grows up believing he lives on Seahaven Island. In fact, he lives within a large, dome-shaped television studio, his life broadcast as entertainment to a worldwide audience. Below, I further abuse poor Truman Burbeck by using him to flesh out my analysis of Berger and Luckmann.

Everyday acceptance of reality

Most people, according to Berger and Luckmann (writing in the pre-AI era) don’t tend to question whether or not the world around them is true:

The man in the street does not ordinarily trouble himself about what is ‘real’ to him and about what he ‘knows’ unless he is stopped short by some sort of problem.

We get on with our lives without questioning why we set our alarms for a 9am work start, eat what we eat or wear what we wear, how the transport system came to exist when we catch our bus, or that any money we earn is nothing but a made-up commodity. And yet, all these things comprise our daily realities. In the face of a life-changing event (redundancy, illness, grief) we might step back and wonder why and how we’ve arranged the world to operate in this way. Or if our daily reality involves disability or discrimination, we might question why society is structured so unfairly. But even then, on most days there will be aspects of the world around us that we take entirely as given.

In their groundbreaking work, Berger and Luckmann argued that ‘the reality of everyday life’—that is, what we know to be the real world around us—is not given. It is not natural, objective or fixed. Instead, social reality is produced and reproduced through our everyday interactions and shared interpretations.

Truman Burbeck is happily living his life in Seahaven Island until he is ‘stopped short’ by a series of problems. One day, a huge TV studio light falls from the open sky and smashes close to where he stands. This, and other problems, prompt Truman to begin to question his reality. When the show’s director, Christof, is asked why it took Truman so long to do so, Christof replies: “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

The foundations of reality

In any given day we carry out millions of mundane acts without much thought. Whole sets of daily activity become ‘second nature’, pushed into the background. But this process (what Berger and Luckmann call ‘habitualisation’) builds the background, and with it the illusion that some of our behaviours (especially the ‘second nature’ ones) are natural or given. We perceive them to be part of an ‘objective reality’—that is, the external world as accepted by society.

Individuals don’t do this on our own (unless, as Berger and Luckmann note, we are stranded on a desert island). It’s through daily actions and interactions that we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

Take Truman’s daily encounters with his neighbours:

By daily performing in a certain way, Truman Burbeck’s neighours help create and reinforce his social reality. In the real world, this happens too. How other people respond to us and how we expect them to respond lays the foundation of our reality. By using certain words or symbols and following (or breaking) certain patterns and rules, we reinforce or challenge shared meaning and social order.

It’s not just through face-to-face interactions, like the one Truman has with the family next door, that we build this social reality. It’s also through ‘remote’ relationships. An anonymous, distinct and broad cohort of ‘others’ helps us refer what we ‘know’ to a much wider set of people than our immediate, everyday circle. It also helps us recognise typical behaviour and behaviour that strays from the norm.

Governing social reality

Human behaviour is signalled as good or bad, and sometimes we go the extra mile to reward, punish or formally codify it on these terms. Berger and Luckmann use the gritty example of incest. In most cultures, we don’t think about not doing it: we just don’t do it. It’s institutionalised socially as taboo. But because some people might do it, we have taken extra steps to prevent it and institutionalise it formally. Namely, we’ve made it a crime. By continuing not to practice incest and stigmatising those who do, we continue to legitimise the formal institution that governs it.

For another—very different—example of institutionalisation, enter Truman:

In order to prevent Truman from wanting to leave the studio world, travel away from Seahaven Island is framed negatively. The background becomes one in which travel and adventure seeking are deviant and dangerous behaviours. This objective reality is signalled through posters in the travel agency, which show planes being struck by lightning; and it’s symbolised in the alleged drowning of Truman’s father and a strategically placed sunken boat in the jetty. Travel is also policed: on his attempt to drive away, Truman confronts a series of roadblocks, and a police officer orders him to turn back.

Internalising the world around us

Berger and Luckmann write in detail about the processes involved in social construction (in short: we each externalise our ‘self’ into the world while simultaneously internalising that social world as an objective reality). They stress that these processes are context-specific and temporal: ‘Clock and calendar ensure,’ they write, that we are all ‘of our time’. Not only that, but humans are cultural beings and our sense of reality depends very much on the culture we are born into:

The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court.

Later in life, we may realise there are other possible worlds and ways of being, but the core principles, roles and assumptions instilled in us from our primary years remain critical. And even if we shift away from them, we haven’t broken free of societal constructs: we’ve merely adopted different ones or become part of (and internalised) new ‘symbolic universes’.

Truman sees his world as the only one in existence:

When Truman’s belle, Lauren, tries to tell him that the world he thinks is real is completely made up, he is unable to listen. Telling Truman his whole life is a TV show goes against what he has internalised—that is, what he knows and has experienced to be true. Truman’s world is not the real world, but it is his social reality.

Social constructions have real effects

In the real world, social constructions are powerful and pervasive. Armies and language, the tax system and beauty… they’re all invented. But these things are also present, ‘independent of our own volition’ and we can’t ‘wish them away’. Thousands of people have fought and died for their nations or religion. What matters isn’t that nationality and faith systems are social constructs, but that their effects are the ‘realities of everyday life’.

So, back to the original request for this month’s topic (phew!):

“I’m thinking of sex and race and how people interpret them as being ‘socially constructed’. This seems to imply they don’t actually exist, but obviously they do?”

Berger and Luckmann note that humans are inherently social animals - homo socius. But we’re animals nonetheless. We’re male or female and valued as such for our reproductive function (the survival of our species depends on it). Our biological sex comes with attendant strengths and limitations. Sex itself, therefore, is not a social construction. Beyond this, society places other values and expectations on each of the sexes, and many of these are social constructions. Gendered dress, societal roles and power structures are some examples. These binary values and expectations are sometimes (and sometimes intentionally) wrongly conflated with the biological sex binary. (In Queer Theory, this trick is used to underpin the argument that sex is a spectrum.) Acknowledging that these values and expectations are collectively and culturally made up isn’t to deny their real and serious consequences. On the contrary!

Humans also vary genetically in other ways (expressed, for example, as differences in hair and skin), and some of these variations are important to understand because they impact on our health. But categorising and organising people by ‘race’ (a taxa invented in the nineteenth century) is an act of harmful social construction. Saying race is socially constructed isn’t to declare there are no differences across our human population, or that some of these differences don’t matter. It is to confront that the values and expectations placed on these differences—and the language used to describe and give meaning to them—are created by people.

In The Truman Show—unlike on Earth—the weather is man-made. In one scene, rain falls on Truman but not elsewhere due to a technical malfunction in the dome. The crew scramble to fix the sprinklers and sound effects to create a general downpour. The scene, in which Truman had been sitting on the beach thinking about his deceased father, exposes the degree to which we give symbolic meaning to rain and other natural phenomena. It also demonstrates a difference between truth and social reality: it was not actually raining, but the pretend rain was ‘real’ to Truman.

I will finish with an excellent map analogy my husband used to explain social construction to our kids, and which I borrowed for my kids’ book, Great Minds:

Think of the way humans have created countries by drawing borders on a map – the countries and borders are made up, but in reality, they shape how we live.

Just as humans didn’t conjure the continents or construct the rain clouds, neither did we decide humans would be two sexes and an array of skin colours. But we have created a vocabulary and symbols and rules around these natural phenomena that shape our understanding and our everyday behaviour—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and always a work in progress.

Thanks for joining me at the edge of the herd. And thanks to the subscriber who sent in this request and to others for their (unexpected but welcome!) suggestions of topics for my Everyday Ethnography posts, in which I try to make sense of human behaviour using classic texts from sociology and social anthropology.

If you’d like to support my work, please consider sharing this post!

Share

If you’d like to buy one of my books, Great Minds: 2500 Years of Thinkers and Philosophy, mentioned above is HALF PRICE at Waterstones this month!

And if you enjoyed this article, you may also like…

• This post on masquerades with Erving Goffman (and with help from Bridget Jones).

• This article on Simone de Beauvoir and C. Wright Mills, on lived experience and the sociological imagination.

• This piece on social conformity with Solomon Asch and Irving Janis (and a no-spoiler review of Pluribus).

Share

E Pluribus Unum / Out of Many, One

Pluribus follows protagonist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) as she confronts being one of the few humans on the planet immune to an alien virus. The virus causes humans to become part of a single mind. All the information stored in their brains is now shared information. From within their individual physical bodies, they each act as part of a whole. All around the world, since knowledge becomes uniform and power is experienced in unison, peace and happiness prevail.

Except for Carol.

Carol, when we meet her, is an internationally renowned romance novelist whose bestselling ‘escapist garbage’ has brought her fame and wealth but little joy. Ornery and stubborn, she is not a terribly likeable central character. Even so, as the story unfolds, it is difficult not to side with Carol against the virus. What’s more, those infected—‘The Others’—are on a mission to ensure that Carol joins them. The threat is existential: if Carol becomes infected, her body will survive but she will lose her personality, her individuality, her selfhood. Can whip-smart Carol reverse the effects of the virus and return these happy beings to (warts-and-all) normality?

Even starting with the title, there is a lot to say. ‘Pluribus’ (or Plur1bus as it is rendered in the title graphics) is taken from a Latin phrase that is, notably, also one of the national mottos of the United States, even appearing on its currency. It’s a bold title, and not only for being black sans-serif against bright yellow. It promises equally bold political commentary, about human intuition, freedom of thought, and individual versus collective identity. So, does the show deliver?

AI, algorithms, and losing control

Some early reviews speculated that the virus and hive mind of Pluribus represents the way in which massive AI models have scraped billions of creative works online without consent in order to have access to information on a global scale. Certainly, throughout the show, obvious parallels to AI can be drawn. When Carol’s helpers among the Others are presented with her requests, they sometimes ask questions (such as, ‘Can you be more specific?’) that parrot online chatbots. Carol relies on, and to a certain degree must trust, answers she is given by the Others; in our real world, many rely on and trust information generated by the likes of Grok and ChatGPT. Plus, each episode signs off with the quip, ‘This show was made by humans.’

However, according to a review of Pluribus by Forbes magazine, maker Vince Gilligan (also of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) claimed he wasn’t referring to AI when he penned the script, a process that began many years before the uptick in generative AI technologies.

If not directly about AI, then, might Pluribus be interrogating online and social media spaces, in which ideologies foment and people are siloed into certain beliefs and behaviour, and where answers to their questions are determined by algorithms beyond their control? I think so. But I think it’s about the offline world, too.

Social conformity, groupthink, hive mind

In our real world, all humans conform—without the help of an alien virus—in certain circumstances; and some surrender entirely their own opinions, beliefs and judgement to those of their group.

We know about conformity because we all see it in action. But we also know about it from bags of psychological research. Not least, the classic 1951 study by Solomon Asch, known as the line test. (To watch a short reconstruction, see here.) In brief, participants were asked to match a line in one image to one of equal length in an image of multiple lines. All others in the group had been instructed to select the wrong line. Group members had to answer out loud.

Asch found that 37% of participants in the experiments conformed in the tests. That is, they gave the wrong answer, choosing the answer given by others in the group. A minority of people seemed especially susceptible: 5% of participants conformed in every test in which they took part.

“The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence.”

Several explanations for conformity emerged from the research: perceived social pressure; self-doubt/lack of self-confidence; self-interest/preservation; and distortion of judgement. Crucially, when the participant was asked to write down their answer privately (instead of declaring it aloud like the rest of their group), instances of conformity dropped by some two thirds.

A couple of decades later, another social psychologist, Irving Janis, developed the theory of ‘groupthink’ (a term evoking George Orwell’s ‘doublethink’) and showed:

• Members of small groups tend to accept a political decision or viewpoint if they perceive it to be representative of their group, even if they do not share the decision or viewpoint or agree with its potential outcomes.

• The more closely-knit the group, and the more socially homogeneous, the more likely it is that its members will relinquish their own thoughts for a shared one.

• People conform to groupthink in opposition to their own judgement even, astonishingly, if the result is an act of military aggression or outright war.

Admittedly, what’s happening in Pluribus is a little different: here, no decision is taken independently because group members are incapable of independent thought. This is not a case of groupthink or herd mentality. As the honey-bee palette of the show’s poster suggests, this is hive mind.

Even so, Pluribus invites us to think about social conformity more generally in two ways. First, it serves as a sort of reductio ad absurdum. If individuals find it difficult to dissent within small, cohesive groups (as Janis showed they do), how would a person (in our case, Carol) behave if faced with group intimacy, homogeneity, and Gestalt intelligence on a global scale? Second, the show throws in some other characters who are immune to the virus, who (unlike Carol) choose to conform rather than resist the new norms and expectations brought by the virus. Why would some humans in this scenario give in to something obviously wrong? (Loop back to findings by Asch.)

Pluribus asks us to weigh up not only the losses incurred in such a scenario, but also the gains. After all, there is peace on earth, nobody wants for anything, and true equality has been achieved. For many, this is deeply appealing. On the face of it, the Others (or ‘the Joined’ as they are sometimes called) are happy and free from harm. But the sinister truth that Carol recognises, even if some of her fellow, free humans do not, is that this apparent ‘happiness’ IS the harm.

Groupthink, ideology, gender identity

The ‘happiness’ is a side effect of the virus, which represents (in my interpretation) dangerous ideology. All subcultures and ideologies develop around shared beliefs and norms of some kind or another, but Pluribus seems to speak pointedly to those of gender identity. Not only does the show invoke the social conformity and groupthink displayed by followers of this subculture and ideology, but the ‘happiness’ mirrors the ideology’s promise of euphoria. And, at the show’s heart, is a critique of the belief, central to gender identity, that our minds/souls can be separated from our bodies.

This separation is known as Cartesian dualism, named after the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, who proposed that the ‘self’ was made of two distinct ‘substances’: the thinking mind/soul and the material body. It’s also known as the ‘mind-body problem’. Pluribus invites us to work through this problem. When the alien virus separates people’s minds from their bodies, what does it mean for their minds, and what does it mean for their bodies?

In his 1949 work, Concept of the Mind, Gilbert Ryle mooted the mind-body problem as a category error. He would refer to it, he said, ‘with deliberate abusiveness’, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. There are no ghosts and there are no machines, there are only human beings. So, while in fiction it is possible for an alien virus to turn us all into humanoids operated by a single spirit, in reality this could never happen. (Phew!)

As relationships in the story develop, so does the mind-body theme. Viewers are challenged to think about the degree to which our emotions and sexual attractions are determined by our biology. If Carol were to develop an attraction to one of the Others, exactly to whom would she be attracted? The whole world? Just someone’s body? Individuality is gone, so individual Others cultishly refer to themselves as ‘we’ and ‘us’. They struggle to talk in first person, prompting Carol in one scene to mutter, ‘All the brains in all the world and you can’t figure out pronouns.’ It’s clear which pronouns she means, but the word choice feels highly charged: it speaks directly to contested pronoun usage in gender-identity subculture.

Subscribe now

‘Niceness’ in resistance

The Others frequently tell Carol that they ‘care’ about her, and on the surface of things, they all seem nice. In contrast, Carol’s behaviour and attitudes are definitely not always ‘nice’. (This was true even before the world came under alien attack.) In our real world, part of the criticism levelled against some people (especially women) who attempt to push back against what they perceive as dangerous ideology is that they do not communicate their concerns in a ‘nice’ way. In other words, regardless of their message, their messaging does not conform to a particular set of social expectations.

One example might be the image of J.K. Rowling triumphantly puffing on a cigar from her superyacht following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010. Her messaging referenced another TV show, The A-Team: she quoted the catchphrase of team leader, Hannibal, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Many of her supporters appreciated her humour, while others squirmed in discomfort. Her opponents, meanwhile, were up in arms, accusing her of truculence and hate.

Interestingly, in the Forbes review of Pluribus, Carol is described not as a dissenter, survivor, or champion of free thought, but as a ‘hater’. This misses the point.

Watching Pluribus, viewers might feel frustration or dismay at the way Carol behaves, but this adds important complexity and realism. Sometimes kindness or calls for moral justice—or, conversely, harm—don’t show up in the form we expect. Even if I found elements of Carol’s personality tricky, or (quite frankly) didn’t like her that much, I fully supported her cause. A truth-teller’s behaviour doesn’t need to be ‘nice’ for his/her truth to hold.

Acting on our intuition

I find myself circling back to the title and its nod to the US national motto. What other dangerous ideologies threaten our human rights? And what are we each doing about it? Is there a warning here, too, about apathy? Of the few humans left unscathed by the virus, only Carol and one other seem genuinely concerned enough to act on their instinct that the effects of the virus are deeply, morally wrong.

What Pluribus reveals is that when we lose our individuality—our freedom and ability to think and feel and act independently—we also risk losing vital intuition that keeps us, and those around us, safe. Carol is in real danger. The Others do not like dissenters. In her attempts to make a plan to reverse the effects of the alien virus, she is vilified and ostracised. What will happen to Carol, and what will become of humanity?

References

Asch, Solomon (1951) Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments, in Guetzkow, H.S. (Ed.) Groups, Leadership and Men, Carnegie Press

Di Placido, D. (2025) ‘What Is Pluribus Really About?’, Nov 29, forbes.com

Janis, Irving (1972) Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Houghton, Mifflin

Orwell, George (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker and Warburg

Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of the Mind, Hutchinson

I am ‘cancer free’.

Words that are still sinking in. Words that, at first and for days, I was too frightened to say or type in case the ground quaked open and swallowed me whole. But there they are, and here I am. And it is largely thanks to the excellent NHS and Macmillan medics and nurses who are my team. I am unable to find adequate words to express my gratitude; I imagine the search will last my lifetime.

It’s with some discomfort, then, that this month’s topic was prompted by something said by one of that team and which I found perplexing. I want you and the universe to know that - as most often with me - it is his ideas and how they influence behaviour that I am interested in here, rather than making any judgement of him as a person. In fact, I’ve enjoyed our few encounters (their necessity notwithstanding).

An unexpected answer

We first met shortly after my diagnosis, and he is an oncology pharmacist. As the one who would prepare my weekly SACT (systemic anti-cancer treatment) and the basket of medicines tackling its side effects, he had some questions for me and I was encouraged to ask questions of him. Since I knew to expect chemo-induced menopause, one of my questions was about managing its symptoms. Specifically, since my cancer was not hormone-related, could I be prescribed HRT or take any supplements? The answer is ‘no’, but it’s not the answer he gave. Instead - and as the expert in a room also occupied by a student pharmacist and my husband - he said this:

“Oh. I don’t know. I mean, I hadn’t thought about that. I guess, why would I? I’m not a woman.”

Now, a woman he might not be, but an oncology pharmacist he is. And while he may not anticipate menopause in his own life, surely he should have anticipated it in the life of his female chemotherapy patient, a mother in her mid-forties? And surely he understands that his patients’ care is not about - and should not be diminished by - who he is at all? I did not need him to be a woman any more than I needed him to have had breast cancer in order to understand how to mitigate the side effects of the immensely powerful drugs he was dispensing.

Over the months that followed, as treatment grew tough, I came to rely increasingly on the expertise of the cancer-care nurses, none of whom had lived through cancer themselves. On the hot flushes, aches and fog of menopause, I took advice from nurses who had been through it, and nurses who had not. On and off, I thought about the relationship between expert knowledge and what we have come to call ‘lived experience’. And I kept coming back to the pharmacist’s unapologetic admission that one of the most upending side effects of chemo had simply not crossed his mind, because although his patient was a woman, he was not.

Overlooking women

Sadly, we know that female-specific needs are often overlooked. Cardiac arrest in women presents differently from men, but few are trained to recognise the signs, putting women’s lives at risk. Data collection, including in medical research, often omits women (see Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men, 2020).

But if here, at the edge of the herd, we’re turning to classic Sociology to help us make sense of what’s going on, we run into trouble. The discipline has not been immune to what Dorothy Smith called the ‘gender subtext’. In a series of essays (published as The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology in 1989), she showed how women had been belittled both as subjects and experts in sociological research. Women’s knowledge and activities were regarded as ‘unsystematically developed’ and ‘natural’, resulting in women’s contributions being overlooked by men, who dominated the field.

Seeing from a standpoint

Sandra Harding, a feminist theorist from the USA, built on Smith’s work. She claimed that women and people of other marginalised categories in society were uniquely positioned to define topics of importance and articulate relevant questions on social issues that related to their own circumstances. She called this approach to knowledge-making ‘standpoint theory’. That was in the mid-1980s - it’s now more often referred to as ‘standpoint epistemology’.

An example of this approach in practice might be the involvement of female chemotherapy patients in the creation of protocol relating to their care, to ensure concerns about menopause are ‘seen’. This research has, of course, been done, and there are excellent resources from Macmillan and Breast Cancer Now on this topic - the pharmacist had no excuse. His own, blithely delivered explanation was simply that he was limited by his standpoint as a man.

Indeed, for many standpoint theorists, there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ truth when it comes to social issues: we can only ever perceive the world from our individual positions, informed by our unique experiences. In its twenty-first-century form, standpoint epistemology makes frequent reference, then, to our ‘lived experiences’.

‘Lived experience’ - now

As well as being uncritically absorbed into academic studies, this term - ‘lived experience’ - has entered our day-to-day language and the way we view the world. There are ‘Lived Experience Panels’ in the NHS; literary competitions for those with ‘lived experience’ of marginalisation; and courses coaching employers on how best to attract candidates with ‘lived experience’ (often, however, without attendant training on how such varied experiences might fairly be assessed).

Applied in its current form, as something approximating ‘direct personal experience’, it has allowed people in marginalised categories greater access to opportunities in a system weighted against them. It also lets us hear important voices, empowers those affected by a given issue, and ushers greater diversity into organisations. All good things.

But rarely defined or explained, the term has been flattened to an axiom, spread broadly and thin. Further, the value it is given is high: lived experience has become a qualification and measure of a person’s authority to speak on a given subject. Problematically (if meritocracy is your bag), in some cases it trumps skill, measurable knowledge, and expertise. There will be situations where this is entirely appropriate, of course. But it risks mirroring a wider social pattern whereby people are reduced to categories and labels, and their behaviours (and oversights) attributed to historical and existential forces.

‘Lived experience’ - then

In fact, the term comes to us through French existentialist philosophy. First penned in 1927 in the student diary of Simone de Beauvoir, it enters print in 1949 as the title of the second volume of her feminist text, The Second Sex. Here, de Beauvoir offers a rigorous, at times heart-wrenching, account of the girl becoming a ‘woman’ (something she makes clear, incidentally, is ‘no archetype’, ‘no immutable essence’).

But she, too, neglects to define ‘lived experience’; instead, she shows rather than tells us its meaning. (Perhaps this was because she was drawing from established work in phenomenology - but we’re not venturing down that rabbit hole today. Or possibly ever.)

In my reading of de Beauvoir, a woman’s ‘lived experience’ demands her active awareness of the situations she finds herself in, both in the moment and retrospectively. It is about a woman recognising what agency she has, or doesn’t have, in that situation, why that might be, and how she might act. Crucially, a woman can misinterpret her own experiences or move through them without fully ‘living’ them. It is, therefore, more complex than simply experiencing life as a member of a categorised group or set of intersecting identities. It is also - and keenly - about the ‘self’ in relation to a bigger picture.

Imagining ourselves within society

A decade later, and influenced by de Beauvoir, sociologist C. Wright Mills would describe this way of thinking about self and society as ‘the sociological imagination’. It is, he wrote, a ‘quality of mind’ that ‘promises an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities.’

Like de Beauvoir, he wanted his ideas to extend beyond the academy. His work invites each of us to step outside of ourselves and reflect on the ways our ‘personal troubles’ relate to ‘public issues’ and to the historical and cultural narratives that sweep us along. But none of us are for Mills - as women are not in The Second Sex - mere ciphers. Each of us, while shaped by society and history, also shapes it, by ‘the fact of [our] living’.

Asking questions about our own position in society is, according to Mills, a ‘precondition for objectivity’. It requires us to step outside of ourselves (a key difference from standpoint epistemology) to ask bigger questions about social groups. Questions such as:

‘In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of “human nature” are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period?’

This box-step in our thinking about society enables curiosity, openness, and a genuine attempt to reach beyond our own, naturally limited position.

‘Lived experience’ as liberating and limiting

One criticism of de Beauvoir is that the assumptions she makes and examples she takes in The Second Sex may not apply to women universally. This is due to her limited standpoint as a woman of a certain background and relative privilege. Her ‘lived experience’ - as we use the term today - is picked apart based on current, sometimes self-righteous social values. But thinking back to my pharmacist, I wonder if this shallower definition of ‘lived experience’ and the logic that follows from it lead us astray?

Both Simone de Beauvoir and C. Wright Mills’ ideas were from eras different to our own. Nowadays, our personal suffering or success, privilege or disadvantage is often not only explained by but blamed on forces bigger than ourselves. We live in a strange time: we seem to want people to be liberated from structures of history and society, while at the same time cementing them to those structures through categories and labels. This places us under constant strain: the structures must be exploded because they confine us; the structures are reinforced because they are used to define us.

I wonder if we should be using ‘lived experience’ more carefully? In its current form, it can take us to an unseeing of the material concerns of others, excused on account of our own life story. This risks narrowing our individual perspectives, the very thing that people using the term presumably seek to overturn. Is it time, then, for us all to flesh out its meaning, step out of ourselves, and engage our social imaginations?

Thanks, and next up…

I want to add, in case you have imagined him as a stuffy old man with out-moded views, that the pharmacist is the youngest member of the team. Interestingly, he is also the only one to sport a Progressive Pride flag badge and matching lanyard (symbols of a movement widely accused of erasing women). Whatever his actual beliefs, his remarks certainly prompted me to reflect on ‘public issues’ and my real-life ‘personal troubles’.

I’m going to end by reiterating that my medicine and surgery worked, and it’s thanks to my cancer-care team. And whatever the data on women as a class suffering from institutionalised male bias, every member of my team, not least the pharmacist, had a hand in ensuring that I was not only seen, but rescued. I will be grateful for as long as I live.

And thanks to YOU too, for joining me at the edge of the herd. Please share and subscribe! Next up, at the end of September, something much lighter - The Slow Drift takes a food theme with recipes and a fabulous Book Wild giveaway.

Subscribe now

When I first had the idea of Notes from the Edge of the Herd, I wasn’t sure where to begin. There’s so much to say about humans and their herds, so much to share from studies in sociology and ethnography. What to write about first? Do I dabble with Durkheim? Quibble with Queer Theory? Or cosy down with my comfort reads?

None of my many scribbles on possible opening topics anticipated this one, because none of my plans anticipated being situated for hours every week as a patient in a cancer treatment room.

As a social scientist by training, I often catch myself theorising about the world through a sociological lens. And so it was, from my first chemotherapy session, rigged up to a drip from my high-spec hospital chair, I observed the nurse-led unit at work. And there it was, dancing before me: classic sociological theory at play. And my first Edge of the Herd topic.

Dropping our masks

For some time that morning, I flitted between people-watching and reading my book. I’d chosen War and Peace, which turns out to be a brilliant piece of fictionalised sociology. (Tolstoy undercuts large, sweeping observations of human nature with micro-observations of human behaviour.) One of the nurses, on passing, stopped to comment on my tome in typical nurse-patient small talk. We went on to discuss which translation I’d selected (Anthony Briggs) and why translations matter, and before long, and unexpectedly, the nurse dropped her mask.

Not literally – she wasn’t wearing one. But figuratively, she changed the ‘hat’ she was wearing, the part she was playing. She told me she’d worked in publishing before becoming a nurse; I told her I’d been writing a second children’s novel before becoming a patient. We swapped publishing industry tales; she asked me about writing and we chatted about the local book festival. Her body language shifted – she relaxed palm to hip – and her voice altered to a gossipier tone. I was so absorbed, I forgot I had a cannula fitted and waved my arm up, prompting the monitor to bleep. Straightaway, we straightened up, replacing the masks we’d earlier been wearing and resuming our roles of cancer nurse (attending to my machine) and chemo patient (entirely in her expert hands).

Human masquerades

Such ‘masquerades’ are what sociologist Erving Goffman (scoot to the bottom of the page for a brief bio) explored in his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. According to Goffman, humans engage daily in a series of performances. Using the language of stage and theatre, he called this approach to studying human interaction the ‘dramaturgical account’. Please don’t be put off: it’s a cumbersome name for an easy-to-grasp and fascinating idea.

In short: humans daily engage in a series of acts or performances, taking on different roles and wearing different masks to ensure we play our roles successfully. The show we put on and the masks we wear are determined by each new situation we find ourselves in, what we want to impress upon other people in that situation, and what other people will be impressed by.

Subscribe now

The individual act

Using his theatre metaphor, Goffman first considers individuals. Humans perform ‘frontstage’, acting for our audience and wearing our various masks. We change these masks according to our audience. A school teacher who participates in an online course after work one Friday becomes a student, then has a drink with friends, and goes home in time to tuck her children into bed and catch up with her spouse. In the course of an evening she has worn at least five masks.

But there is also a ‘backstage’, a space in which a person can decompress, assess and even rehearse their roles. Sometimes, this is a mental space we enter, and it can be during a performance (for example, in a group conversation, you might be thinking ahead about want to say, or while trying to contain frustration you might expel an internalised ‘aarrrrgh!’). Backstage can also be a physical place. When a person is alone in their bedroom or bathroom or driving their car… or ironing their hair in preparation for their next performance…

For Goffman, the ‘backstage’ persona isn’t so much an ‘authentic’ self, in today’s pop-sociology speak; instead, every performance is inescapably a different presentation of the self. You might feel more comfortable in some masks than others, but the masks are all ‘authentically’ you.

Disruptions

What happened in the treatment room when the nurse dropped her nurse mask - temporarily interacting with me as a fellow of the world of books rather than her cancer patient - is what Goffman called a ‘disruption’. This can happen when we are faced, as the nurse was, with more than one possible appropriate mask. (Which one to wear?!) Or sometimes it can happen when we encounter someone out of usual context - like when I was introduced pitchside to a dad at the rugby, only to realise he was the doctor who had seen me half naked in his surgery the week before.

Goffman gave an example of disruption as the unexpected early arrival of a house guest before anyone or anything is ready. (Picture the children tantrumming and the house still a tip. Quelle horreur!) And an enteraining one about sailors:

‘Sea-men, whose home away from home is rigorously he-man, tell stories of coming back home and inadvertently asking mother to ‘pass the f-cking butter’.”

Manners and maintaining decorum are a big part of our daily performances, in which we tend to want to avoid ‘creating a scene’. But the scene is sometimes created for us when we are not prepared for - or we don an inappropriate mask in - a given situation.

The team act

As well as analysing individual behaviour, Goffman looked at team acts. This is when one group of people (say, cancer nurses or restaurant servers) can be separated from another identifiable group of people (cancer patients or diners) and each provides the other with their ‘audience’. In these circumstances, we perform both within a group and as a group.

Here, the ‘backstage’ can be shared: the little room where the nurses gather to swap notes and swig from water bottles might also be the place they have a quick grumble - but it’s not a grumble the patients will ever hear. My father-in-law ran a diner and reminded his waiting staff to show the customers their ‘counter faces’, which they were permitted to drop when backstage in the kitchen.

There’s lots more to the idea of the team act than I’m going to delve into here - I want to return to in a future article - but what I do want to note is a point about representation. It applies to both individual and group performances.

Everyday representations of something more than the self

In the cancer treatment room, the nurses wear turquoise scrubs. This sets them apart from everybody else coming and going. The scrubs are an important signifier of their role and status; it would be a disruption if I were to rock up for my treatment dressed in a set. And so, our behaviour also involves our choices in appearance.

Appearance is important. It communicates how someone wants to be perceived, but also represents something more than individual desire. (For this, Goffman draws on work by Simone de Beauvoir.)

Here’s an example. When a police officer wears police officer uniform, he or she represents something greater than themselves; they embody the idea, and should strive to represent the ideal, of what a police officer is. A civilian dressing up as a police officer might also represent the idea, but the costume itself does not make them a police officer.

There is a degree of trust, then, socially, in our everday interactions, that relates to how we behave, including how we dress. This loops back to the idea that our daily performances are not just about what we wish to impress upon others but also what other people are expecting of us. For the masquerade to function, we need to acknowlegde and trust in each other’s masks.

Masking over

For some - in fact, many - performances, how we want to present ourselves to others requires holding back certain information.

In order to feel ‘normal’ and avoid unnecessary attention, many chemo patients suffering from hair loss choose to wear wigs. It may be known that they are undergoing treatment, and even that they are now bald, but a wig allows them to dress over this information.

It’s a majority of women in my treatment room who wear wigs. One day, I witnessed a cancer nurse helping someone adjust her wig before being discharged for the day. It was an intimate moment in which I was reminded of the depth of the nurse’s role - what Goffman called the ‘specialist’, a person admitted into another’s ‘backstage’ space in order to help them to present themselves ahead of a future or ongoing performance.

From human masks to the dehumanising power of mannequins…

Someone who is a specialist, in this sense, to me is a Zambian friend who made me a headscarf from beautiful chitenge cloth and showed me how to wear it. Because instead of a wig, I’ve chosen to wear cotton beanies and headscarves. They do, alas, make me conspicuously more ‘chemo patient’ looking, meaning that no matter what other role I might be playing, I am also presenting myself as someone with cancer.

Which brings me to the final point I want to make, which isn’t about masks but about mannequins. Because in the world of beanies and headscarves, cancer patients seem to be treated unusually. Why, does anyone know, is headgear for cancer patients - and people with alopecia - marketed using mannequins rather than human models? Some websites have a mixture, but the impression is overwhelmingly one of plastic heads. I find the whole thing quite strange and dehumanising! I would love to know the rationale.

If this last point on mannequins relates to the work of Erving Goffman, it probably isn’t to the book I’ve been considering here, but to another set of his thoughts on the topic of interactions and stigma. I’d like to come back to the topic of stigma at some point... See? There’s just so much to say about how ideas from sociology can help us make sense of the world we live in, and the funny behaviours of herds of humans!

Thank you so much for joining me for this foray into Goffman. I hope you enjoyed it enough to sign up for more everyday sociology in my next Edge of the Herd in August. Before then I will have an article on slow living out in July (if you missed my first post for The Slow Drift, you can catch it here) and I will be chatting books in Book Wild in June. Don’t forget that paid subscibers get the chance to enter my book giveaway (inc P&P)!