Postmortem Identity Work in Territorial

Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical ideas about impression management are applied to analyze four historical photographs of deceased children. The photographs are archived at the Alaska State Library and were taken during Alaska’s territorial-colonialist era. This article explains how living photographic subjects, who are often unseen but are symbolized through items visible in the photograph, work with viewers to co-construct social identities of themselves and of the dead children in the photographs. I propose that participants—the seen and unseen subjects, the photographer, and the receiving audience—engage in what Goffman calls frontstage and backstage work to co-construct social identities for the dead children and for the living survivors and to manage the impressions given by the visual images. Further, I propose that the social identities portrayed in the photographs were shaped by social forces and symbol systems external to the persons and settings visible in the images. This article demonstrates that the social systems of family, religion, ethnicity, and gender are especially powerful in co-constructing the symbolic social identities of the participants in the photographs under study. Other issues considered are the social systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and assimilationist policies that targeted Native and immigrant peoples