Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982), was an American-based Canadian sociologist and writer. The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective that began with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and was developed throughout his life expanding to the topics of deference and demeanor.

Biography

Goffman was born to Max and Anne Goffman in Mannville, Alberta, on June 11, 1922. His parents were Jewish Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada. Goffman's family moved back to Manitoba when he was a child.^[1] His sister, Frances Bay says that Erving "was a real prankster as a kid, and they never thought he'd amount to anything."^[2]

Goffman attended St. John's Technical High School, Dauphin, Manitoba before studying chemistry at the University of Manitoba in 1939. He worked for the National Film Board of Canada in 1943-1944. He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1945 (where he dated social network pioneer Elizabeth Bott^[3]), and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1949 and 1953. He lived in the Shetland Islands in 1949-1950, collecting material he used in his dissertation and in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Press, 1956).

He married Angelica Choate in 1953, with whom he had one son, Tom. Angelica committed suicide in 1964. In 1981 he married the Canadian linguist Gillian Sankoff, with whom he had a daughter, Alice.

His sister, Frances Bay, enjoyed an acting career with supporting roles in numerous TV shows and movies in the 1970s through the 1990s. She may be best known for playing the "marble rye" lady on the Seinfeld sitcom.

On November 20, 1982, Goffman died of stomach cancer.

Goffman as a sociologist

Goffman was one of the greatest North American sociologists of his generation. Along with many other sociologists of his cohort, he was heavily influenced by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in developing his theoretical framework. Goffman studied at the University of Chicago with Everett Hughes, Edward Shils, and W. Lloyd Warner. He would go on to pioneer the study of face-to-face interaction, or micro-sociology, elaborate the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and develop numerous concepts that would have a massive influence. Unlike many of the most influential sociologists, Goffman's influence continued to grow after his death.

Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his formulation of symbolic interaction as dramaturgical perspective in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which begins with an epigraph by George Santayana about masks. Largely working within the tradition of symbolic interactionist, he greatly elaborated on its central concepts and application. For Goffman, society is not homogeneous. We must act differently in different settings. The context we have to judge is not society at large, but the specific context. Goffman suggests that life is a sort of theater, but we also need a parking lot and a cloak room: there is a wider context lying beyond the face-to-face symbolic interaction. "Throughout Presentation of Self, Goffman seems to perceive the individual as nothing more than a cog responsible for the maintenance of the social world by playing his or her part. In fact, he refers to the self as a 'peg' upon which 'something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time.'"^[4]

Author of the rigorous, then-controversial, and highly influential text Asylums, for which he gathered information at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., he describes "institutionalization" as a response by patients to the bureaucratic structures and mortification processes of total institutions such as mental hospitals, prisons, and concentration camps. The NIMH tried to persuade Goffman not to publish his book because of its criticism of mental institutions. He always considered himself a social scientist, and did not use phenomenology or postmodernism as his major epistemological approach. He also was a sociologist who emphasized that "society always comes first".

He also wrote Frame analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Many of his works form the basis for the sociological and media studies concept of framing.

Awards

During his lifetime he was awarded the following:

• Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), University of Manitoba, 1976
• Guggenheim fellowship, 1977-78
• In Medias Res, International Prize for Communicating, 1978
• Doctor of Hebrew Literature/Letters (D.H.L.), University of Chicago, 1979
• Mead-Cooley Award in social psychology
• Forms of Talk was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, 1981

Institutions

During his career Goffman served at the following institutions:

• University of Chicago, Division of Social Sciences, Chicago, assistant, 1952-53, resident associate, 1953-54
• National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, visiting scientist, 1954-57
• University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1958-59, associate professor, 1959-62, professor of sociology, 1962-68
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, 1969-82

He was also the 73rd president of American Sociological Association^[5]

Quotes

• "Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way."^[6]
• "Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes."
• "Society is an insane asylum run by the inmates."
• "The world, in truth, is a wedding."
• "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity."

Major works

• 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. ISBN 978-0140135718. Anchor Books edition 1959.
• 1961: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York, Doubleday.
• 1961: Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction - Fun in Games & Role Distance. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill.
• 1963: Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, The Free Press.
• 1963: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall.
• 1967: Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Anchor Books.
• 1969: Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• 1971: Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
• 1974: Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London: Harper and Row. ISBN 978-0060903725
• 1981: Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0812277906

References

External links

• Biography
• Biography
• Biography
• Biography
• Articles on Goffman
• Erving Goffman: A Bibliography
• Extracts
• Goffman and the sociology of order in interaction