Goffman, Erving (1922—82)
Canadian sociologist. His work is renowned for demonstrating that apparently instinctual behaviour, such as winking, glancing, gesturing, is more socially organized than previously thought. His work uncovered and classified the rules and presuppositions of these types of unconscious or unthought social conduct. He created a range of new concepts to describe this behaviour that have become part of common parlance both within academic sociology and in more everyday situations. Goffman came to sociology almost by accident. He originally enrolled to study natural sciences at university, but did not complete his degree. After a spell working for the National Film Board he became interested in sociology and resumed his studies. For his PhD at the University of Chicago, he conducted an ethnographic study of rural life in the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland. Graduating in 1953, Goffman immediately began working on the book that would propel him into international fame, namely The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). Although it is not strictly speaking a book of the dissertation, it nonetheless draws on the ideas about social interaction Goffman pioneered in his thesis. In particular, it developed the idea that all social interaction is a variety of performance that stage-manages how ‘we’ wish to be seen and perceived by others. He thus described facial expressions, which are one means by which we manage others’ impressions of us, as ‘face-work’. From 1955 to 1958 Goffman worked on a National Institute of Mental Health‐funded ethnographic project at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC. He used this as an opportunity to gather material for his book Asylums (1961), one of the most influential pieces of sociology in the twentieth century, as well as a moving and affecting account of the dehumanizing processes mental patients are subjected to. Goffman was particularly interested in the social and political mechanisms whereby certain behaviours come to be coded as clinically insane and not merely eccentric. Goffman described the asylum as a ‘total institution’, whose function is to change people---they are, he said, experiments in what can be done to alter the self. He catalogued the way rituals of humiliation, debasement, and profanations of the self were deployed by the institution to break subjects down and make them amenable to self-transformation. Goffman also documented the ways patients built a life for themselves despite the institution’s control over their daily activities---Certeau, Michel de’s concept of making-do can be traced to this source. He attempted to synthesize his observations on everyday interactions in Frame Analysis (1974), which was written as an alternative to Garfinkel, Harold’s concept of ethnomethodology. Butler, Judith utilizes this work in her essays on war. Although Goffman continues to be read today, his work has been criticized, somewhat paradoxically, for being on the one hand overly impressionistic and on the other hand overly systemic. Further Reading: T. Burns Erving Goffman (1992). P. Manning Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (1992).