Universitatea din Bucuresti Facultatea de Sociologie si Asistenta Sociala

The American sociologist Erving Goffman

Carol Georgiana English Course Professor : Claudia Ghisoiu

Erving Goffman (June 11 ,1922 November 19, 1982) is a well-known Canadian-born

sociologist,considered to be the most influential American sociologist of the twentiethi. The Times Higher Education Guide listed Goffman as the 6th most-cited author in the social science. He was born in Mannville,Alberta, Canada though he was from a family of Ukrainian Jews who moved to Canada. First he studied chemistry at the University of Manitoba but he interrupted his studies and started working for the National Film Board of Canada. During this time he met Dennis Wrong a famous North American sociologist at that time and he became interested in sociology. This meeting with Dennis Wrong was a motivation for Goffman to abandon University of Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in sociology and anthropology. After that he studied at the University of Chicago and after finishing his studies he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology. Then, while he was preparing for his dissertation, he lived in the Shetland Islands to collect ethnographic data. That research inspired Goffman to write his first truly important work , The Presentation Of Self in Everyday Life in 1956. Goffman is most probably best known for this book which is a study of symbolic interaction under the form of dramaturgical analysis. In the book , Goffman`s starting idea is that in the everyday socialization ,everybody acts and reacts not naturally, but under a mask made of individual points of view ,personal opinions about other people, situations and most important about themselves . He says that people act like this because they know that others will judge, classify and make an opinion based on his actions and opinions about certain topics. The face ,how Goffman calls it, is actually the expression of the self which is an important fact that defines a person. Goffman says about this term that the face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the lines others assume he has taken during a particular contact. iiThat means everybody adopts a face ,a different one ,according to the situations. The face is in a continuously change, depending on the persons feelings and emotions at some point of social confrontation. If the subject has positive feelings and acceptance from the other participants , his self esteem grows,making him more confident. If the feelings or the response are negative the person will loose confidence and soon he will no longer be

able of continuing a social action. Goffman says that when a person is given a face by another coparticipant, this person enters in a so called state of a guardian where he must sustain the face and prove that he is worth of and doesnt disappoint the expectations of his coparticipants . That`s true when the face given to someone is positive. From the group perspective,Goffman said that every member expects from each other to have respect for other persons of the group and to have self respect ,at the same time. Goffman believed that these two rules, to have self respect and to respect other participants in a social action , makes the action more easy and pleasurable and that the face is not the purpose of interactions,but a condition. Another important piece of work is Asylums : Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates wrote in 1961. Asylums is a collection of four essays : "Characteristics of Total Institutions" , The Moral Career of the Mental Patient" (1959), "The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital" and "The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades. The first three essays are about patients and their experiences and the last one is about professional client interactions. Goffman`s attention is attracted by psychiatric hospitalization and the effect that he calls institutionalization. Goffman describes what`s happening in a mental institution and how they try to put people into some role of a good-patient, they try to make them dull ,harmless and inconspicuous. That`s institutionalization . The interesting part is that most of the patients manage to find their way back and reclaim their identities although total institutions have a powerful impact on the people`s interactions. With Asylums he also popularized the term of total institution and some people associate Goffman with this term and give him credit over it, but according to Fine and Manning he didn`t came up with the term of total institution , he only made it popular with his book, Asylums. Fine and Manning said that Goffman heard it in some lectures by Everett Hughes,who`s known as the one who influenced the most, Goffman`s work.

Asylums had a great impact on total institutions and officially have been a major factor in the problem of reforming the mental health system. Thanks to Goffman`s book the number of large mental hospitals and people locked up has dropped radically. Many have associated Goffman with the symbolic interaction school of sociological thought,but he never considered that. He wasn`t the kind of sociologist who would limit himself at some specific school of sociological thought. Goffman`s work is various,his ideas are difficult to reduce to a number of key themesiii and that`s exactly why Fine and Manning classified his work as a comparative,qualitative sociology that aimed to produce generalizations about human behavior.iv Goffman`s work was influenced by Emile Durkheim , Sigmund Freud ,Herbert Blumer, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schutz and the most influential of his teachersv how Burns call him is Everett Hughes. He was also a source of inspiration and he influenced numerous contemporary sociologists such as Anthony Giddens ,Jurgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu. Among his students include Charles Goodwin, Marjorie Goodwin, Harvey Sacks, Carol Brooks Gardner and Eviatar Zerubavel. Sadly ,today there aren`t too many students and scholars who continue his work. The officials says that the lack of interest in continuing Goffman`s work is due his difficult and different style to write, hard to reproduce. Also, because of his stylistic and topics approach he`s not to valued in social science. They lack interest in the topic of behavior in public places because they considered it being trivial and not worthy to be studied by scholars. In my opinion Erving Goffman was a remarcable sociologist, a man who saw things differently and in the first place he wasn`t afraid to do things differently. He didn`t limit himself only to some subjects and with the risk of not being taken seriously he studied and wrote about a lots of things, reaching a lot of sociological themes . I consider The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to be masterpiece in sociology. It`s

fascinating to study people and see how they react in a social interaction. At the base of any sociological system,civilization, lies the social interactions so I believe it`s really important to understand how this works and how people act around other people,in groups and what are the terms and situations that make them act different. It`s essential to understand how people work in order to understand how the whole system works because people are those who make up the system. Goffman`s work can be used to understand the social life too, in order to have a better control over yourself and others in a social interaction. I also admire his book Asylums because he approached a new subject and in my opinion it`s more than just a subject. I think it`s critical to understand the needs of people with mental health issues and how they think in order to help them live a normal life and be accepted in today's society. Asylums is a collection of four essays : "Characteristics of Total Institutions" , The Moral Career of the Mental Patient" (1959), "The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital" and "The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades. The first three essays are about patients and their experiences and the last one is about professional client interactions. With Asylums he also popularized the term of total institution and some people associate Goffman with this term and give him credit over it, but according to Fine and Manning he didn`t came up with the term of total institution , he only made it popular with his book, Asylums. Fine and Manning said that Goffman heard it in some lectures by Everett Hughes,who`s known as the one who influenced the most, Goffman`s work. Besides The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Asylums, he also wrote Behaviour in Public where he continues his passion with the subject and wrote about interactions in everyday life. He stays on topic and wrote two more book about social interactions in everyday life,in different circumstations, Stigma and Interaction Ritual . Frame Analysis is another interesting book,one of the lasts he wrote. The complete name of the book is Frame Analysis : An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Here, Goffman`s trying to explain how an individual`s perception of society is structured by the conceptual frames wich refers at the ways to organize experience. He explain this concept by talking about a picture frame which

represents the structure and a picture. The role of the frame is to hold together this picture which represents the content of whatever experinces he had. Frame Analysis is not so popular as other books he wrote, but he considered this book the greatest he ever wrote, his best work. Reading Erving Goffman`s work (some of it) was surprisingly captivating. I don`t think it`s accessible to everybody, even if his writing style is more accessible than the style of others sociologists. But if you have read some sociology and you`re accustomed with the terms,you`ll enjoy reading Erving Goffman. Although there hasn`t been any Goffman school,he did make an impact on social theory and Fine and Manning considered Goffman to be the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century. In the end I think Erving Goffman`s work is an example of how sociology should be practiced ,by face-to-face interactions. He exemplified the best of the sociological imagination.

Times Higher Education. 2009-03-26 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Erving Goffman 1956 iii Fine and Manning ( 2003 ) p. 34 iv Fine and Manning ( 2003 ) p. 43 v Burn (2002 ) p.11
ii

Works Cited

Burn, Tom . Web. 2002 Fine and Manning . Web. 2003 Goffman, Erving . The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1956 . Extracts from Erving Goffman. A Middlesex University resource. Retrieved 8 November 2010.