Erving Manual Goffman

Erving Manual Goffman

    June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982

Erving M. Goffman served as the 73rd President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “The Interaction Order,” was delivered at the Association’s 1982 Annual Meeting in San Francisco,and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR February 1983, Vol 48 No 1, pp 1-17). 

Obituary

Written by Arlene K. Daniels, Northwestern University. Published in Footnotes, January 1983.

Erving Goffman died in his 60th year on November 20th, 1982 in Philadelphia. He was one of the very few sociologists whose work was known beyond the field-and his influence on the world, as well as within the disciplines of social science, has already been so great that he stands as a giant among the social thinkers of his day. His dazzling writing style enabled him to write clear English without jar­gon and with a nicety and a feeling for words extremely rare among academics-n ever cute or patronizing to the reader, but thoroughly professional. And his writing was enlivened by the enormous catholicity of materials that he drew upon, illustrative vignettes-vivid, horrifying, amusing, entrancing-not only scholarly and sociological, but from history, literature, and the annals of popular culture. A judi­cious assessment of his work re­mains for later reviews. But there is already no doubt that Goffman changed the way we think about the world we live in and our pas­sage through it. He examined apparently insignificant, un­noticeable, conventional activities and found important social princi­ples embedded in routine. 

Erving Goffman was born in 1922 in Manville, Alberta. He earned his BA at the University of Toronto in 1945, and his master’s and doctor’s degrees in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1949 and 1953. His dissertation, Communication Conduct in an Island Community, informed his first great work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. First published in 1956 by the University of Edinburgh Social Science Re­search Centre, this work became the much reprinted paperback that inspired so many un­dergraduates to enter sociology and changed the shape of the field as well. 

When one asks colleagues-and also people outside sociology­ what they know of Erving Goffman, they mention this great, early work. They often mention the significance of concepts like backstage, to show the im­portance of the hidden, mediating work that must be accomplished for successful presentations in public. And they discuss the im­portance of dramaturgical imag­ery for understanding the con­structed nature of human interac­tion. Some have deplored the treatment of impression man­agement in this imagery as an overly cynical view of motivation for all behaviors. But the real sig­nificance of this rhetoric lies in its focus on showing the place of any behavior within a system of un­derstandings developed about the appropriate context for the display of manners and morals, emotions and feelings. 

For this and his many later works, sociologists honored Goffman in 1961 with the MacIver Award and in 1981 with the presidency of the association. But these formal recognitions cannot sufficiently express what a debt the field owes to Erving Goffman. 

Goffman’ s work shows the sig­nificance of microanalysis for un­derstanding the world we live in, the importance of each actor who moves through the everyday world in recreating and main­taining the normative order. It is Goffman who explains why mac­roanalysis, though it can show us the patterns of normative order, cannot tell us how it works. We need to observe the actors closely in order to understand how social structure is made viable. In the ex­amination and analysis of social order, moment by moment, we can see how that order is con­structed, how individuals take on themselves the responsibility for its maintenance and reconstitution after a rupture-through embarrassment, for example. 

Goffman pulled apart commonly held assumptions and expectations that obscured social structure to show us its formerly invisible underpinnings. For in­stance, his discussion of taking cigarettes and matches away from mental patients showed how this restriction made it impossible for them to engage in the give and take of commonplace activity. And in his analysis of the propri­ety of maintaining role distance and guying the role of rider on the merry-go-round, he showed how impression management is a social rather than a personality issue. 

Erving Goffman’ s fine-grained analyses, his sharply perceptive images and metaphors which then guide our own perceptions ever afterward, change the world for us. As Jessie Bernard once wrote: “We can never see the world the same way after reading Goffman; we will never forget his description of such phenomena as “lol­lers’ tuck” -how people lean up against walls when waiting for someone. It is this perceptiveness that served him well when he showed us how to look for the un­derlife of institutions and the pro­cesses of colonization and secon­dary adjustments possible there. 

Coffman’s ability to create powerful imagery has often been put to the service of the powerless. In early works like Stigma and Asylums, he has shown the harshness and brutality of even avowedly humane systems in managing the control of deviants. And he has also shown the awesome inventiveness and determination of the stigmatized to resist these sys­tems. 

Sometimes the revelations have been discomfiting -the metaphor of peristaltic movement to describe the mental patient’s passage through hospitalization, for example. But Goffman’s analyses have always been particularly acute in assessing the peculiarly difficult position of such powerless people as mental pa­tients. 

In his ability to see how the powerless are managed in in­stitutional settings, he also offered a grimly sardonic view of the role certified professionals play in so­cial control. His essay on “The Medical Model. .. ” in Asylums stands as a brilliant example of controlled rage at the irony of “therapeutic treatment” that can strip away all sense of self-esteem in the treated and make them into non-persons. 
In Relations in Public and in Behavior in Public Places, Goffman showed how the classic language of status, role, and obligation apply in understanding the most primary kind of status, that of fellow human being-on a street corner, greeting or avoiding greeting, involved or shielded from involvement with others. In his later work (Frame Analyses, Forms of Talk) Goffman began to focus on the formal properties of communication to be found in sequences of events and in linguistics. 

He began to develop the rules of transposition from one level of meaning to another and from one mode of communication to another. And he examined the dimensions of power and privilege embedded in that activity-itself part of the activity of constructing our daily world. This line of analysis also appears in Gender Advertisements, where Goffman analyzed photographs to show how they translated male super ordination of women into everyday or idealized scenes. Feminists may thank him for this contribution to our knowledge of how the cultural subjugation of women is portrayed. 

Throughout his work, an un­derlying belief in positivism appears. Not everything was socially constructed for Erving Goffman. He showed his allegiance to Durkl1eim in his belief in social facts. And he owed allegiance to anthropologists Radcliffe-Brown and W. Lloyd Warner as much as to his sociolo­gy teachers Louis Wirth and Everett Hughes. 

But whether primarily sociologist or anthropologist, positivist or social constructionist, there never was anyone or anything quite like Erving Goffman. He shot across the sociological horizon like a blazing star and he amazed, amused, captivated and infuriated those who knew him. His interest in analyzing the elements in an interaction, even while in the mid­st of it, could be maddening to other actors in the setting with him. And his resolute refusal to play the games of social manners often drove others into states of real fury. At the same time, he could be kind, gentle and ten­derhearted to those he knew; and he was often wildly funny. During his time as an officer of ASA, he made a real effort to transform himself from enfant terrible to responsible statesperson. His apt­ness at learning, his real capacity for thoughtful serious participation-combined with occasional outbursts of hilarity and whimsical observation­ made him a target for waspish re­marks but also a joy to serve with. The illness that caused him to miss much of his year as President also caused many who serve on Coun­cil to realize how much they mis­sed him. 

The memory of the combination of Erving Goffman, the great con­tributor to modern social theory and Erving Goffman the impish iconoclast of the ASA will contin­ue to bemuse his colleagues even as they mourn his passing. But while the peculiarities of Erving Goffman’ s interactional style. may bemuse, the brilliance and significance of his contribution to social theory warrant nothing but the greatest admiration and gratitude.