Erving Goffman

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Lore & Background

Goffman was born 11 June 1922 in Mannville, Alberta, Canada, to Max Goffman and Anne Goffman, née Averbach, from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had emigrated to Canada at the turn of the nineteenth century. He had an older sister, Frances Bay, who became an actress. The family moved to Dauphin, Manitoba, where his father operated a successful tailoring business. From 1937, Goffman attended St. John's Technical High School in Winnipeg. In 1939, he enrolled at the University of Manitoba, majoring in chemistry, but interrupted his studies to work for the National Film Board of Canada. After meeting sociologist Dennis Wrong, he left the University of Manitoba and enrolled at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1945 with a BA in sociology and anthropology. He then moved to the University of Chicago, receiving an MA (1949) and PhD (1953) in sociology. For his doctoral dissertation, from December 1949 to May 1951 he lived on the island of Unst in the Shetland Islands, completing his dissertation Communication Conduct in an Island Community (1953) under W. Lloyd Warner, Donald Horton, and Anselm Strauss. This research inspired his first major work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). After graduating, in 1954–1957 he was an assistant to the athletic director at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, leading to his second book, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961). In 1958, Goffman became a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, first as a visiting professor, then from 1962 as a full professor. In 1968, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and Anthropology. In 1969, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1970, he cofounded the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1977–1978. In 1979, he received the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He was elected the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association, serving in 1981–1982, but was unable to deliver the presidential address due to progressing illness. Posthumously, in 1983, he received the Mead Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. In 1952, Goffman married Angelica Schuyler Choate (nicknamed Sky); in 1953, their son Thomas was born. Angelica experienced mental illness and died by suicide in 1964. In 1981, he married sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff; their daughter Alice, born the following year, also became a sociologist. Outside academia, Goffman was known for his interest in the stock market and gambling, and at one point became a pit boss at a Las Vegas casino. Goffman died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 19 November 1982, of stomach cancer.

Reader's Guide

Goffman's significance lies in his development of a comparative, qualitative sociology that aimed to produce generalizations about human behavior. He made substantial advances in the study of face-to-face interaction, elaborated the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and developed numerous concepts that have had a massive influence, particularly in the field of micro-sociology of everyday life. Much of his work was about the organization of everyday behavior, a concept he termed "interaction order". He contributed to the sociological concept of framing (frame analysis), to game theory (the concept of strategic interaction), and to the study of interactions and linguistics, arguing that the activity of speaking must be seen as a social rather than a linguistic construct. Methodologically, Goffman often employed qualitative approaches, specifically ethnography, most famously in his study of social aspects of mental illness and the functioning of total institutions. His contributions are valued as an attempt to create a theory that bridges the agency-and-structure divide—for popularizing social constructionism, symbolic interaction, conversation analysis, ethnographic studies, and the study of individual interactions. His influence extended far beyond sociology; for example, his work provided the assumptions of much current research in language and social interaction within the discipline of communication. Goffman introduced the concept of nonperson treatment as a level of social interaction. He defined "impression management" as a person's attempts to present an acceptable image to those around them, verbally or nonverbally, based on the idea that people see themselves as others view them. He was dedicated to discovering the subtle ways humans present acceptable images by concealing information that may conflict with the images for a particular situation. Goffman broke from George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in that he was more interested in the actual physical proximity or the "interaction order" that molds the self. He believed that impression management can be achieved only if the audience is in sync with a person's self-perception. People present images of themselves based on how society thinks they should act in a particular situation, drawing from William Thomas's concept of definition of the situation. In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed Goffman as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens, and ahead of Jürgen Habermas. His popularity with the general public has been attributed to his writing style, described as "sardonic".

Did You Know?

• Goffman's older sister, Frances Bay, became an actress.
• For his doctoral dissertation, Goffman lived on the island of Unst in the Shetland Islands from December 1949 to May 1951.
• In 1970, Goffman cofounded the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization.
• Outside academia, Goffman became a pit boss at a Las Vegas casino as part of his ethnographic studies and hobbies.
• Goffman was unable to deliver his presidential address for the American Sociological Association in 1982 due to progressing illness.