1922-1983
Perhaps the most colorful of American sociologists, Erving Goffman, born in Alberta, Canada, led the turn to the micro-sociology of everyday life. He received a PhD in 1953 from the University of Chicago. Goffman’s program began as a development of the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, which set out to uncover the moral order that makes society possible. Where his predecessors, the British social anthropologists, analyzed religious rituals in tribal societies, Goffman examined the secular rituals of modern social interaction. He believed that such rituals construct the modern self, which he studied by examining the conditions in which it is threatened or blatantly manipulated. Goffman analyzed abnormal situations and institutions, including mental hospitals, confidence games, gambling, spying, and embarrassment in social encounters, to reveal the social conditions upholding conventional realities.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman analyzed social life as a theater, divided into frontstage regions, where official definitions of reality are presented, and backstage regions, where dirty work is hidden and performances are prepared. Privileged occupations and social classes dominate frontstages and present idealized images of selves and institutions, whereas subordinated persons do much of their work backstage and are dominated by frontstage performers.
In Asylums (1961) and Stigma (1963), Goffman analyzed the extreme backstages of society, such as the schizophrenic wards of mental hospitals. Proposing the concept of "total institutions" for places where all aspects of life are subject to all-encompassing authority that allows no private backstages for the individual, Goffman argued that patients and other inmates engage in resistance through bizarre behavior aimed at supporting a sense of self beyond institutional controls. Thus, the official social processing of persons as deviant tends to promote still further deviance.
Mental illness, in Goffman’s view, is not a characteristic of the individual so much as a social enactment, a spiral of violations of the ritual proprieties of everyday life. In Behavior in Public Places (1963) and Relations in Public (1971), Goffman made use of the violations exhibited by mental patients, as well as close ethnographic studies of pedestrian traffic and sociable gatherings, to develop a taxonomy of social situations and their tacit requirements and constraints. Unfocused interaction among persons in each others’ physical presence involves tacit monitoring and signals indicating a respect for personal space. Focused interaction carries implications of memberships in groups, however small or temporary, and involves devices for entry and exit into the focus of attention, as well as for guarding boundaries of intimacy and warding off offenses that violate respect for the relationship. In "On Face-Work" (1955) and "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor" (1956), and in Interaction Ritual (1967), Goffman applied the theories of Durkheim and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown to the polite ceremonies of greetings, departures, and conversation. The everyday situation is constructed out of efforts at ritual enactment, and the modern individual self is elevated into a Durkheimian sacred object—much as the tribal gods were situationally re-created by the worship of them—through deference given in everyday rituals. There is therefore no essential self, but only an ongoing social construction.
Although Goffman did not contextualize his observations historically, his work casts light on the prestigeful pattern of the self in the late twentieth century. Goffman introduced the concept of "role-distance" (in Encounters, 1961), in which the actor claims superior sophistication by displaying signs of detachment from the demands of the social role. Games and entertainment, which take up an increasing portion of "postmodernity," were seen by Goffman as producing a sense of "fun" and excitement by requiring the actor to display engrossment in an activity bracketed from ordinary mundane reality, while also courting risks that allow a display of "coolness."
The ritualism of everyday encounters allows some actors to manipulate situations, engage in face-work contests to subtly embarrass others, or deceive them for criminal, business, or political purposes. These analyses have led some theorists to conclude that Goffman viewed the world as a Machiavellian contest of false reality-constructions. But Goffman argued that the social order is basically accommodative, and that situations involve ritual constraints that must be largely respected if any social reality is to be constructed at all. In Strategic Interaction (1969), he analyzed espionage and other self-interested manipulations of impressions, concluding that such behavior is limited by the inherent difficulties of sustaining complex deception. Social conflict and domination are possible only when placed upon the background of ritual solidarity enacted in most social encounters.
Goffman’s later works, Frame Analysis (1974) and Forms of Talk (1981), take up the social construction of multiple social realities. Goffman adopted a moderate position, holding that complex social frames or definitions of reality are built up hierarchically, by bracketing or transforming activity at more basic levels of bodily action, human ecology, and social rituals. Highly laminated social meanings emerge situationally. For example, individuals (1) may make ironic backstage comments (2) during a rehearsal (3) for a commemoration of (4) a historical event, but if a fire breaks out during the rehearsal, all four levels are collapsed to the lowest level of framing, the fire. Language itself is built up through a hierarchy of framing devices. Talk is a move in the interaction ritual through which social membership is negotiated. It is built upon prior enactments and constrained by the framing or stage-work necessary to sustain or transform the current situa-tional definition. Social reality, self, and language are all emergent phenomena, built out of the ritual constraints of the interaction order. Goffman died in 1983 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
