Erving Goffman
Categories: 1922 births | 1982 deaths | Canadian writers | Canadian sociologists
Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 - November 19, 1982), was a Canadian sociologist and writer. Goffman received his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1945 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1949 and 1953 respectively.
Author of the seminal text Asylums, for which he gathered information at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., he describes "institutionalization" as a response by patients to the bureaucratic structures of a hospital setting. Goffman uses phenomenology to understand how humans perceive the interactions that they observe and take part in. To Goffman there is no real capital-T truth, but interpretations that are real to each individual.
Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his formulation of symbolic interaction in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Although Goffman is often characterized as a symbolic interactionist, he tried to correct the flaws of symbolic interactionism. For Goffman, society is not a homogenous creature. We must act differently in different settings. The context we have to judge is not society at large, but the specific context. Goffman suggests that life is a theater, but we also need a parking lot and a cloak room: there is a wider context lying beyond the face-to-face symbolic interaction.
He also authored Frame analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Many of his works form the basis for the sociological and media studies concept of framing.
Main works
- 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre.
- 1961: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York, Doubleday.
- 1963: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall.
- 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London: Harper and Row.
See also
- Face (self image)
- dramaturgical perspective
- American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization
- total institution
- symbolic interactionism
- impression management
- Framing (communication theory)
- Synthetic Personality
External link
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