Having It Both Ways with Erving Goffman

Historians of social science from Anthony Giddens forward have ably chronicled Erving Goffman's legacy. Goffman's resonant book titles alone hint at the Dickensian acuity of his social close-reading: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Behavior in Public Places (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). I envy newcomers the opportunity to read pieces like “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952) and “Where the Action Is” (1967) with fresh eyes. Goffman, born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to Ukrainian parents, attended the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto before receiving a PhD in sociology from Chicago. His fieldwork was in the Shetlands, and Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) were both written after a period of ethnographic immersion at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, DC. It may help first-time readers to know that as an adolescent he had a “special aptitude for noticing details of people's interpersonal conduct”; also that “his Chicago classmates nicknamed him ‘the little dagger’ because of his talent for the pointed personal comment. Sometimes, they felt, he never knew when to stop.”