Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman, born in Mannville, Alberta, on 11 June 1922, was a Canadian-American sociologist and writer often called the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century. His family were Ukrainian Jews who had emigrated to Canada around 1900. He had an older sister, Frances Bay, who became an actress. The family moved to Dauphin, Manitoba, where his father ran a successful tailoring business.

In 1937, after moving to Winnipeg, Goffman attended St. John's Technical High School. He began studying chemistry at the University of Manitoba in 1939 but left to work for the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa. There, meeting sociologist Dennis Wrong sparked his interest in sociology.

He transferred to the University of Toronto, studying under C. W. M. Hart and Ray Birdwhistell, earning a BA in sociology and anthropology in 1945. He then went to the University of Chicago, receiving an MA in 1949 and a PhD in 1953. For his doctoral dissertation, he lived on the Shetland island of Unst from December 1949 to May 1951, collecting ethnographic data. Supervised by W. Lloyd Warner, Donald Horton, and Anselm Strauss, the dissertation was titled Communication Conduct in an Island Community.

Career

That research inspired his first major book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), which introduced his dramaturgical analysis of symbolic interaction. From 1954 to 1957, he worked as an assistant to the athletic director at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland; participant observation there led to his essays on mental illness and total institutions, collected in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961). In 1958, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor, becoming a full professor in 1962. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, holding the Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and Anthropology, thanks largely to former Berkeley colleague Dell Hymes.

He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969. In 1970, he cofounded the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization and coauthored its Platform Statement. His book Relations in Public (1971) tied together many of his ideas about everyday life. Frame Analysis appeared in 1974.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1977–1978 and the Cooley-Mead Award in 1979. Elected the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association, he served from 1981 to 1982 but could not deliver the presidential address due to illness. He died of stomach cancer in Philadelphia on 19 November 1982. Posthumously, in 1983, he received the Mead Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

Personal life and death

Goffman married Angelica Schuyler Choate in 1952; their son Thomas was born in 1953. Angelica, who experienced mental illness, died by suicide in 1964. In 1981, he married sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff; their daughter Alice, born in 1982, also became a sociologist.

Outside academia, he was known for success in the stock market and gambling, and once worked as a pit boss at a Las Vegas casino for ethnographic study. His major works also include Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), and Forms of Talk (1981). His research focused on the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, the framing of experience, and concepts like total institutions and stigmas.

Influence and legacy

In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide ranked him the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences. Influenced by Herbert Blumer, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Everett Hughes, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schütz, Georg Simmel, and W. Lloyd Warner—with Hughes being his most influential teacher—Goffman did not see himself as a representative of symbolic interaction, though he is often associated with it. His work has influenced sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.