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Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982), was a 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.
Biography
Goffman was born to parents Max and Anne Goffman in Manville, Alberta June 11, 1922, emmigrants of Ukrainian Jewish descent, who migrated to USA before the First World War. He was married to Angelica Choate in 1952, with whom he had one son. Angelica committed suicide in 1964. In 1981 he married the Canadian linguist Gillian Sankoff, with whom he had a daughter. On November 20, 1982 he died of stomach cancer. Goffman was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, on a par with Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Mead, in whose footsteps he followed in developing a sociological social psychology. Goffman studied at the University of Chicago with Everett Hughes, Edward Shils, and W. Lloyd Warner. He would go on to pioneer the study of face-to-face interaction, or micro-sociology, elaborate the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and develop numerous concepts which would have a massive influence. Unlike many of the most influential sociologists, Goffman's influence continued to grow after his death.
Education:
- St. John's Technical High Schol, Dauphin - around 1937
- University of Manitoba, 1939 - chemistry field
- University of Toronto 1944-1945, Bachelor
- University of Chicago, 1945-1949, MA
- University of Chicago, 1949-1953, PhD
During his lifetime he was awarded the following:
- Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), University of Manitoba, 1976
- Guggenheim fellowship, 1977-78
- In Medias Res, International Prize for Communicating, 1978
- Doctor of Hebrew Literature/Letters (D.H.L.), University of Chicago, 1979
- Mead-Cooley Award in social psychology
- Forms of Talk was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, 1981
During his career Goffman served at the following institutions:
- University of Chicago, Division of Social Sciences, Chicago, assistant, 1952-53, resident associate, 1953-54
- National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, visiting scientist, 1954-57
- University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1958-59, associate professor, 1959-62, professor of sociology, 1962-68
- University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, 1968-82
Achievements
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 and mortification processes of Total Institutions such as mental hospitals, prisons and concentration camps. 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 homogeneous 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 theatre, 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.
Major works
- 1959: 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.
- 1981: Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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 links
1922 births | 1982 deaths | Canadian non-fiction writers | Canadian sociologists | Existentialists | Jewish Canadians | People from Alberta | Social psychologists | University of California, Berkeley faculty | University of Pennsylvania faculty | Canadian expatriate academics in the United States
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"Erving Goffman"