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Erving Goffman Quotes
1922–1982 Canada
Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982) was a Canadian born American sociologist and writer. His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social theory, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and social stigmas.
Canada Academics Non-fiction authors Psychologists Sociologists Also known as: Goffman, Erving
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Stigma - the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance.
Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.
So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.
Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.
Only a schmuck studies his own life.
There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.
Erving Goffman (1971)
For over a decade now in the literature of social psychology there has been good work on stigma - the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance. This work has been added to from time to time by useful clinical studies, and its framework applied to ever new categories of persons.
The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.
The degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.
In recent years there have been elaborate attempts to bring into one framework the concepts and findings derived from three different areas of inquiry: the individual personality, social interaction, and society. I would like to suggest here a simple addition to these inter-disciplinary attempts.
In many kinds of social interaction, unofficial communication provides a way in which one team can extend a definite but non-compromising invitation to the other, requesting that social distance and formality be increased or decreased, or that both teams shift the interaction to one involving the performance of a new set of roles.
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