# Erving Goffman **Erving Goffman** (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982) was the Canadian-American sociologist who made the study of face-to-face interaction a science and, in doing so, supplied the vocabulary the vault uses whenever it analyzes politics as performance. Born in Mannville, Alberta, to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, he trained at Toronto and Chicago, did his doctoral fieldwork in the Shetland Islands, spent a year as a participant-observer among the patients of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, and taught at Berkeley (1958–68) and Penn (1969–82). He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1981 and died of cancer before delivering his presidential address. By 2007 he was the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences. ## The work Goffman wrote a sequence of short books, each of which introduced a concept the field now uses without attribution: - ***The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life*** (1956/1959) — the **dramaturgical** model: social life as staged performance, with a *front stage* where the performance is given, a *back stage* where it is prepared and dropped, and **impression management** as the work of controlling what an audience infers. The vault's concept page is [[Erving Goffman Self-Presentation Theory]]. - ***Asylums*** (1961) — the **total institution**: a place (asylum, prison, barracks, monastery) where all aspects of life are conducted in the same place under a single authority, and where the self is systematically "mortified" on entry. The vault's [[Totalism]] page and its cult material depend on this. - ***Stigma*** (1963) — "spoiled identity": how people carrying a discrediting attribute manage information about it, pass, cover, or are "discredited." The [[Stigma]] entry. - ***Interaction Ritual*** (1967) — **face-work**: the mutual labor of keeping everyone's claimed self intact, and what happens when it fails. - ***Frame Analysis*** (1974) — the frame as the answer to "what is it that's going on here?"; the ancestor of every media-framing argument the vault makes. ## Why the vault cares Goffman is the hinge between the anthropology of ritual — [[Victor Turner]], [[Clifford Geertz]], [[Mary Douglas]] — and the analysis of political spectacle. [[Ritual and Political Performance]] uses front/back stage to read rallies, hearings and "leaks"; [[Impression Management]] and the [[Political Psychology]] pages use his account of the performed self to explain why a politician's contradictions do not cost him with an audience that is watching the performance rather than auditing the claims; All the Worlds a Stage traces the older lineage. [[Pierre Bourdieu]] and [[Arlie Russell Hochschild]] extended him — Bourdieu into the sociology of taste and capital, Hochschild into "emotional labor" and, later, the deep story of the American right. The dramaturgical model is also the vault's best account of the *back stage* of the movement: the donor retreats, the group chats, the Signal thread — where the front-stage performance is written. ## See Also - [[Erving Goffman Self-Presentation Theory]] · [[Stigma]] · [[Totalism]] · [[Ritual and Political Performance]] - [[Victor Turner]] · [[Clifford Geertz]] · [[Mary Douglas]] · [[Pierre Bourdieu]] · [[Arlie Russell Hochschild]] - [[Sociology Hub]] · [[Anthropology Hub]] · [[Political Psychology]]