Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982) was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".

Goffman was born 11 June 1922, in Mannville, Alberta, Canada, to Max Goffman and Anne Goffman, née Averbach.

He was from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had emigrated to Canada at the turn of the century.

He had an older sibling, Frances Bay, who became an actress.

The family moved to Dauphin, Manitoba, where his father operated a successful tailoring business.

From 1937 Goffman attended St. John's Technical High School in Winnipeg, where his family had moved that year.

In 1939 he enrolled at the University of Manitoba, majoring in chemistry.

He interrupted his studies and moved to Ottawa to work in the film industry for the National Film Board of Canada, established by John Grierson.

Later he developed an interest in sociology.

Also during this time, he met the renowned North American sociologist Dennis Wrong.

Their meeting motivated Goffman to leave the University of Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, where he studied under C. W. M. Hart and Ray Birdwhistell, graduating in 1945 with a BA in sociology and anthropology.

Later he moved to the University of Chicago, where he received an MA (1949) and PhD (1953) in sociology.

For his doctoral dissertation, from December 1949 to May 1951 he lived and collected ethnographic data on the island of Unst in the Shetland Islands.

In 1952 Goffman married Angelica Schuyler Choate (nicknamed Sky); in 1953, their son Thomas was born.

Goffman's dissertation, entitled Communication Conduct in an Island Community (1953), was completed under the supervision of W. Lloyd Warner, Donald Horton, and Anselm Strauss.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, in 1954–57 he was an assistant to the athletic director at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

The research Goffman did on Unst inspired him to write his first major work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).

In 1958 Goffman became a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, first as a visiting professor, then from 1962 as a full professor.

Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981).

His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.

Participant observation done there led to his essays on mental illness and total institutions which came to form his second book, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961).

Angelica experienced mental illness and died by suicide in 1964.

Outside his academic career, Goffman was known for his interest, and relative success, in the stock market and gambling.

At one point, in pursuit of his hobbies and ethnographic studies, he became a pit boss at a Las Vegas casino.

In 1968 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and Anthropology, due largely to the efforts of Dell Hymes, a former colleague at Berkeley.

In 1969 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1970 Goffman became a cofounder of the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization and coauthored its Platform Statement.

In 1971 he published Relations in Public, in which he tied together many of his ideas about everyday life, seen from a sociological perspective.

Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association.

His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction.

Another major book of his, Frame Analysis, came out in 1974.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1977–78.

In 1979, Goffman received the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship, from the Section on Social Psychology of the American Sociological Association.

In 1981 Goffman married sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff.

The following year, their daughter Alice was born.

He was elected the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association, serving in 1981–82, but was unable to deliver the presidential address in person due to progressing illness.

In 1982 Goffman died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 19 November, of stomach cancer.

His daughter is also a sociologist.

In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.