I must admit I have always been a Goffmanian. Since reading The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, issued by Penguin Books and
Doubleday, Anchor Books, many years ago, his close work on social interaction
has so deeply influenced me that I can attribute to Goffman (1922-82) the
origins of much of my current thought.  I suspect this is also true for many
scholars today. Reading the book under review, Goffman’s Legacy, I
realize much better why.  From the innovativeness of his analytic methods and
theoretical insights to the breadth of his reading (from mainstream academe to
popular culture), Erving Goffman’s work interpenetrates many levels of now
common analytic methods.  Uta Gerhardt, Professor of Sociology at
Heidelberg University, and contributor to this book, for instance, points out
that in Goffman’s seminal work, Frame Analysis (1974), newspaper
clippings were used for the first time in sociological research to mirror the
reality constructions of experiences of  authors of the news story (pp. 154 –
155).  A. Javier Trevino, the editor of Goffman’s Legacy, notes also the
eclecticism of Goffman’s scholarly enterprises:

…in much the same way that he refused to be pinned down to any
particular theoretical tradition in sociology, Goffman employed a number of
research designs, including his own careful ethnographic studies on particular
social settings, informal note taking from radio broadcasts, as well as a
content analysis of ads and news photos. He simply used whatever techniques
afforded him the best information in making or supporting a conceptual point.
(p. 25)

Central to Goffman’s work was his microanalysis of what he called "the
interaction order", that is, the reciprocity that is the process of the
self interacting the social domain. Goffman spent his entire career exploring
the everyday worlds of individuals (starting with his PhD dissertation that was
converted to the book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956));
where, as Trevino puts it,  the individual self is ‘maintained … as a basic
unit of analysis (the other two basic analytical units are the encounter,
the focused interaction in which participants agree to sustain a single focus
of cognitive and visual attention, and the frame [a metaphor where
social life-as-a-picture-frame, gives us the image of a picture (the event) and
the perspective from which it is viewed (the frame)]…’ (p. 14). It is
important, however, to realize that the self is not viewed as a static entity,
but a dynamic social process. The self, according to Goffman, sits at centre of
the interaction order, within the social encounter. The self is fluid, a
self-in-interaction, in elaboration; a transformative process of being.

By seeing the reciprocity of self as interaction, Goffman was able
to reconsider the phenomenological enterprise where experience is viewed as
belonging to individuals-as-units. Instead he, as Gerhardt puts it in her
contribution to Goffman’s
Legacy, could view ‘experience
is socially constructed in a way different from phenomenological thought.  … He
explained how experience of the world emulates forms that convey the "realness"
of the world. Their reality… lies in their compatibility with conventions for narratively
constructing real-life experiences. That these forms are cast as credible
frameworks of presentation makes activities meaningful to both the actors as
well as their audiences.’ (p. 154)

A
conflict of frames of presentation, as illustrated in the disturbing milieu
that is the mental asylum provides, for Goffman, another field of examination.
In both his books Asylums (1961) and Stigma (1963), he follows
with typical microanalysis the disjunction between the selves of patients,
staff and institutional society. In this way his work parallels Gregory Bateson,
Thomas S. Szasz, R. D. Laing, and David Cooper and
other proponents of the antipsychiatric movement. It is significant that this
work was influential in bringing about changes
in mental health policy, in particular those changes leading to the
deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.

Goffman’s
Legacy
consists of twelve original essays, all written by prominent Goffman scholars.
Just as Goffman contributed bountifully to contemporary sociology, this current
volume will benefit scholars of many diverse disciplines. It is a wonderful
resource capturing the influences on Goffman’s  thinking, the parallel
movements of academic thought from the 1950s to 1970s, and his legacy wrought
through current sociological, phenomenological, ethnomethodological, and
feminist thought. Highly recommended.

© 2005 Elizabeth McCardell

Elizabeth
McCardell, PhD, Independent scholar, Australia.

Categories: Philosophical