The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (1922-1983) was born in Manville, Alberta, Canada. In 1953, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Goffman was also a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Before his death in 1983, he received the MacIver Award (1961), the In Medias Res Award (1978), and was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Goffman has been noted as the most important American sociological theorist in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1963, Goffman published Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity to illustrate the lives of stigmatized individuals—those who are unable to conform to standards that society calls “normal”. Stigma (1963) was published after two of Goffman’s other works, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Asylums.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman uses face-to-face interactions as his subject of his study. Goffman finds that individuals attempt to give others a certain perception of their self by changing his or her appearance or manner. Asylums, published in 1961, uses the anthropological technique of participant observation to record the lives of mental patients living in a psychiatric hospital. The patients in this hospital experienced what Goffman calls “institutionalization”, in which they are socialized to conform to the “good patient” the hospital, and furthermore society, expects of them. It can be seen, then, how Goffman came upon the idea for Stigma, a book that deals with social interactions between people who are “normal” and those who are stigmatized, compelled by soci...

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... but rather perspectives.” In conclusion, Goffman illustrates how the study of stigma can be used to understand social issues related to deviations and deviance. Deviance exists in all societies. According to Goffman, “Social deviants, as defined, flaunt their refusal to accept their place and are temporarily tolerated in this gestural rebellion, providing it is restricted within the ecological boundaries of their community.” While there are these social norms within society that dictate how the stigmatized and “normals” should interact, deviants act as a paradox to these expectations.
While Goffman adequately explains the interactions between the stigmatized and “normals”, he fails to explain why people respond to the stigmatize in this way.

Works Cited

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.