Erving Goffman – The Sociologist Who Made the Ordinary Feel Strange

Climbing above the world is how some thinkers explain it. The opposite was done by Erving Goffman. When a door refused to open, he crouched down, almost rudely, and observed what people did with their hands, eyes, throats, and little embarrassed laughter. He viewed the actions that we typically write off as insignificant, such as clearing one’s throat, apologizing, and avoiding tight spaces, as the real framework of social interactions. Even now, over forty years after his death in Philadelphia in 1982, reading him gives you the unnerving impression that someone has been surreptitiously recording your party behavior.

Goffman was raised in a Jewish family of Ukrainian descent who eventually relocated to Manitoba, where his father operated a tailoring company. He was born in 1922 in Mannville, a small Alberta town.

That detail seems subtly appropriate for a tailor’s son who would dedicate his professional life to examining the finer points of social appearances. He began his studies in chemistry before straying into the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa, sociology in Toronto, and ultimately the University of Chicago, which at the time was the closest thing to a workshop floor in American sociology.

Of all places, his doctoral work brought him to Unst in the Shetland Islands, where he spent about eighteen months observing islanders deal with the small awkward task of being noticed. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, first published by Edinburgh in 1956 and later reprinted as something akin to a paperback bible for undergraduates, originated from that fieldwork. Although the terms “front stage” and “backstage,” as well as “performance” and “impression management,” seem thinner than what Goffman truly intended, they were introduced to the world in this book.

I believe he was actually debating something more bizarre and humble. According to him, we are not cunning con artists concealing our true identities behind masks. That is not as close to the bone as the mask is. According to Goffman, the self is something that is put together during the performance and supported by others who consent, usually without giving it much thought. This explains why it feels so strange to fall over in public. The journey itself is insignificant. The agreement is in danger.

The same instinct was pushed into darker corners in his later works. It is still painful to read Asylums, which was written after participant observation at a psychiatric hospital in Washington. This is partly due to his icy rage at the ease with which institutions deprive people of the little symbols of humanity, such as their cigarettes and matches. For anyone who was identified as different, stigma had a similar effect. Gender Advertisements focused the same attention on glossy magazines and discovered the architecture of subordination in the tilted head of a woman.

His coworkers recalled him as challenging, occasionally irritating, and sometimes hilarious, rejecting the customary academic courtesies he had devoted his life to deciphering. Despite being too sick with stomach cancer to give the speech in person, he was elected as the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. The great theorist of face-to-face encounters being absent from his own is a subtle irony.

Decades later, the habit of paying attention is what endures. Queues feel different after you’ve read him. Lifts, waiting areas, and the little dance of holding a door are all examples of this. These days, it’s difficult to ignore the rules. In the end, Goffman’s gift was to make the ordinary seem a little uncanny and to imply that, as he once put it, the majority of the real work in the world is done in precisely these ordinary places.