The Unfinished Business of Erving Goffman: From Marginalization Up Towards the Elusive Center of American Sociology

Abstract

Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology-and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences-and, especially, his writings. Anecdotal evidence of his "enigmatic" personality (Lemert, 2003), or "bad-boy outrageousness" (Berger, 1986), works as a derailing tactic, leading to unwarranted appraisals of Goffman's personality-and, more importantly, to the neglect of crucial aspects of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, Simmel's treatment of "the stranger" as a social relationship, and Merton's concept of "moral alchemy", are used here to try to make some sense of the mixture of celebration and neglect still surrounding "Goffman". Historical data was gathered in part from the "Erving Goffman Archives'' (Shalin, 2013).

Beyond the “inimitable” Goffman: from “social theory” to social theorizing in a Goffmanesque manner

“…Moreover, Goffman (1981a,b) was critical of attempts by its proponents of one methodology seeking to monopolize the study of the Interaction Order, be that the transcript-driven approach of Conversation Analysis or any other form of data collection and analysis (Ranci, 2021). Strong's (2013, p. 150) gloss on these admonitions is for the student of the Interaction Order not to "get uptight about a single data-source, " because for Goffman, "there was no point in analyzing a single data-source.…”