ERVING GOFFMAN

Names

By: Marika Saidova

Erving Goffman

• Born in 1922-1982, Mannville, Alberta• Ukrainian Jewish parents

Erving Goffman - education

• Interested in chemistry • Attended St. John Technical High School, then

BSc. At University of Manitoba • Early 1940s – first encounters with sociology

(Dennis Wrong)• 1945 – graduated at University of Toronto• 1949 – 1951 Collecting data for doctoral

dissertation (Island of Unst – Scotland)

Erving Goffman - education

• 1953 – succesfully defended his disertation

Erwing Goffman

• 1958 – Invited to teach at the University of California in Berkley

• 1959 – The presentation of Self, 1961 – Asylum• Progressed rapidly, 1962 full professor• Stock market, Blackjack• 1964 – His wife commited suicide• 1969 The Insanity of Place rumored to be

autobiographical

Erving Goffman• 1968 resigned his position in Berkley • Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and

anthropology at the university of Pennsylvania• Frame Analysis, published 1974, hoped to be

his magnum opus• 1981 - 73rd president of American Sociological

Association, • 1982 - died from Stomach cancer, in

Philadelphia

No matter where you are, you always “put a mask” to get where you want and to be part of something.

“The World is like a stage”

Humans are:

Active and knowledgeable

Devise their own conduct

Guide and control how others see them

Different in social settings than alone

Social Con Artists

DRAMATURGY

The Theatrical Representation of life

Consist from Front Stage and Back Stage

Uses Impression Management as a tool

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”

Erving Goffman:

He was influenced by..

Herbert Blumer Lloyd Warner

Erving Goffman’s work was overly impressionistic

Unsystematic: he mainly focused on small groups

Lack of reliability, operationalization and testing.

Impact that Goffman had on the society

He is considered the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth

century"

Goffman dramatically revised how we think of social life

Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is still a major influence in contemporary social analysis.

References

• goffman&source=bl&ots=i9Ny9n6msT&sig=oBk0I3zLnc0BWaattm0gf_mtEio&hl=en&sa=X&ei=70EkU_OhNcjqswai8oGAAQ&ved=0CG0Q6AEwCQ

• Fine, G. A., & Smith, G. (2000). Erving goffman. (p. 1688). Sage. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/refbooks/Book210765

Thank you for your

attention