Stigma And Social Identity

Abstract

From Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, pp. 1-19, © 1963. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Erving Goffman, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has tried throughout his career to develop a rich and subtle microsociological theory of face-to-face interaction. In his work he is always simultaneously concerned with the taken-for-granted culture individuals carry with them into interactions (by which they give meaning to what goes on there) and the developing process of social exchange within a situation where individuals simultaneously seek their own ends and accommodate themselves to face-to-face reality. His books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Doubleday-Anchor, 1959), Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), Behavior in Public Places (Free Press, 1963), Interaction Ritual (Doubleday, 1967), Relations in Public (Basic Books, 1971). One other book of particular interest to students of deviant behavior is Asylums (Doubleday, 1961), which analyzes the “moral career” of the mental patient as he is eased out of ordinary society and confined to a mental hospital.