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monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use spring is here and to celebrate princeton university press is having an incredible sale use the code bloom50 to receive nearly 50 off of every single Princeton University Press print book, ebook, and audiobook. The sale ends May 31st, so go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to New Books in Sociology, a podcast on the New Books Network.
I'm Matt Dawson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow, and today I'm delighted to have as my guest Dimitri Shallon. Dimitri is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he is also Director of the Center for Democratic Culture. And today we are discussing, I'd say, his groundbreaking biography. Irving Manuel Goffman, Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination, which was published by Routledge. Dimitri, welcome to the show. Good to be here.
Ah, man, thanks for inviting me. Ah, we're delighted to have you. So I think a good place to start is, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the study of Goffman and ultimately this biography? I was born in Russia, studied sociology at the Leningrad State University and got my PhD from the Institute of Sociology in Moscow.
my first encounter with golf one goes back to the early nineteen seventies when a group of american students came to russia one of their michael sachs gifted me a book interaction ritual written by an author whose works were not available in translation i did not know then that gothman's family had russian jewish roots But his concept of facework and self-presentation struck me as well-suited for Soviet realities.
Faith does not belong to the agent, Goffman famously claimed. It is on loan from society which can withdraw it from the recalcitrant, leaving those who fail to follow the script embarrassed and ashamed. and its soviet citizens lend their faces to the state construct potomkin villages and project the image of happy campers amid socialist squalor. Now, the dissidents face reprisals. Their very sanity suspect they could be locked in the psychiatric ward and those hard set against the regime.
might be kept there in psychiatric facilities until they give up their delusions and accept the official definition of the situation. Now, you can check Anton Chekhov's famous... word number six to see how far back in Russian history that trope of Potomkin village and controlling your face goes. After reading the book, I thought, well, how can I find more about Irving Goffman? And it was not until 1976 when I emigrated to the United States that I...
got a chance to read more of Goffman's work. That's when I discovered in a famous study he published under the title Asylums, this quote a small group of pet inmates who handle the task of escorting visitors around the institution's potomacan villages i spotted that's where goffman did his a famous study of St. Elizabeth Hospital, and he spotted the team of inmates who would be impressing visitors. What happy campers they are in this mental illness facility.
Now, it took time for me to get my barracks in the United States, improve my English. I enrolled at Columbia University, did my round of graduate work again, and got a PhD from Columbia. My research was primarily in theory and pragmatism and directionism, but around 2007, I started the Irving-Golfman Archives. Among the factors fueling my interest was an emotional affinity I felt with Goffman.
the tendency to use face work as a distancing device signaling the gap between public and private selves reliance on irony rather than direct speech to register disagreement I approach Irving's students. relatives who agreed to sit down for interview, supplied invaluable documents, letters, memoirs, which are posted in Irving Goffman archives. That's how it started.
Yeah, and it's really interesting you mentioned the archives there because I think one thing that's really significant for this book and you detail... in an appendix the irving gothman archives and their centrality to the project and obviously one of the reasons why they're so important is has your detail in there gothman's papers have been sealed to researchers
per his wishes before he died. So I wonder if you could tell listeners a bit about the type of things they might find in the archives. There are assortments of documents. some letters that irving exchanged with various correspondents educational transcripts that i collected from his canada years and time he spent on the
the University of Chicago. There are memoirs written by people at my request and interviews that I conducted, which Probably are not your traditional interview genre, more like dialogues. Sometimes we start with the memoir and then go on to discuss things. It's kind of memo view or intervoir when you start with interview and then go to additional memoirs and so on. I managed with the help of John Laughlin, student of Goffman, to lay a hand.
on the frail transcript of Goffman's talk that he gave, I think, around 1974 on fieldwork. It was in very bad shape, but I processed it with some experts and now it's available in archives so people can. listen to voice of organ golf and i believe that's the only source where you can get some sense of a man in flesh and blood There are some studies of Goffman's works that are available in public domain. I listed them there and made available at Qlik.
Some correspondence which I had with various people like Herbert Bloomer, Herb Gantz. uh yeah and uh michael delaney sharika van who agreed to um uh co-direct the archives and worked with me too should i a few years ago so there are a variety of
documents there, which are widely used by scholars. I see that interviews and documents posted in Goffman Archives, EGE, Irving Goffman Archives, highlighted in various publications yeah and there's a wonderful appendix in the book where you go into more detail on the archives and uh if anyone does read the book i would encourage you to read the appendix sometimes appendices get skipped but it's hugely
influential and after reading the book I went to the archive myself and found myself dipping into various things and realized I could spend hours making my way through the archives. It's a hugely rich and important resource I think.
so let's turn to the book so as you've already detailed dmitry gothman came from a family of primarily russian jews who had then migrated to canada So can you tell us a bit about what you think were the key parts of Goffman's early life, which then influenced his sociological trajectory, which, of course, as you've already mentioned, leads to his going to the University of Chicago to do his graduate work?
yes few tangents i think are worth mentioning irving's parents max and annie gofflin were part of the averbach family network which included four brothers and four sisters who came from russia in the early twentieth century and settled in canada for the most part although two people from that network ended up in the united states The Averbach family stuck together and helped each other through hard times. But there were strains between different branches of the Averbach clan.
winnipeg where most of the family settled in canada was hailed at the time as the north america's largest rail yards operated by the canadian pacific railroad whose tracks split the city into distinct enclaves those left behind on the wrong side of the tracks sometimes felt slighted by the more successful king The division was visible in Winnipeg's south and posh neighborhoods where affluent people lived.
and the humbler environs of the north end with its signature sukirk avenue and inexpensive apartments any averbach's sister fumed about her relatives treating her as she put it as a poor side of the family the other relative says it was all immature with averbach's And Leonard Syme, an important American student of public health, who knew Goffman from his Winnipeg years, remembers
expensive glassware, bone china, prominently displayed in a wealthy household to dramatize family good fortune. Esther Bespris, cousin of Irving, brings up the fancy Books on the coffee table strategically placed in the houses of her upwardly mobile aunts to impress the visitors. So kids sometimes would be prohibited to play with their relatives, with the other cousins on the other side of the tracks.
for a variety of reasons, but kids would sneak in and still play with those even though they were of different social ranks. Irving Goffman, an astute observer, saw these dynamics and, I argue, theorized in his work on the presentation of self and oppression management, some of this important gambits.
he was also aware of the inferior status accorded to jews before second world war in europe canada and the united states i found evidence that anti-semitism was behind irving's desire to distance himself from his jewish roots in the mid nineteen thirties irving when still a teenager
altered his first name from the traditional irving spelled with an i to irving spelled with an e which is why his jewish friends would tease him oh here is coming irving with an e so mandlow it's irving's friend from the chicago years told me that
Irving was a Jew, acting like a Canadian, acting like a Britisher. So there was multiple masks that he was wearing to distance himself from his Jewish troops. And indeed, his son, wrote to me actually irving was anti-semitic i think it's overkill there there's evidence that he took pride in his jewish origin at least later in his life but there were certainly important issues of this kind
Another important factor that I believe impacted Irving's sociological imagination was certain personal stigma that he carried. Irving was just over five feet and two inches. which may explain his heightened sensitivity to certain visual stigma as you would call them this is not an optimal height for a man who was on the prowl, who was very much into dating and such matters. So Goffman's life Beale was compounded by his Jewish origins.
a kind of religious racial stigma, ethnic stigma, and it put him at a disadvantage in a country plagued by anti-Semitism. There's one more influence that I would like to mention that I think impacted his work. This one reflecting his Russian roots. I'm talking about the Potomkin village trope that he used in his research. This trope is part of Russian mythology.
that goes back to the reign of catherine the great that travelled to crimea in seventeen eighty seven to inspect her newly acquired territories with her viceroy and sometime lover gregory potomkin or gregory potomkin as they would say in russia staging festivities for the benefit of her highness and foreign guests to showcase his achievements He would stage well-dressed commoners, happy villagers, military exercises, parades, just to impress your highness and the visitors.
Now, historians disagree whether this show had little substance behind it or whether a real progress was made since 1774 when Russia had wrestled control over Crimea, a region ruled by a succession of Mongol Khans, Cossack warriors, and Ottoman Turks.
I would not want to argue about the realities, what passes historical tests and scrutiny, but it's clear that this trope, Potomac village trope, has an enduring has had an enduring impact on Russian psyche and perhaps also beyond the border of the country.
We're already getting a feel for how much is going into this individual life of Goffman. As you say, it's about the personal, it's about his height, it's about his upbringing, but it also draws upon these questions of Russian mythology and others. I was really taken when I was reading it. I was imagining young Irving noting the fancy China and all these type of things and obviously sparking his sociological imagination, as you say. So obviously, Goffman...
like many of his generation, goes to the University of Chicago for his graduate study. And I was really struck when reading your discussion of Goffman at Chicago by the role of W. Lloyd Warner. who many of the listeners will know. He was a great sociologist on many topics, but most notably class and stratification in the US, which perhaps is most well known.
You detail Woolner and Goffman's relationship alongside other ones, but this is one I want to focus on. And you detail how Goffman's first publication, Symbols of Class Status, fits the tradition that Woolner had mapped out quite well. But his second publication, On Calling the Mark Out, which is perhaps my favourite Goffman essay, I think it's a wonderful piece of work, really suggested Goffman going off in his own direction and blazing his own path.
And this tension between to what extent Goffman was following a path trodden by Warner and so on, or really going his own way, then gets played out in the response to Goffman's PhD thesis. So...
Can you tell us a bit what was so significant about the sociological path that Goffman sets out in his PhD thesis? Yes, and I think that Lloyd Warner... an american anthropologist who mentored goffman at the university of chicago and sponsored his dissertation had a very important but largely overlooked impact on his work as the leader of a research team investigating middle america they published several volumes in a series known as yankee city
where he spotlighted status anxieties in the up-and-coming classes, whose purchasing power exceeds the grasp of cultural subtleties distinguishing upper strata. warner clued goffman to the fact that outwardly mobile individuals tend to assume material status symbols which are associated with a higher than their own circumstances, that those strivers fall short of what it takes to penetrate the higher strata. They lack upper-class, easygoing style and superior demeanor.
This insight comes to the fore in Goffman's first publication, Symbols of Class Status, where he lists six characteristics distinguishing well-bred individuals. This line of thinking, I believe, goes back to Thurston Vabla, who noted at the break of the 20th century that modern society feature situation where the struggle for existence has been transformed into struggle to keep up appearances.
Searite Mills would later call this trade the fetishism of appearance, and Goffman, I argue, continued this line of thought pioneered by Veblen. and goffman's first published article on symbols of class status owed a lot to his mentor lloyd warner there's one a specific vignette that i came across that speaks to goffman's circumstances in this vignette in this story and i think it's worth quoting from on that. He talks about a Jewish resident of the city he studied.
whose uh material circumstances are way buff his cultural capacity to fit into the society this is what warner says when i purchased my red hotsam The only other car like it was owned by Mr. Sacks. I can't stand him. Because in the days when cars were rare and expensive, there was a great feeling against the Jews owning such fine cars. And Mr. Sachs has started as a drug dealer. There was a great feeling against the Jew owning such a fine car.
now warner goes on to comment here is evident a very active resentment against the jews for acquiring class symbol in the form of a fine car out of contacts with their class status. Interestingly, a few years later, Goffman would be driving a Morgan. I don't know how many of your listeners would remember what it is, but Morgan, I think it's still produced like a few dozen cars each year. A handsome roadster costing a fortune.
signifying an income-ring was driving morgan which he did not possess the car belonged to his upper upper-class wife angelica schuyler cho whose bostonian ancestors go back to the mayflower generation Now...
This article, Symbols of Class Status, bears the mark of a student paper, and indeed it was presented in class as a final for one of the classes that Goffman took. It is somewhat formulaic, but his second publication, Cooling the Mark Up, which you mentioned, reveals his own brand of sociological imagination that really stands out.
In this paper, Kaufman observes that society is full of losers, washouts, the downwardly mobile individuals, and there is an institutional pressure to help such people manage their diminished
their visible and invisible stigma. Lest those dealt with the road do cause trouble for... society the problem is almost as acute among impostors one of these and those on the upswing with the checkered past who are anxious to hide potentially stigmatizing information about themselves uh that could result in the loss of face and profound embarrassment now keeping those who met with failure pacified
is not enough, Goffman tells us. The challenge is to make the wretched sustain workable interaction with the world, to minimize the possibility that, I quote, the mark outwardly accept his laws. withdraws all enthusiasm. goodwill, and vitality from whatever he is allowed to maintain. Now, the downside of face loss is a potentially serious problem for an organization and for society at large.
where the macro-sociological implications of Goffman's theories come to the fore, perhaps for the first time. This is what he says on the subject. When an employee turns sour... The interests of the organization suffer. Every executive has the problem of sweetening his workers. They must not come to feel that they were slowly being cooled out. This is one of the functions of granting periodic advancement in salary and status, of profit sharing, of giving employee at home an anniversary present.
a similar problem a government faces in times of crisis one must maintain the enthusiastic support of the nation's disadvantaged minorities for these populations can feel they are being cooled down and react by turning sour. Now, what happens in the face-to-face interactions, according to Goffin, reverberates through society at large. Society is a big con. Some are losers. Some are winners.
in this never-ending game the socially defeated must go on mingling with the socially thriving or as Goffman memorably quipped, the dead are sorted out but not segregated and continue walking among those who are still living. This is a rather stark indictment of ubiquitous struggle for status and prestige. Now, let me go very briefly to Goffman's dissertation because that connects to his relationship with Lloyd Warner.
when goffman was sent to shetland isles by warner to write his thesis he was supposed to have examined class differences among the lines developed by warner and his colleagues that didn't work out goffman ended up exploring communications among the crafters at a great length to which they go to minimize class differences avoid embarrassing each other maintaining comity in public
and sustaining what Goffman calls interaction order. After Irving published his paper on class symbols, he dropped the issue of class difference pretty much altogether.
I wonder if the subject was too sensitive for him personally, as he was advancing to a starship with stardom from a very low... beginnings so his professional success perhaps diverted his attention to other matters yeah and you detail how that plays out in his dissertation defense where these sort of competing agendas and expectations of what gothlan uh should be doing really play out in a really interesting way but he gets his thesis uh
As you detail in there, there's perhaps some last-minute interventions by Hughes to help him get his fetus, but he gets it. And then, of course, after the defense... for graduate students before and into the current day comes the job hunt and this is especially significant for government given as you mentioned he's married and also he's got a son by this point he ends up at the national institute for mental health
a position and influence will return to later on but this period also sees the publication of his first and perhaps his still most read book presentation of self in everyday life
And obviously lots of things have been written about the presentation of self. But I wanted to pick up on an argument you're making there that I found absolutely fascinating, which is where you talk about two... to this point uncommented upon influences on that book and one is eric from and the other one is the russian playwright and you'll have to correct my pronunciation if i get it wrong here dimitri nikolai erinov
Nikolai Yevrenov. Yevrenov. Yevrenov. Nikolai Yevrenov. So why were these two writers so significant to that text, do you think? The presentation of self in everyday life is called from Sinti best known and most cited work. goffman was influenced by a number of authors they were discussed by scholars at length but two of them i think largely escaped attention one is eric from a german-born theoretician of modernity and fascism the other is a russian playwright and theatre theorist nicolai
in nineteen forty one from published the book escape from freedom where he laid bare the anxieties and hopes of the post-war era reeling from the horrors of fascism and planted doubts about the ability of humans to stand fast in the face of totalitarian oppression. the goal as gov azofrom presented for himself in this book was to understand the attraction which fascism exercises upon great nations Germany was one of those countries at the time, of course, during the Second World War.
Second World War. And now we see other nations with proto-fascist tendencies who develop along the path outlined by Erich Fromm. So for Fromm, a modern man with all the advantages earned faces a dilemma. Modern man is a language that Fromm uses, language of the period, we'll say men and women, but let me follow if he's on verbiage. So modern man... kind of has to maintain personal autonomy, but also collaborate with fellow human beings in a joint quest for sane existence.
There are two extremes that need to be avoided here, but hard to do so. Sliding toward the individualistic extreme, the autonomous modern agent, risk falling into despair of solipsism and loneliness, as Fromm calls it. The other pole carries the risk of succumbing to authoritarian powers from uprages. What we witness in this historical juncture around 1939 was the lonely crowd of individuals, to use the term popularized by David Risman, craving recognition.
and afraid to take a stance which may expose them to public disapproval the agent of mass culture experiences an unbearable feeling of isolation and powerlessness And this in turn leads to psychic desire to escape, as Fromm points out, driving mass culture-saturated men and women into the arms of authoritarian mobs. Market mechanisms exacerbate the tendency toward conformism.
the desire to consume conspicuously in a way affirming group solidarity to display a character agreeable and pleasing to everyone and here is how from articulates this inside since man cannot leave doubting his identity he must find the identity not in reference to himself but in the opinion of others. His prestige, status, success are a substitute for a genuine feeling of identity. This situation makes him utterly dependent on the way others look at him.
and forces him to keep up the rule in which he once had found success. um that's from stake on modernity and the discontent and i think is inside uh perhaps uh is still very much relevant in our time now this is what german intellectuals witness Hitler's fascism, bequeathed to American critics like David Risman, C. Wright Mills, William White, Alvin Goldner, who laid the ills of American society at the door of the massacre.
culture with its signature type of other directed man organization man white collar man lonely crowd this would be the terms to my mind very much modeled after what uh Eric from Outline. So the agent dwelling in the brave new world is bent on selling a favorable appearance of oneself.
to other middle class members, equally obsessed with appearances and anxious to please extant powers. The Einstein dopsters, as Riesmann wrote, can do nothing to change politics. He craves to be... the inside to join the inner circle and since he cannot change the others who dominate his political attention His character leads him to manipulate himself and his identity in order not to change the others, but to resemble them.
mill sounded similar alarms when he told his readers that all men do not naturally want to be free white-collar man has no culture to lean upon except the contents of mass society that his isolated position makes him excellent material for synthetic molding at the hands of popular culture, print, film, radio, television. that the new man must smile, be personable.
standing behind the counter or waiting in the outer office that in the mass society personality often actually replaces skill and professionalism as a requirement A personable appearance is emphasized as being more important in success and advancement than experience, skill, and intelligence.
That's what, Mills says, leads to self-alienation. And Alvin Goldner, to conclude, conjured up a pungent picture of the human agent beset by the ravages of modernity, the new bourgeois world of oppression management, which is inhabited by anxious, other-directed men. sweaty palms who live in constant fear of exposure by others and of inadvertent self-betrayal the sting of this attack incidentally was directed against irving goffman
The art of impression management that Goldner cites is very indicative here. There's a funny tale which I don't mention in the book where Irving and Alden Goldfern are discussing book ventures with the publisher. And Golder complains that they really treat us like commodities. That's what they do. And Goffman says, that's all right, as long as they treat us as expensive commodities. So there was this dynamic. The two had a very close relationship. I did at some point. Gullner left in the house.
that Goffman and his wife owned when Goffman went to Harvard for his sabbatical. Now, the presentation of self in everyday life... to my mind observed this visage of mass society in which people curate their public persona to ensure that their actions fit in with the ceremonial order and prove their moral fibre
or as goffman put it as performers we are merchants of morality the very obligation profitability of appearing in steady moral light forces one to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage this line of reasoning i believe sheds light on the populism driving politics in our own times. Certain proto-fascists desire to be on the inside, to join the crowd, to expose your enemies and smite them of the face of the earth. Now another precursor, and I understand I'm getting a bit
long-winded, so if you want to stop me, feel free to do so. Another precursor of Goffman's dramaturgical theory is Nicolai Yevreno, an early 20th century playwright, actor and critic. theater director, and an author who developed a philosophy of theatre that had an impact on luigi pirantella's drama of multiple realities on antonin artaud's theatre of absurdity of cruelty
Now, Goffman rarely spoke about his Russian roots. All the more important is a testimony from Tom Burns, a Scottish scholar and a friend of Goffman, who said that goffman once confided to him i quote that being a jew and a russian jew at that explains a lot about me Now, Burns didn't put much stock in this uttering, and indeed how many Russian Jews who immigrated display Goffman sensibilities. And yet, to my mind, it is a very important acknowledgment on the part of Goffman.
it's since that goffman read nikolai reynov's treatise the theatre in life where the author developed a theory of stage management precursor of impression management as i believe it is as a central feature not only of theatrical but also everyday life. the reign of published a series of books fleshing out his perspective on life as self-dramatization an ongoing performance conducted for others as much as for oneself
A collection of his essays was published in New York in 1927. It made an impression on theater goers where some of um uranus place for a stage Goffman, indeed, probably was aware of this book and read it as a number of his colleagues. That's what Goffman's students, Marvin Scott and Stanford, Stanford layman suggests. Now, the theater in life, this is how the book is translated from Russian into English. I believe better translation would be life as theater.
offers a panoramic view of dramatic performances permeating nature and grounding humanity's collective well-being. Nimi Cry is ubiquitous in the plant world. where little creatures assume the likeness of insects, turf, little drive, sticks, etc. The acting flower pretends to be dead when it is alive, sterile while it is prolific. absent from the scene
though in reality it is present. Cat and mouse are trying to fool each other. Once the former has released or hold on her little victim, the latter pretends most dramatically and skillfully to be dead.
the cat also plays a role absolutely indifferent to the mouse sitting at the distance she licks her paw yawns looks around but as soon as the little mouse uh little actress uh moves um feigned carelessness disappears the cat drums up takes to his heels the cat throws off the mask and catches the mouse and then
the show starts all over again. Maths playing. It's on Role playing. It's on Max and so does the cat. And here's a very interesting observation by uh you've read enough that i believe makes its way into um bates and famous uh theory of frame analysis this is how Irina describes the dogs playing with each other.
here is a dog extending the invitation to play made in a very characteristic manner with legs wide apart a position well adopted to facilitate the rapid retrojection of the body in flight the other dog in the meantime is a fine picture of hypocrisy. It looks about with complete indifference, as if the whole affair were nothing to it. And that's when the fun begins as the leader springs forward, though not at full speed, and the other dog gives chase with enthusiasm.
This is kind of frame analysis, invitation to play, or message is a play. This is what I think Gregory Bateson was using. Now, look at the dinner table, writes Ivrainov. a deceptive picture of on-stage merrymaking. For what could be more simple and natural?
for a man than to sit at the dinner-table and dine simply without ceremony in the company of other men the fact is however that that which a well-bred man calls naturalness is quite a science necessitating long years of training, experience and education, a role which becomes a second self.
and look at the way you look at the mirror says urinov when you mimic the appearance of greatness attractiveness imposing earnestness decision and so on what we want to see in the mirror is not objective truth but flattery, consolation, and encouragement.
or check the photo albums examine the postures the smiles the family groups or the faces looking out of the window overgrown with ivy the figures outside the house fans those young men riding horses or playing tennis the rolled-up sleeves the disheveled hair those girls wearing peasant costumes those
ladies fanning themselves wearing evening gowns and displaying with nonchalant smiles and more of their legs than anybody would care to look at. What a variety of democratic, aristocratic, philosophical and other poses and masks. And what a wonderful faithfulness to the principle of theatricality in all. Just as Goffman intimated stage management, or in Goffman's word, impression management,
is at the heart of social reality. Stage management means, as we understand it, the reduction of all things. That's again wording of Nikola Ivanov, Nikola Ivanov, of all things seen on stage to a common denominator.
the sort of standard style standard temperament standard taste standard rhythm it fuses the play the actors participating in it the stage setting illustrating it and lots of other variegated things connected with it into a harmonious theatrical whole it is that which grounds, months of meticulous analysis,
with the coveted synthesis which makes the scenic chaos crystallize into logos. The Potomacan village sensibilities are palpable in the reign of writings and I think somehow or other directly and directly And directly, they made their way into Goffman's arm imagery and theories. Yeah, I was laughing to say that, Dmitry, and it just made me think that...
It goes to what we were saying in the previous topic we were talking about, where even in these influences, you can see the brilliance of Goffman, where it is that... micro level the theater in life and the macro level of questions of fascism and what it is to exist in modernity etc so we can see how those two influences indicate the richness of gothman's sociological
project that he brought out incredibly well there and obviously one of the things that happens as goffman is publishing a presentation of self in everyday life is he gets a new job and he's hired by the sociology department at the university of california berkeley where his former chicago teacher herbert bloomer has been asked to establish the department and is in the process of creating what would for a period become perhaps the most significant sociology department in the states and you detail
in the book how Goffman was not that well received by his colleagues at Berkeley initially and also collect some recollections from his students which I found very interesting to read. So can you tell us a bit about what Goffman's experiences at Berkeley were?
yes once erring defended his ph d thesis he couldn't find a job he was really craving a job in academia but jobs were very scarce at the time few of his buddies really had good time landing a job howie becker a friend of irving who had published several articles and had extensive teaching experience graduated from the University of Chicago with a PhD even before Goffin couldn't land a job.
Incidentally, what is not known that Howie Becker was going to join Goffman at the National Institute of Mental Health.
uh there were some prospects of working as a resident saint elizabeth gospel hospitals but actually um everett hugh discouraged becker from joining off one of these facilities he found he would be better off continuing his work on survey at the university of illinois in urbana Now, Goffman landed his first job in 1955, a position of research scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health Laboratory of Social Environmental Studies.
They worked there for two years before accepting her with Blumer's invitation to join sociology department. The circumstances surrounding Blumer's invitation are fuzzy.
bloomer did not preserve his correspondence and left very little by way of archives a golfin by contrast held on to his correspondence but sealed it before his death no one can get access to his papers as that was his wish what we know is that goffin was brought to berkeley in nineteen fifty seven as a visiting assistant professor on a temporary assignment with an understanding that he would be considered
for a regular tenure-track appointment if he continues to show scholarly productivity and an aptitude for teaching. Impressed as Bloomer was with Goffman's abilities, he had reservations about his scholarship and even stronger ones about his personality.
bloomer co-taught with this visiting lecturer ervin goffman an interclass he as an adviser to prentice hall had a hand in placing goffman's manuscript stigma with the publisher all this in addition to the fact that goffman's owed bloomer his first academic job may explain why goffman never criticized bloomer publicly soon after e g came to berkeley Bloomer began to download the wisdom of granting him tenure, or perhaps even granting him a tenure-track assistant professorship.
There's testimony from Marvin Scott and Alice that Bloomer indeed found Goffman as being just so many catchy phrases, as you put it. shriekavan recalls that philip zelsnick another goffman's colleague spoke of goffman's as a hollywood sociologist marty libson queried jerry skolnick who is this guy is he any good Roy Turner, a student mentored by Goffman, recalls that...
there was an obvious feeling in the department that goffman's work was subjective goffman must have gotten used to hearing that in his early days the sentiment did not bode well for the future a year after he was appointed on this temporary position goffman's performance came up for review his colleagues had to decide whether to convert his temporary appointment into a regular one and promote him to associate professorship with the prospect of tenure
the faculty had doubts about the young scholar's work and his suitability for workly sociology programs some found his unconventional theories problematic and his record of department citizenship
Goffman didn't always appear for faculty meetings, was late, didn't take active part in governing department and so on. Now, department chair... at the time sent out inquiries from various scholars asking to assess goffman's work and scholarship especially from the standpoint of its theoretical significance And he got quite impressive letters.
of recommendation. One came from David Schneider, or David Schneider rather, an anthropologist who taught at Berkeley for a while before moving to Chicago program. He was a close friend of Goffman for Road, I call it. I do not know of a leading person, either in the United States or near, who approaches Goffman. either in quality or in quantity of published output or in intellectual stature now tell it's good to have
friends and right places who could write letters of recommendation of that kind. So he got quite significant support. So at least for the time being, Goffman was able to continue in the department. Now, we should bear in mind that Goffman was exceptionally prolific. In 1961, he published two books. One was Asylums. right on inmates and management of spoiler identity the other was encounters
Two more books came out a couple years later, Stigma, Behavior in Public Places. In 1961, the American Sociological Association bestowed on the emerging scholar the Maciwa Award for presidency. representation of self. So for all their reservations, Berkeley faculty was not the one to argue with success and productivity. So the vote for Goffman's tenure was favorable. In 1963, he was awarded full tenure.
and one of those books i wanted to turn to now uh but as you say he started to churn out which is asylums and Most accounts of this book link it back to Goffman's time at the National Institute for Mental Health, which we've already mentioned. And that's obviously true. That was hugely significant for the fieldwork that Goffman undertakes at St. Elizabeth's for the book.
In your biography, you have this fascinating chapter entitled Coping with Madness, during which you discuss the influence of Goffman's wife, who's already come up, who was Angelica Schola Goffman-Choate, or Sky, as she was known. Skye had significant mental health problems and sadly ended up taking her own life. So can you tell us a bit about the role of Skye in Goffman's changing views towards the topic of mental health?
angelica schuyler choate goffman that would be her full name once she married irving barely anyone at berkeley knew about schuyler's history of depression that had brought her to the attention of psychiatrists at bethesda where her husband did the inaugurated st elizabeth hospital
However, her colleagues at Berkeley spotted Sky's tendency to get overexcited about a job, and she was into everything when she was working at the service center. And then after being overexcited, she would drop out of sight. singing to depression. No one was more aware of the problem than Skylar or as she preferred to be called Sky herself. She was in treatment.
for most of her life she knew her family history gave her reasons to pay close attention to her mental health sky's uncle harry crosby founder of black sun press an upper-class socialite and a poet who spent the last decade of his life as an expatriate in paris committed suicide in at the age of thirty-one with his mistress lying by his side in a hotel room with a bullet in her head that was a front page news the scandalous life of death of harry
discussed on both sides of the atlantic as a cautionary tale of what awaits bohemian boozing opium-smoking rebels snodding high society's gentile norms and moors much less is known about the life and death of Henry's sister, Catherine Schuyler Crosby. mother of schuyler future golfmann's wife catherine put a gun to her head and ended her life in nineteen fifty nine few years before schuyler's death uh from suicide um now uh catherine was married to robert bernard choate
I'm sorry, to Robert Bernard Choate, who was a publisher of the Boston Herald. Now... We don't know much what happened with Catherine, why she decided to end her life. Some biographers of Henry Crosby think that she was influenced by the... by the example of her brother but i think evidence suggests that there are problems that run in the family you know for generations of some mental health issues suicides
and so on. Indeed, Tom Goffman, Erving's son, wrote to me that there are Congo River of mental illness going back for centuries in that Westonian part of the family. Now, schuyler difficulties kindling to various causes none
in and of itself sufficient to explain her resolve to kill herself her marriage to irving started inauspiciously sky had gotten pregnant married the father of her child when the couple was not ready to tie the knot the burdens of parenthood fell especially hard on the shoulders of goffman's wife
accumulated enough credit at the university of chicago where she studied alongside goffman to continue with her ph d but she had to put her dissertation on hold and assume parental and household responsibilities for which she had been ill-prepared by her high society parents. who had frowned on her marriage to someone they thought to be out of her league, an aspiring scholar with no clear job prospect and a person of Jewish descent to boot.
Now, Schuyler applied to Chicago to renew her graduate work, to enroll there and finish her dissertation not long before she decided to end her life.
She got no response from graduate program, which might have figured somewhat in her decision to end her life. So on April 27, 1964, schuyler goffman got into her nineteen sixty three jaguar xxe convertible drove herself to the richmond st raphael bridge abandoned her car midway across the span and leaped to her death from the upper deck of the bridge the obituary published next day in the auckland indicated that Angelica Schuyler-Golfman, age 35, became the second known suicide victim
who jumped off the richmond san rafael bridge not san francisco famous golden bridge but very different place which people usually overlook they believe that it happened in different location She left a note, in fact two notes, one to her son, Tom, saying I'm sorry, the other to her attorney, directing him to her box of jewelry. At this point, Goffman's outlook on mental illness began to change.
in behavior in public places he still bristled at the label mental illness and decried the power to stigmatize explaining that patient classified as regressed, seems without fail to give the impression that he is utterly different from ordinary human beings a feeling goffman notes incidentally that sociologists are familiar with from the studies of caste and social class
in nineteen sixty four he published a paper mental symptoms in public order where he still continued to express the notion that symptomatic behavior of mental illness could be seen as a form of social misconduct in the sense that emily post and amy vanderbilt recognized the throne now that was a view of social psychiatry enthusiasts such as melvin corn for instance who was goffman's friend at national institute of mental health and who suggests that goffman take on
and theories of mental illness actually reflected his wife's experience. He was adamant about that. And everybody he thought who knew at the Institute believed that as well. Now, Melvin himself... was a theorist of schizophrenia as a social phenomena, especially common in lower social strata. where parents do not properly orient and educate and socialize the youngsters who are not prepared to cope with the complex realities of adulthood. A theory that was controversial that didn't quite pan out.
later on. But he was even stronger, Melvin Cohn was even stronger opponent of traditional view of psychiatrists than Irving Goffman. fast forward to nineteen sixty nine where goffman published a paper the insanity of place several things leaked from the pages of this piece published in the journal psychiatry and then reprinted a couple years ago in the book relations in public. The author does not mention any of his prior work on mental illness, not even asylums.
Gone are scarecrow quotes quotation marks surrounding references to sickness, mental illness, psychosis, and their cognates. Without trace of irony, Goffman refers to sick persons.
while painting the broad-brush picture of a family devastated by the unpredictable behavior of a disturbed member. The reader gets an about the patient who is crazy, a life in which a family member behaves himself insanely, the household which can become a hospital away from the hospital, the insanity of place which offers
offers no escape to the family coping with mentally hobbled member. Now, if you take kind of this last... passage from this article the insanity of place published and written and published a couple of years after his wife committed suicide, he says, the manic is someone who does not refrain from intruding where he's not wanted.
where he will not be accepted or accepted only at the loss of his valiant status he does not contain himself in the territories allotted to him he overreaches he does not keep his place the last statement is a stunning reversal of what goffman argued in asylums where the refusal to keep one's place signified longing for freedom marking the unwillingness to submit to repressive environment.
Now the refusal to keep one's place is treated as a sign of insanity. A person who doesn't respect family hierarchy, who refuses to attend to one's duty, who hobnobs with uncredited others who embarrasses status distinctions is certifiably crazy. Look from the biocritical perspective and perspective of as i call it that's a theoretical perspective that i work in the evolution of goffman's views on mental illness makes sense in asylums
he went out of his way to normalize aberrant conduct and undercount the notion of mental illness, casting symptomatic behavior as situational improprieties. The horror of total institutions exposed by Goffman and his colleagues made the public receptive to the argument and willing to give communal care a chance. As Skye's affliction grew more severe, goffman must have experienced cognitive dissonance
between the constructionist view of sanity he took at the outset and the need to help relieve his wife's suffering. It is hard to imagine the author of Asylums recommending institutionalization. for his wife, though he knew she urgently needs psychiatric care. The insanity of place is as much a scholarly disquisition as a plea to everybody to hear what he had to cope with.
he told several colleagues incidentally and students to read this piece in sanity of place if they want to understand what happened in his household it is a message in the bottle i believe a chance to present Goffman's side of the story. But his wife also had a story to tell, which unfortunately never has been told and which I try to kind of recount. She didn't write it herself, but in broad outlines, we could glean it from the bits and pieces collected in Goffman archives.
angelica schuylerchut goffman was an intellectual suffocated by an oppressive household desperate to carve a professional niche for herself shunned by her parental family condescended by berkeley faculty which put down women who refused to keep their places skye grappled with family chores with little help from her husband who was incensed by the disturbance of rank, as he put it, his wife's professional aspirations occasion. She was mad at the world.
that saw women as boosters of men's careers that's incidentally phrased at dorothy smith who wrote dissertation with irving goffman who says that goffman's wife not her mentor goffman helped her with the dissertation And this is what I think was happening to Skylar. So she was mad at the world that saw women as boosters of mess. men's careers and who were left out to cope with the psychological, marital, parental chores and pressures on their own.
her manic depressive tendencies which were real exacerbated the situation the theories of boffman that he spawned initially related to mental illness as situational impropriety tied the hands of the parties involved turning sky's suicide into a cruel coda to her husband's assent as an authority in the field of social psychiatry so this is in more than few words i believe what happened uh uh with goffman's theories of psychiatry and rule that skyler plays
Yeah, and as you say, Dimitri, you know, Sky Story is an incredibly sad one, but you've done really well in telling us about her and what she did. I was remembering when you were saying there's a bit in your book where you quote Goffman as right and someone says, I think it's stigma. I think they're finishing stigma because we are finishing stigma. He doesn't say I'm finishing stigma. He says we are finishing stigma and you.
That's right. He was brilliant editor and he was a brilliant stylist and writer. I unearthed her master thesis that she wrote in 1950. where she uses a sample of high Bostonian informants to study high-class patterns of personality, which incidentally cites Irving Goffman's own thesis. You bring out her influence very well as an editor, collaborator, and first reader on Gotham's work on her own contributions. So shifting somewhat.
We've already discussed Goffman's two most famous fields, like Shetland for his PhD dissertation and then St Elizabeth's for asylum. But you hold up a third major field site of Goffman's, and that's Las Vegas and its casinos. This period of what, when I was starting my studies, was called Goffman in Vegas, was often held in a bit of secrecy and a bit of mystery, partly since we only really got the one article.
the government published he publishes this article called where the action is which is a wonderful piece of research but he didn't publish a monograph on his work in las vegas which it seems like from what you detail here he told various people his condom at some point But the account you give is amazing and we could talk about it forever. It includes possible mob connections. It includes Goffman learning to count cards. It includes his work as a blackjack dealer.
It includes him perhaps being taught a lesson, quote, by local thugs until eventually being banned from Vegas as both a player and a dealer, a blackjack, which was his game. partly i was amazed by the fact he said he couldn't play poker because he couldn't do he couldn't keep a poker face he couldn't do impression management which i thought was hilarious so as i say we could spend ages uh discussing the twists and turns here but i guess a good question to ask you simply
Why do you think Goffman was so interested in Gambler? Yes. Now, how did Goffman develop an interest in card playing? several tangents come to mind and can be mentioned his father played cards with his buddies i think it was poker and was very good at it his uncle was a karchar and professional bookie who earned a special mention in the averberg family reunion album and he was a frequent visitor to winnipeg and one of the favorite among the eight brothers and sisters. Incidentally, he...
had a remarkable physical resemblance to Irving. Just as a physical type, I would say that they seem to come from the same stock. Now... we need to bear in mind also that games of chance have a special place in the jewish tradition while tolerating games of skills played for their own sake jewish law condemns games of chance mishna repudiated dice players as people who waste time rather than do their duty
of repairing the world. Baiting on the chance outcome when denied to gaining material advantage wasn't a crime in the Talmudic era, but it was judged a sinful act. and treated harshly sanhedrin disqualified known gamblers from taking the witness stand in the court of law rabbits condemned a skilful gambler comparing one to a robber who may be banned from the community and refused burial service in the vicinity.
a wife on an incurable gambler could petition for divorce according to jewish law when jewish immigrants indulged in gambling it was in the context of their lost religious moorings and the bitter intergenerational conflicts. I recite several examples of famous gamblers.
who would come from the Jewish talk. Moe Dallas is one of them. Moe Dallas, who incidentally, by some reports, helped Goffman to land the drop-in as a casino dealer in Las Vegas. So, um, the rapid secularization of jewish immigrants and legalization of gambling in the united states boosted the process by removing the stigma attached to wagering
In the early 20th century, gambling emerged as a favorite pastime among many immigrants, including Jewish immigrants, who had reached North America and settled in Lower East Side, in New York. city in chicago slums or in canada's manitoba now erring was well acquainted with the gangster lore he collected stories about jewish gamblers I took his friends to eateries frequented by reputed mobsters and delighted in popular reunion stories about gamblers.
Now, there's a bit of a puzzle as to why Goffman, after he's done research on gambling, never published a book. He mentioned it several times. In the interview he gave in Times Magazine and Strategic Interaction, two years before he died, he gave an interview to Werhoven, John Werhoven, when he said that he's still working on the book. never published it. Now, so how did he came to learn the game and practices? Researchers tie some of Irving's concept to his experience.
as a card player which favors those skilled in reading face work of the parties involved when irving took up cards and earnest is unknown but the lifelong interest started at home In the University of Chicago, he was known as a brilliant card player and brilliant researchers at the same time. Ironically, Goffman, and you mentioned that, struggled to keep a poker face.
Bill Smelser recollected in his interview he gave for EGA about the pastime that he was engaged in where some of the people from berkeley irving polyavin henry miller bill kornhauser hal wilensky david matza ernst baker and goffman would assemble to play poker Most of the time, Goffman lost money. And it's interesting that, according to Smeltzer, he couldn't keep his face, couldn't keep his poker face.
he would joke that if gothman were dealt as much as a pair of deuces his hands would begin to tremble his face would begin to flush and everybody knew something was going on with his carts Given his work and his pride and his insight into manipulation of human situation, pressure management, one would expect Goffman to be very much Mr. Kuhl. That was not the case, that smells and noises. Now, Goffman's essay on gambling was based on his fieldwork in a casino.
some time in nineteen sixty one according to letters that are unnerged that he exchanged with his mentor everett hughes e g obtained a dealer's license he
applied to be trained in the casino dealer school and got a license and landed a job at a casino. It didn't last long as he was caught counting cards it didn't help that his wife teamed up with him to play black jack i don't have firm evidence but it's possible that as goffman was dealing his wife was sitting there as an innocent sort of participant and played the game now goffman also teamed up with ira sisson a berkeley statistician
After the two were caught counting cards, they were blacklisted and banned from casinos. Both men knew the basic system for card counting developed by Edward Thorpe. I contacted Edward Thorpe, who told me that Goffman contacted him. and wanted to get some fine points on counting cards. So we have firsthand evidence that Goffman was skilled in that type of pastime. There are reports that Irving Goffman landed his first job.
in lasvega casino via a distant personal connection to mo dalitz a famous notorious cleveland syndicate boss and later owner of a casino uh in las vegas i met with susan dallas mo's daughter and we talk about this intriguing connection we we will not go into this as there are more important tangents to be considered Now, the ball game that Goffman threw himself in was fateful to use his own language.
It was an epitome of what he defined as an event that spills over the boundary of the moment and contaminates parts of the individual's life to come. That's what faithfulness means. Something you do right now that spills over the boundaries of the situation and affects you perhaps for the rest of your life is troubles were not confined to gambling Venice.
one day las vegas sheriff had called the university of chicago about i quote someone called golfman irving height five feet two inches The man, Sheriff complained, said he was a sociology professor at Berkeley while engaging in some nefarious activity. It's possible that Goffman spent a day or two in jail and might have been roughed by local people associated with underworld.
mob activities and such we don't know enough to say definitively but he certainly was engaged there is a seminar that goffman gave after uh his casino job was terminated a seminar at berkeley when he proclaimed that this is an evil industry and he wants to have nothing to do with this anymore. and some of the students present said what golfman wouldn't want to do with the industry like that he spent his life studying such industry why is he so scared what is he scared about he has reason to be
I tried to document in this paper. So Irving Goffman's enduring contribution to the study of gambling. owes much to his determined effort to breach the wall between betting practices and entertainment values and risk-taking in society at large. Goffman went against common wisdom by applying the same standard to all areas of life marked by uncertainty and hazards. Across the social domains, he insisted, humans face risks and opportunities, balance chance and skill.
and cut a figure bespeaking moral qualities to be true there is a difference between gaming and as i understand it gaming is a challenge enjoyed for its own sake gambling associated with betting a value on a chance outcome and calculated risk-taking in society at large won hazards to fulfil an obligation
or get ahead in life nevertheless there are continuities notably when it comes to fair play and cheating by bringing into one continuum risk-taking and all its sundry forms Goffman underscored the fact that honorable qualities are found among professional gamblers just as shady practices abound among risk-takers in legal occupations in businesses and companies. Correct are scholars who maintain that Goffman
Leaves gambling out of the moral abyss into which successive generations of commentators and reformers have consigned it. Now, I would... Just mention perhaps one more point here. The government's treatment of virtues entailed in gambling, masculinity, keeping your face, integrity, gallantry.
are very much masculinist virtuos. He extolled in his work on gambling ethos, that really shows sexist biases, which Goffman embodies in his own conduct, whether he was overcoming for his small build, smarting from depredations he suffered as a jewish boy or reacting to a hostile reception from his colleagues goffman was prone to take unreasonable chances and fight back
where it was unnecessary and counterproductive. For Goffman, character and manliness are the same thing. He says that virtues of Gemmler are not available to women. where women could show certain ability to gamble and put the show on is sex that's where they kind of are known to engage in some risk-taking other than that It is a man's domain. And I then show how he transitioned from that sexist view, essentially.
of gambling masculinity and so on, to much more sensitive attitudes toward women in his work on gender construction. Yeah, and we'll come to that question of gender in a minute because it takes up a really fascinating... chapter in your book but to continue the the temporal narrative a little bit just as Goffman is finishing up this field work in the casino
He returns to a Berkeley Department of Sociology that is facing increasing splits around questions of pseudo-activism, but also on questions of what sociology should be. There's a beginning of Exodus and Goffman is one of those people who leaves. He eventually ends up at the University of Pennsylvania where he accepts the title of, quote, Professor of Anthropology and Psychology.
no sociology in there and here we see the beginning of goffman both distancing himself and perhaps also to some extent being distanced from sociology. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about what was it that led Goffman away from sociology? Right. Goffman's relationship with the discipline of sociology which awarded him a terminal degree phd was always fraught he has and always has had his admirers but mainstream sociologists and movers and shakers in the discipline
worm bill and about his brand of sociological imagination reviews that his work garnered in professional journals were quite quite mixed here's an example eugen wiseman publishing review of Stigma in the American Journal of Sociology, which is kind of exemplary in how backhanded compliments given to Goffman were. I quote, is an irritating work it is clearly padded about twice as long as it should be the style is too deforcish there is much that is too cute and only near relevant
Too much schmaltz and not enough liver. That must be a Jewish writer who writes this. There's much that is too cute, as I said, and not relevant enough. Now, in spite of these things, the problems tackled by Goffman are important, and what he says about them is insightful. Now, imagine being Goffman. You just put out this original work and people tell you it's just too long, it's not relevant, it's too de force-ish and so on.
Would you be enamored with the discipline that assesses your work this way? I would say that even friendly reviews, even those written by his teacher, teachers like Bloomer, like Hugh, were kind of tarred. Princess Everett Hughes wrote in his Review of Relations in Public that the author has limited the area or rather it was Bloomer, I think, who said that Goffman limited the area of face-to-face interaction by excluding the vast mass of human activity falling outside of the pressure management.
And Hughes called... Goffman's brand of ethnography, nosy, and suggested that Goffman doesn't pay enough attention to methods through which he attained his data and urged him to do more work along the line of pointing how he transitioned from face-to-face encounter to macro sociological journalizations. Now, Goffman was a prolific writer, as I mentioned. His work began to attract attention at the universities in the country.
e.g. negotiated a deal with several places including university of chicago which surprisingly wanted him on board at some point university of california los angeles He settled at the University of Pennsylvania, which afforded him a named professorship.
with sparse teaching duties affiliation with the anthropology department and an office at the university museum of old places delheims a famous linguist played a lead role in bringing e g to pan in the fall of nineteen sixty eight government was appointed the benjamin franklin professor of anthropology and psychology indeed no mention of sociology here his office located at the university museum underscored the
problematic relationship he had with sociology colleagues who resented his high salary, no regular teaching load, chance to choose his own courses, disinterest in departmental affairs.
what some considered to be a condescending attitude toward sociology department students aviatar zaruboval one of the most accomplished goffman students who had goffman as a mentor remembers that he came to pan from israel to study with the eminent scholar and when he signed on for goffman's class goffman said no you have to write a petition justifying that you can't belong there
That really upset the editor. Everyone from anthropology, linguistic, and folklore who applied, who signed up for this class, were accepted without any petition or any demand to prove their case. Of sociology students, the only one accepted was Etiater Zerubovello. so his petition explaining why he wanted to be in this class kind of uh paid off Now, he had very checkered experience with Irving, who discouraged Viator from writing a dissertation on time patterns and framing.
who kind of led Zerugov alone for quite a while. Renee Fox kind of chimed in and salvaged the day and without her. which says you might have never become a sociologist now um gary fine describes goffman's relations with sociology colleagues as hostile, and at the time Gary Fine was an undergraduate student at Penn. Things improved somewhat when Rene Fawkes became department chair.
and early years improved as she secured for goffman a voting appointment in the department but irving's commitment remained in the interdisciplinary group that included folklorist delheims linguist bill labauf ethnographer john swetz anthropologist and student of visual media stalworth and a few other scholars who formed an influential but marginal group of social scientists
on the margins of different disciplines. Now, Goffman actually discouraged sociology students from enrolling in graduate program sociology. He told them... Gary Fine, no, just go to anthropology, go to something else. He told other students, sign up for linguistics. This is a real science, not sociology. And yet at the end, he would run for a, say, presidency. Now, that is quite a change. Mimi will have time to discuss that as well.
Yes, we will come to that, definitely. But I wanted to turn to something you mentioned at the end of our discussion of gambling, which is gender and sex. There's a chapter in your book called Gender and Sex, which I think it's... In some ways, I think it is the most eye-opening chapter, at least for me when I was reading it. This discusses Goffman's change in views around gender.
and there's perhaps less change in views on sex, primarily during the 70s. Given this is perhaps less well-known than other parts of Goffman's work, can you just describe to us the key shifts that happened or didn't happen around goffman's views on gender and sex in the seventies right as i mentioned before goffman's work on gambling where he equated manliness with character and character with manliness and indeed the term virtue i would point out comes from verb from man
her ancient romance virtue meant manliness right and in a way goffman follows the same track now after his wife died goffman began to explore new research vistas one subject that attracted his attention was the social construction of gender prior to his move to pen his colleagues kind of saw him as a sexist writers. There was an interesting Nebraska feminist collective.
that did contend analysis of Goffman's work, such as Encounters and others, that pointed out that Goffman's language was exceedingly sexist even by the standards of the time. So they lifted up several usages that Goffman introduced, and I found some more where Goffman talks about a child's portion of manliness.
The individual who can show what kind of a guy he is. Sociologists who are a person who retain the sacred for his friends, his wives, and... himself government views of spousal duties were conservative to say the least i quote in our society to speak of a woman as one's wife is to place this person into a category with a full array of socially standardized anticipations. For example, that wife will look after the house, entertain our friends, and be able to bear children.
the familiar theme of conspicuous consumption describes how husbands in modern society have the job of acquiring socio-economic status and wives job is to display conspicuously their achievement now that's pretty sexist wouldn't you say so later on when goffman was confronted by mary jerdegan who was part of this nebraska feminist collective he said oh come on i was joking i was
I was just ironic, right? And if you can't understand that this language is not my real attitude to women, yes, but let's examine some... memoirs and interviews that I collected, and we see that actually there's more truth that Goffman was willing to acknowledge. When querying about such sexist locution, as I said, Goffman... did not own up to them jane prather a berkeley student remembers how in the spring of nineteen sixty seven after she gave birth to a daughter
she came to confer with goffman about her thesis that she would write with his mentorship and goffman told her why don't you just go home raise your child and forget about graduate school Furious, Jane Prather remonstrated about her determination to pursue scholarship work until Goffman relented with his quip. Okay, okay. You can be like the Britisher.
and just get a nanny so you can write your dissertation. In her memoir, Anne Swidler, now a professor at Berkeley, recounts this episode when she asked Goffman And she was house seating for Goffman at Cambridge at the time. She asked Goffman for advice on the graduate program sociology that she would hope to apply.
And GoFund said... that berkeley was the best place for graduate studies in sociology and then he added there's no point for you going to the graduate school the same things happen over and over again the best-looking woman in the cohort marries the smartest man and she drops out that's pretty much what happened to skye goffla who abandoned her scholarly work
to devote herself to her husband's career with irving's fully expecting her to shoulder the weight of domestic church to edit his manuscripts to type them out in addition to whatever else comes with the territory Now, in 1964, Kyler Goffman cut her life short. I'm sorry. And the tragedy struck Goffman.
to the core and effected his research agenda sheree kavan supplied very interesting details how goffman came in the possession of women's magazines picturing women in advertisements posed for certain ways and how Goffman, based on that find that Cherique Vann and Irving discovered in some flea market in Berkeley area, prepared a slideshow. that started his work on gender advertisement and gender construction. In 1968, Goffman gave a talk.
which was attended by some thirty bay area female phds not a single man was allowed to attend this gathering The presentation took place at Sherika Vance's home, and it featured slides from popular magazines depicting women. EG probably expected a sympathetic reaction from female audience, but he must have been disappointed.
critical comments stress that goffman mistook advertised photos photos used in advertisement where women were posed to please the viewer as a sign of how they behave in real life Some students like Magalice and Fadi Larson also pointed out that Goffman didn't give enough credit to Rachel Khan Hart who is the one who pointed this kind of deficiency in Goffman, he didn't give enough credits to Lenny Weizmann pioneering work where she
compare children's books, pictures of boys and girls showing that there are systematic biases right there. Goffman Foote knows this work, but he doesn't give much credit otherwise, which obviously influenced his own attempt to use visual media. to do his research. Other critics who attended this presentation suggested that Goffman talked as if these were not pictures but real people.
goffman took at face value iconic images of women in the ads ignoring the fact that models were posed by photographers to strike stereotypical poses early hochschild who had a close relationship intellectual relationship with Irving expressed kinder's reservations about Goffman's reading of gender advertisements which depicted women
as differential, passive, childlike creatures ready to submit to male authority. The treatment she contrasted to how Goffman presented Wiley Preeti, a fictional character in the presentation of who deftly used all manner of tricks to manipulate his self-image and prove oneself to be a strategic actor.
goffman's message man is to woman as parent is to child did not do justice to female agency according to she contended that Goffman's conceptual arsenal had many more important tools available to him that he did not deploy in study of gender. Goffman gave a more nuanced treatment of the subject in his article, The Arrangement Between the Sexes. where he paraphrased Marx, insisting that gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. Now, common sense pins gender difference on biology.
And there are some visual differences, so-called sexual dimorphism characteristics. Based on visible markers, men and women are sorted out into basic sex classes. and encouraged to memeing cultural stereotypes about what is essential about their sexual natures. Goffman calls such hackneyed blueprints genderism. or sexist genderism, which carry with them status and life chances implication. Or as Goffman writes, the social roles of men and women are markedly differentiated.
This giving to women the lesser rank and power, restricting women's use of public spaces, excluding women from warfare and hunting. and often from religious and political offices. And more than males, the female finds herself centered around household duties. So in this.
theory goffman clearly was among the pioneers of gender studies now he wasn't that original i should add there are other scholars who are barking up that tree but goffman simply added his verbally, dexterous way of analyzing the differences societies introduce as if they were a matter of nature, but in fact, they're matters of culture.
So the response to Goffman's effort this time around was generally positive, even though commentators expressed certain skepticism about the assumptions that are there in his work anatole broyard published a review in the new york times where he pointed out that advertising represents a schedule for socialization, but advertising is not only read as a parody these days, but is intended as a parody as well. And to say that that's...
what you can infer about how sexes are different in our society is stretching the point. Now... I would suggest a more nuanced approach, even if stereotyped, right? Even if exaggerated and parodied, this advertisement posings and pictures indeed tells you something about the way genders are distinguished, even though... real life provides far more nuanced distinctions that are available here. Another issue that comes up in his new research agenda is human sexuality.
and they arranged and detained the sexes, Goffman offered this definition of sexuality. By sexuality, I will refer to patterns of activity involving sexual stimulation, sexual experience, and the adumbration of inducement. to the activities taking a cultural specific form of appearance in dress, style, gesture, face work and the like. Now, We should bear in mind that sexuality is a difficult subject to tackle under any circumstances. The issue of tech privacy imprints on the researcher's agenda.
So I had to trade gingerly exploring Goffman's sexuality. But since he writes about it rather abundantly, I felt it would be important to take up the subject. There is enough material deposited in the Irving Goffman archives to raise the issue and compare his treatment of gender with his treatment of sexuality. Now people familiar with Goffman's in Toronto and Chicago and elsewhere Report that Irving was well known on campus for his romantic exploits. He was quite the Romeo.
and enjoyed the company of the opposite sex writes water the observer erring appeared to be quite normal and inquisitive as a teenager living through Esquire magazines, identifying sexy pictures and trading stories and observations, which is by Dolphin and later on Winnipeg. Now, more engaging. And interesting in the context of Goffman's theories is a story of Irving carrying around a volume of Malinowski's The Sexual Lives of the Savages to impress potential college base.
This is quite a huge volume if you're familiar with. And when asked, you know, what's the point? Why are you doing this? Well, that's impressive, isn't it? So he knew how to use impression management techniques even in such areas. Now, Goffman's views on sexual relations didn't seem to evolve as far as his views on gender inequality.
He sounded rather conventional in his statements on the subject. He writes, sexual intercourse in our society is preferably carried on under the involvement shield of darkness for darkness can allow participants to enjoy some of the liberty of not being in a sexual situation at all thus in the well-adjusted marriages goffman writes we expect that each partner may keep from the other secrets having to do with finances
past experiences current flirtations sex engagements indulgences in bad expensive habits personal aspirations and so on and so forth with such strategically located points of In Renaissance, it is possible to maintain a reasoned desirable status quo in a marital relationship. Now, to me, this is rather a broad statement of what marriage is like, which probably reflects something of the marriage that he was selling himself.
Now, Goffman talks about sex, but never about love or romantic relationship. the term is absent the term love is absent in his book indexes it shows up in goffman's text chiefly as making love love-making and so on he sounds rather acerbic on the subject she would say in one of his quips that i bring up many men have traveled distance to make love but few presumably have done so to hold hands and have romance
Okay, well, that's a peculiar view. I sense in Goffman the uneasiness about embodied action enjoyed for its own sake, and that's steering emotions and produce euphoric affect.
the body for golfman is a medium for symbolic representation and display rather than a source of pleasure and creativity as he put it early on body is a pack on which social manufacture is sunk for a while now mind you in stigma and beyond he shows bodies a lot more than a pack it's a suffering pain uh capable uh evolutionary product and he is very eloquent thing to say about it but still emotions related to the body and sex tend to be acerbic tend to be negative effect related rather than
euphoric so um so while Goffman telegraphed his critical attitude toward the sexist gender order he seemed comfortable with the sexual prejudices of his time goading men to draw women to what i like this term goading women in the situation of subordinate intimacy i found this interesting expression that he uses he doesn't presented as some part of the cultural repertory, but rather as evolutionary natural differences between. The sexual order in Goffman's text
is not so much an absolute historical practice as an actual phenomenon based on primordial sex differences and biologically driven sex hierarchies. His approach to sexual order contrasts with Goffman's
Yeah, fascinating discussion. And you end that chapter with the... the accounting of his meeting with Mary Jo Deegan that you mentioned there which is a fascinating discussion and many will be familiar with Deegan who unfortunately passed away a couple of years and a very fascinating discussion of the interaction between the two of them.
One of the Goffman books we haven't spoken about thus far is Frame Analysis. And Frame Analysis is Goffman's most philosophical and somewhat programmatic statement. It's often stood out among his books and a number of readers have been put off it. I will hold my hand up here and say I haven't made it through all of frame analysis. I've only read some parts of it. I thought you did an excellent job discussing the book in here.
But what I wanted to discuss with you is you use it as a springboard to discuss Goffman's tendency in everyday life to break the frame or, to use the words of his son, to be a bit of a jerk. which is the way it's described in your book. So how then did Goffman break frames in his daily life? Fascinating subject. I can only touch upon a few dimensions of it as we are the time constraint.
Indeed, frame analysis is the most philosophical work of Goff on the truth, his depth, a variety of important thinkers of his era such as gilbert ryle ludwig wittgenstein john austen william james alfred schutz kenneth burke burke and others now I want to single out just one that I don't think is truly appreciated as a precursor of frame analysis. And this is Kenneth Burke.
He indeed uses the term frame and did use the term primary frame and rhetorical frame. And I want to briefly describe what he's trying to do because that helps you. get a sense of what Goffman is after, even though, as you said, you didn't make it through the book, and a lot of other people didn't. It's the hardest, perhaps, book to read, most ambitious, theoretical, philosophical one, but I think it repays
the effort, and I'm trying to unpack it as best as I can. A rhetorical frame for Burke commits one to a certain way of seeing the world.
yet when we apply this rhetorical frame any rhetorical frame and there's a whole bunch of them to empirical reality we cannot escape contradictions we always run into trouble marxist frame uh their discourse as based on objective impersonal forces socio-economic conditions that drive human agents toward a blissful communist society through inevitable laws iron laws and marx buddha and so on
But when the exploited classes fail to rise to the occasion, Marxist theories surreptitiously make room for the agency. for the party, communist party, for functionaries tutoring the proletariat about their real interests, trying to raise their consciousness, turning them into revolution. That's not what a regional rhetorical frame calls for their objective forces socio-economic conditions they drive proletariat as previous classes
to change the regime and yet there's so much room for party activism for raising consciousness what marxists are doing they're forever running after the proletariat trying to raise their class consciousness not with much success, it seems. Now, there's one other example that I want to sign from Kenneth Burke on what brain is, to which, to my mind, speaks to our time in particular this notion of what is democracy and he says during world war ii there were
two different frames to explain why Europeans succumbed to fascism and Americans never did so. So this is how Burke explains this difference. Democracy is felt to reside in us, in Asia, intrinsically, because we are American democratic people.
democratic acts are derived from democratic agents agents who would remain democratic in characters even though conditions required the curtailment of basic democratic rights and freedoms But if one employed the scene-act ratio frame, it's a specific term that privileges agents versus material objective conditions. One might hold that there are certain democratic situations favorable to dictatorship.
The assumption is here that prioritizes the agent overseeing a democratic people would continue to perform democratic acts. and restore conditions favorable to democracy. But if you take a different reference from the privileges agent or objective materialist condition,
then the situation is no longer democratic. Even an essentially democratic people will abandon democratic ways and become authoritarian. So he shows how you can take any situation and put in it construction, certain kind of frame. So in one frame, something about Germans that makes them susceptible to fascism. But Americans, no, that never could happen here. Well, I wonder if we take a closer look at what's going on in our country, whether we might have a second thought on...
on the subject. Now of special interest in Goffman's frame analysis is the device that he calls frame breaking. that generates some kind of negative emotions, negative experience. An example is the game of dozens. In this frame-breaking exercise, participants send someone on fool's errand. Pull each other's legs. Fabricate an unstable environment to unsettle the butt.
there is an ever-present danger in such exercises that playing a practical joke and trading mock insults could into real life fights which start by testing the agent self-control and end up drawing real love figuratively And sometimes, literally, the blood is drawn in such a frame-breaking exercise, when what seems like a normal situation of a game becomes a normal situation of real insight and put-down.
the question confronting the agent entangled in frame-breaking behavior is to decide what's really going on here which frame is at work on display is it just a friendly put-down or a full fledged verbal assault. Comedians are experts in this game. And they furnished many useful examples to the author of frame analysis when he deals with frame shattering exercises.
for instance one joke would go that's not the one goffman cites life begins at conception the priest opines oh no it starts at birth counters the minister The rabbi chimes in. I'll tell you what. It is when the dog dies and kids move out of the house. That's when life begins. Much comedy works this way. That's an exercise in frame.
breaking we are put into one frame and then find ourselves in another one as we suddenly lose our blinders the payoff is the enlightenment that comes with the realization that more than one prospective perspective bears on the issue that we can reframe the situation and laugh at our own predicament. now goffman singled out don rickles as a master frame-breaker a famous comedian of his time who turned insulting his audience into art form marmin scott
unusually close to Irving Goffman until he refused to read frame analysis. Irving Goffman sent 1,000 pages of manuscript to his uh student uh marvin school he said what you want me to read this dance thing no way and their relation could never quite was the same afterwards but marvin uh uh spent um the year at goffman's home at berkeley when goffman was at harvard on his sabbatical leave
doing his studies with Schelling on strategic interaction. So Marvin Scott vouched for Goffman's fascination with comedy and club routines. And Rickles, Don Rickles in particular, Marvin found out that Goffman and his house had a vast collection of records featuring Don Rickles, Bored Soul,
jonathan winters bob newhart and other comedians specializing in the genre of breaking the frame irving was according to marvin scott and i quote enthralled by the justice of ronrico with whom he would gladly trade places in a cinch marvin told me wrote to me goffman said to me that what Rickles does requires an iron stomach. Unfortunately, I don't have iron stomach to do that kind of routine. Now, that might be the case.
but e g was well known for his prodigious skills as a put-down artist to use shirikavan's expression i analyze a genre of so-called tales of gotham cataloging Goffman's quirks and zeroing in on those that exemplify breaking routines. Indeed, I make a case that many of real real-life put-downs and frame-rating exercises that various relatives and students and colleagues report actually find their theoretical placement in his writings.
analysis in particular where you see how indeed frame breaking works here are perhaps a couple examples goffman's working in the hotel lobby during a same meeting passing a group of his former students goffman announces
If I can't find anybody more important than you to talk to, I'll come back and talk to you. This is what Viktor Shklowski called... uh bearing the device he's not hiding he's telling exactly he would rather talk to someone else more important than you but if no one else guess what he'll come back and then he humors you um
revealing the trick here's a more aggressive example as goffman writes in one of his theoretical treatises in the polite society a handshake that perhaps should not have been extended becomes one that cannot be declined.
thus one accounts for anomalous abolish through which those in high status are expected to curb their power to embarrass the lesser ones who extended this handshake right injudiciously And here is what happened when a freshly minted Berkeley student who burst into Goffman's office extended his hand out and tried to introduce himself to the famous scholar.
this is what another graduate student president at the time would observe goffman stood up he looked at the hand and very slowly the man dropped his hand goffron just let him stand there with his hand up then very softly goffron said i am busy mr jones when mr jones left he turned to his other student said he doesn't understand we're students of those kind of things
As you can imagine, this is a good example of breaking the frame and embarrassing the lesser as they come. So how would somebody who espouses theoretically on the wisdom of doing what is right, even if it's... somewhat embarrassing to avoid embarrassment of people with lower status how he could engage in such exercises now um um to maybe Cite couple more examples. Phil Selznick's wife died.
and goffman quips oh well finally gertrude has lost her stutter good thing and when he attended the memorial service for his father he was late as he often was everybody was sitting there Irving chimes in, oh, I see everybody's observing what anthropologists call rituals of mourning. This is his father in a coffin and everybody remembering him. Now, you wonder... Why would Goffman do so? What's the point? And the argument that I make is that Goffman did not make much of a distinction.
between the life of a scholar and everyday life of a man that he was really engaged in non-stop ethnographic examination that he was a student of demeanor while he acted often demeaning. The student of civility that he often violated the rules of civility. that that was his way of what another famous rule breakers, Garfunkel, would also use as a trust bridging experiment. That was for him a way to kind of see how people behave, how they would respond. He would arrange a class coming to his home.
and at the time students would show up and nobody would answer the knock on the door which was half open and they would stand up and wondering what's going on and there's no one half an hour later people begin to leave some you know, decide to come in and Goffman is somewhere at the distance.
observing, taking notes, and then starting class reporting what he observed, why their behavior exemplifies certain things. On the other hand, the story that says that I think Gary Fine reports, what happens when the police officer showed up in his class at Berkeley, reporting to him that something happened. Would Goffman please step out of the room? He needs to share something. Goffman says, no, no, just tell me what the problem is. And police officer says, no, I can't talk about this.
Please, Dr. Goffman, please step out. I'm telling you, tell it. We're having a class. And police officer says, your wife just committed suicide. Goffman without missing a bit. proceeds to talk about how embarrassing such situations could be, what it means for the audience, what it means for the person like himself. Now, Gary Fine says, and I think he's right, that this is apocryphal story.
It's unlikely that Goffman would use this example to teach to his class with police officers present. But it tells you something about folklore that accumulated by Goffman, doesn't it, right? And I use dozens and dozens of such tales. of government and try to parse out and see what it actually means.
Yeah, as you said, there's loads of tales of Goffman there and absolutely fascinating ones. While you were speaking, I was reminded C. Wright Mills makes that distinction between doing sociology and being a sociologist. You know, some people do sociology where it's the... Of course, sociology and leading off sociology. Yes, exactly. Living sociology and living off sociology. Exactly, yes. And Gotham was definitely someone who lived it.
in any ways you know it was as you say in the book and as you said there it's very much he's a someone who lives the life the scholar in so many ways um so coming towards the end of his life you then recount as we enter the late 70s and early 80s
Goffman begins to give interviews. He'd been reluctant to give interviews before. You mentioned earlier he gave an interview to Time magazine, but that was somewhat the exception to the rule. He begins to talk about his Jewishness a bit more, something that he... been reluctant to do. And as we've already mentioned, he takes everyone by surprise in 1981 by agreeing to be nominated for president of the American Sociological Association.
which easily wins election tour. And obviously, as we've discussed, he'd been somewhat distanced from sociology, both from sociology and by himself for quite a while. But of course, this period is also one of tragedy, as Gotham is taken ill and dies quite quickly after his cancer diagnosis, never getting to deliver his presidential address. And anyone who's read his presidential address, the interaction order will know that it starts with that.
very gothmanian discussion of what it is to write a speech that's never actually going to be delivered and now is being written as an article etc so i guess the question i want to ask is What do you believe were the reasons that explained this shift in Irving before he died? You know, this willingness to give interviews, talk about his Jewishness, to become part of the ASA once again. What were the reasons for these changes in you?
several commentators who knew irving well observed changes in his lifestyle quite significant ones in the last few years of his life Goffman agreed to sit down for interviews, something he refused to do for most of his life, engaged in extended conversations with his critics. collaborated on a volume of critical studies devoted to his scholarship, owned after his jewish roots and spoke about the holocaust and agreed to stand for election as the president of the american sociological associations
All these happenings bespoke the departure from his usual practices. Carol Brooke Garner, I think his last graduate students who wrote dissertation with him at Penn, recorded this accident.
Goffman was, he says, he kind of recalls that Goffman was giving his speech, going through his lecture notes, and then asked his students to react to what he just said the concept he introduced and one tenacious student pointed out to the weakness in goffman's argument this is what happened next carol brooks garner told me golfman was silent for a moment then tears filled his eyes briefly and he said you know it's easy to criticize and then he proceeded with his
lecture now that's quite a change what an occasion for golfman to break the frame to do something nasty no that showed that something was a food now several reasons could be adduce for this change. For one thing, he met a special with a partner, Gillian Senkov. who was a very important part of his life in the last few years, in the late 1980s and the first years of 1970s and first years of 1980s, he died in November of 1982.
The birth of his daughter must have affected him as well. There were signs that Egy began to feel his mortality. He once told his friend, pagoda look at these books he showed in his study and his enormous library what about them she said these are dead books nobody reads them any more he says what do you mean it's true in every discipline in every field art sociology and goffman says yeah this is true but isn't it sad there was something on his mind that i think was pointing that
he was thinking about his mortality, about his legacy. And some of the changes that I record, I believe, show that he may be approaching some kind of threshold.
I think he knew something was wrong with his health way before he let know to other people. Now, um... it is unclear when exactly irving knew something was seriously wrong with yourself but it must have been well before he checked into the hospital he did so on the advice and on the urging of his son tom goffman a third-year resident in internal medicine at georgetown who told his father to see specialist immediately upon hearing upon about his symptoms
in the summer of nineteen eighty two gothman was vomiting blood a grave augury for a non-smoker a light drinker tom's father who detested going to doctors and dentists put off the decision to run diagnostics for a long time after he felt the first twinges of serious stomach pain that probably happened in early 1982, if not late 1981. Nothing serious Irving thought, perhaps a bit of ulcer. He even traveled to London.
with his family in the early nineteen eighties visiting liz bode spilius his good friend and one-time romantic partner at the university of chicago he kept in touch with her and his son tom visited liz as well and then after this visit goffman called her and said there are things i laughed some silver i think he bought in london please send it to gillian and at least both said that's not
why are you calling what else is going on and she said that they talked about mortality and pending death of her ingoughlin says lis says we said good-bye to each other as best as we could now tom golfman kept a close watch on the progress of his father's illness it supplied important details multiple myeloma he wrote to me was his diagnosis e g died with a belly full of mm involving the stomach and small and large intestines the cancer proved unresponsive to
to chemotherapy and radiation i asked tom to hazard an opinion about the origins of the cancer and this is what tom had to say unfortunately my father was working in an unventilated lab in dauphin with benzene floating all over the place any distant cancer epidemiologist knows that leads to leukemia which irving goffman got at age about sixty-one he remained later to the end calling the icu the antechamber of hell
Goffman's ASA presidential address went undelivered. He worked on his address knowing that he would be addressing his colleagues from behind the grave. And his address... is very interesting to analyze in this respect a certain stage performance by someone who is dead the address was published posthumously in nineteen eighty three under the heading interaction order
It appeared in the American Sociological Review, the only article ever published in the premier sociological journal by Irving Goffman. Yeah, and it's a wonderful article. And as you say, you can read it in a certain way, given what we know about Gottman not actually delivering it. But it's also an amazing piece of sociology. And this brings me to your conclusion. I'm going to quote you at some length here, Dimitri, and hopefully the audience can keep up with my quote as well. So quote.
I think Goffman occupies an unusual, if not unique, place in American sociology. And I'd add in here in preface, speaking from the UK, I think.
what you describe here is true in those countries that gothman has been exported to such as uk goffman didn't leave behind a tradition with a distinct theoretical agenda and methodological tool kit adopted by a group of dedicated scholars he distanced himself from discipline identified with sociolinguists and favored methods deployed by ethnologists and anthropologists ignoring the boundaries between the social sciences
goffman advocated a transdisciplinary approach which drew into his orbit scholars hailing from different fields not surprisingly his influence extended well beyond sociology For all the attention Goffman's scholarship received, his place in social science is far from settled. Check the reference sources and you will find assessment that bespeak his colleagues' uneasiness about his legacy.
And indeed, and you discuss these different influences and difference in legacies. But in the conclusion, you're off this fascinating note, and you've touched upon this a couple of times. I wanted to give you a chance to speak upon it more. You talk about how we can understand Goffman, the interaction order and democracy. So can you tell us a bit about what you think Goffman's value is here? There is a reason why most of citations to Goffman works are outside of the discipline of sociology.
only 30 i think two percent of all his citations are by sociologists the rest are by psychologists, social psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, legal scholars, medical experts, and so on and so forth. Why? Because he disregarded disciplinary boundaries. very bad omen when you only are confined to what your discipline studies. In this respect, incidentally, he followed his teacher, Everett Hughes, who weren't sociologists.
You need to allow sociologists to roam freely across borderlines. Otherwise, there would be, what's the expression he used, there would be deaths to all the sides, to all the uh venice of research that you forgo because you're trained as a professional sociologist goffman believed that much as well um he believed also in unsports unsponsored scholarship Goffman's answer to the challenges facing social sciences was to mount ecologically minded
theoretically grounded interdisciplinary studies relying on systematic observations in natural settings. During his first foray into ethnography, he combined an interest in social order with an anthropological investigation of ritual life and attention to communication dynamics in the small croftry community in Shetland. His second fieldwork dealt with mental illness, the subject matter of psychiatry.
which he merged with an inquiry into the organizational dynamics and under life in total institutions next he spent several years studying gambling establishments in nevada
which afforded him a glimpse into a culture of valorizing risk-taking. In the late 1960s he began to join forces with linguists, ethologists, and did pioneering research based on the assumption that students of language and communication can benefit from close attention to group life and social interaction Later on, in frame analysis, he took a stab at the philosophical investigation of reality and its social morons, later expanding his research to media studies.
gender advertisement and commercial talk shows. Built into his approach was an understanding that social reality doesn't come to us with a boilerplate attesting to its anthro-, psycho-, or sociological status. Such disciplinary markers reflect the bureaucratic rationalizations and depart environmentalization process, which all too often result in iron quiche. To counter such a possibility, Goffman used any kind of data that promised to eliminate his concerns.
biographies novels poetry and on and on in addition to first-hand observation now egypt's forays into neighboring fields were aided by his uncanny ability to discern and label minute social interactions and connect them with the working of larger social formations as if sensing that his life would be caught short.
he kept inventing new conceptual tools and mapping uncharted research domains raising concerns among critics that he did not follow through on his earlier formulations unwilling to do the paradigm and fit his ideas into established school goffman dared to ride an emotion and follow personal experience which he elevated the above-private appurso and turned into testable proposition we can see this in his acute sensibility to stigma mental illness
gambling phenomena with which irving was intimately and painfully familiar while as sharing prescriptions about fighting social ills Goffman's ethnography evinced acute awareness about the plight of plain folks. caught in the willful organizational structures with vested interest inimical to their missions and pious rationalizations. So that is why I think scholars all over the map, in the humanities, in the social science and philosophy, legal studies,
claim Irving Goffman as their own. Now, this is not the brand of sociology that is easy to emulate. wrote about his method. i think it's kind of telling and it'll help you understand why there's no school of goffman's studies no students who really are considered to be true heir he wrote i draw on materials that writers in other traditions whether in literary or dramatic criticism, high culture, sociological journalism, which tell us something important, vicarious experience of society at large.
by and large he writes i do not present these anecdotes as evidence or proof but as just clarifying depictions does data have another drawback i have called them over the years on a hit-and-miss basis using principles of selection mysterious to me which changed from years to years and which I could not recover. even if I wanted to. Here, too, a caricature of systematic sampling is involved.
Now, the skills that propelled Goffman to the top on the social science letter, and he is now the most cited North American sociologist of all time, behind on an international scheme only foucault giddens and i think bordeaux who just etched him but goffman is right after them So the skills that propel Gotham to the top of the science prestige aren't taught in school. They're grounded in the ability to find good questions to ask.
That is what Malia Rilke advised politically inclined students of society. He says, he wrote, don't worry much about answers. try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms like books that are written in a very foreign language do not now seek the answers leave everything leave the questions right now so goffman followed a similar creed as he was poetically inclined when he advised his students to immerse themselves in the field to find out the right questions
important questions to ask his advice to marjorie goodwood was you don't want to test hypothesis you want to generate hypothesis now there are issues that goffman were grace that he did not address sufficiently. There are problems which I identified that we need to bring up. We need to interrogate Goffman and question some of his insights. Indeed, when Goffman says that facework is at the heart of generating Potomac village and social reality, I don't think he gives enough credits, enough
attention to the fact that faith is a means of production of social reality as objective and meaningful. That faith work can be turned into faith labor. where others, the powers, the authorities, expropriate the surplus meaning that we generate. Being born in Russia, I'm very much aware how when I refuse to lend my face to the authorities to dramatize officials, socialist reality could result in my being imprisoned and put in psychiatric work.
But everywhere in America, in Winnipeg, in Canada, in Germany, we are engaged in constructing plutonkin portable villages. And when we refuse to land our faces and deface the official facades,
they begin to crumble, even if we pay the heady price for that. So democracy is a regime where we... kind of socialized means of production of reality, allowing everybody to raise a truth claim, everybody to challenge the status quo and use our faith to put down the reality, to be ironic, to be detached, even if in the countries like Russia, an ironic vigil of dissidents results in the bad damage that they sustained because the brunt of their ironic
uh sarcasm are their loved one their families their children their spouses so there is a price we paid as face dissidents again i'm going on tangents which i could explore for a long time i don't think we are of time to quite pursue it any further at this point yeah but as you say it's absolutely fascinating ways in which Goffman can be used in a whole variety of different ways that he intended
He didn't intend. It's been taken up across the disciplines. So I'd like to end by asking you what, during the course of researching and then obviously writing this biography, really sticks with you about gothman perhaps there's something that you didn't know about him or his work before starting that you now think is really important to our understanding of gothman what might that be well i could
mention a few revelations that i had after i began to study irving's corpus and ernest and collect documents and interviews and memoirs and such my approach to writing of his biography is rooted in pragmatist hermeneutics which studies how we assign ourselves in the flesh
and seeks meaning on the intersection of speaking acting and emoting pragmatist biographer wants to know how we talk the talk walk the walk and i add rock the rock I knew that Goffman's scholarship intermeshed with his life, but it wasn't until I started collecting interviews and documents.
in the goffman archives they realized that goffman's entire scholarly corpus is cryptobiographical that his theories and research incorporated minute episodes of his personal and family history for a man who peered behind the façades people erect to protect their private selves that was quite a discovery Zealously guarded his own backstage. And yet there in plain sight, we see his life unfolding. I said, I raised the question, could you read Goffman's works as Romana Cleff?
and in some respects this is true because the minute details of his personal history of his wife tragedy are there encrypted like kennedy's assassination uh starting uh private uh foundation that's exactly what distinguished the Sky government. He did start a foundation to support blacks and disadvantaged groups in her will. She was very dead.
devastated by assassination of john kennedy and so on it's right there in goffman's writing another discovery was the fact that goffman was a student of civility whose standards he flouted that his demeanor was sometimes intentionally demeaning as i already mentioned that his deference wilfully deferred and that his aggressive facework offended those around him.
Goffman's infringements on the interaction order were strategic, theoretically significant, and they called for sociological scrutiny. Goffman's life is a prime example of what I call bias sociologicus.
a life dedicated to the science of society with no sharp lines separating goffman the scholar and goffman the man e g e interviews memoirs and documents uh reveal goffman as a participant observer par excellence constantly exploring experimenting testing social convention charting the boundaries of the interaction order and intervening in unnerving those around him who take the brand of his
frame-writing experiment. So Goffman's immersion in his work yielded key insights but it also took a toll on people around him and finally i would mention the macro sociological importance of goffman's research and theories I think his view of society is a big con when those in power stage appearances and those who underneath are required to keep enthusiasm, to show, to put the show on, is very much attention in his work that needs further exploration.
that would move us beyond what Goffman calls loose coupling between macrostructures and direction order. I think there's more research that needs to be done along the slides that would show how indeed interaction order microscopic interpersonal dynamics tend to codify what's happening on the macro level. If the fate of the universe, physical universe, depends on what happens on the quantum level,
then why not face of the social world depends on what's happening in face-to-face interaction. If we use the body gloss of fascism, when we put down people we don't like under the veneer of shared views we would have consequences if we use the facework democratic culture, which valorizes differences, with shared ethos, then we have democracy. And here again, I believe Goffman's work has a lot to offer us.
Yes, indeed it does. And I think you've done an extra job suggesting there what it can offer us. So obviously the biography is done now. You've done the work on it. The archives existed. What are you turning your attention to now? What's the piece of work you're working on at the moment? Well, very briefly, as I'm petering out the bust, a couple of short-term projects at my desk.
And a longer study, a book-length study. Right now I'm working on a paper for a fast street celebrating the life and work of Richard Schusterman, a pragmatist thinker and a... uh driving force behind these so my static school of pragmatist studies. So this is an opportunity for me to connect Richard's work with Richard's life.
wrote some decades ago or tried to write a song for him, but I will not sing it for you. There's another paper in the works examining the people and cyclicals about human dignity. I'm going over some 1500 years of official pronouncements on the subject showing how the notion of us being made in the image of God and having dignity changed over time. in reversing itself and its significance.
It was once used to justify the claim that God determines who lives the life of a slave, who must be a soldier, a priest or a prince, and that everyone must humbly accept one's lot.
and that violence will be visited on those who fail to do the facework, to submit to the destiny, and to use whatever level of dignity accorded to you in the larger scheme of things. At the turn of the 20th century, people decree sounded a very different tune using Emago Dei, the image of God, precept to justify universal human rights and dignity of labor the way that it was never stressed when
Catholicism Christianity began its course. And this paper is part of a larger project titled Dignity and Violence. I think this is pretty much the end of the road for us, Matt. Yes. We covered my two grounds. We have covered lots of ground and it's been really interesting. So to wrap it up, as a reminder for our listeners, my guest today was Dimitri Shalin and we were discussing his book, Irving Manuel Goffman, Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination.
and we've always lacked a biography of Goffman. Some of the, for reasons we've already mentioned here, the closing of his papers and so on and so forth.
The composing of a Goffman biography always seemed a somewhat gargantuan task, but as I'm sure listeners will have been able to tell from this conversation, you've done a really wonderful job of this, Dimitri. You've produced... a really important really valuable biography which not only tells the story of a really interesting life for all the reasons we mentioned but in doing so in all the ways we've discussed in this podcast
gives a number of new ways of looking at Goffman. I was delighted to get the chance to read it and was really pleased to have the chance to discuss it with you, Dimitri. And as amazing as it may be, given how much time we've spoken, we haven't covered everything that's in the book. There's still things.
that are in there we haven't discussed. No, we didn't. So, Dimitri, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate the fact that you pay attention to works in sociology that are perhaps off the beaten track. It was a pleasure.