Word: goffman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These students made friends with other patients and participated in the hospital's social life. They became part of the community that Erving Goffman describes in his book Asylums. One student still tells anecdotes about the people he met. Another said. "You could have great times there. People sat around reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There were some great tall-tale tellers...
...Exploring a Shadow World": In order to achieve a more valuable contribution to sociology, Erving Goffman should study more closely the work of his putative intellectual forebears, Cooley and Mead. Surely social life is more than the banal playing out of prescribed social roles by "normal" social actors. Though social order is based upon a high degree of mutual expectation in role behavior, the viability of social life is fruitfully conceptualized in terms of highly frequent, residual rule-breaking by "normal" persons, as well as by supposed deviants. Are all human relationships as disingenuous as Goffman portrays them...
...Goffman's basic thesis is that man's need for public order and unspoken mutual trust manifests itself in even the seemingly most simple social interactions, such as two people passing each other. Several years ago I observed Erving Goffman walking through Barrows Hall on the University of California campus. He ran into another sociology professor who said, "Well, Erving, I haven't seen you in several years." To which Dr. Goffman replied, "It isn't my fault, David...
Eclectic Scholar. Such mordant views have made Goffman something of a maverick in his field. His work has been attacked as overspeculative, his scholarship as too eclectic; in illustrating a point, he is as likely to quote from a novel as from a sociological text. Goffman has also been accused of insulating his theories with purely supportive evidence. Then too, there may be some unexpressed envy on the part of his sociological peers about the fact that Goffman can write well; although his books have pages of jargon, they are enlightened with passages of dazzling clarity...
Even his critics concede that Goffman has skillfully explored an area of life that has until now been both neglected and misunderstood. "The individual is known by the social bonds that hold him," writes Goffman in Behavior in Public Places. "And through these bonds he is held to something that is a social entity with a life substance of its own." However trivial social exchange may seem at the levels Goffman examines, "it is out of these unpromising materials that the gossamer reality of social occasions is built. We find that our little inhibitions are carefully tied into a network...