Erving Goffman by Philip Manning
ERVING GOFFMAN
Erving Goffman
(1922-1982)
Philip Manning
KEY
WORDS Blumer, Dramaturgy, Frame
Analysis, Impression Management, Mead, Symbolic Interactionism, Total
Institutions
OVERVIEW
Erving
Goffman was one of the most important sociologists in the twentieth century.
The focus of his work was the organization of observable, everyday behavior,
usually but not always among the unacquainted in urban settings. Using a variety of qualitative methods,
Goffman developed classifications of the different elements of social
interaction. The hallmark of his
approach was the assumption that these classifications were heuristic,
simplifying tools for sociological analysis that did not capture the complexity
of lived experience. In addition to the
study of everyday social interaction, Goffman retained a strong interest in the
sociology of mental illness. This began
in 1950s when he conducted ethnographic research at a large hospital in
Washington D.C. He considered the study of everyday interaction and the study
of mental illness as two sides of the same coin. The intellectual context of
Goffman’s work was both the narrow sociological concerns of the 1950s and 1960s
and the broad scholarly concerns of this era.
This vantage point allows us to understand his work as an extension and
integration of the perspective of symbolic interactionism, the methodological
assumptions of Chicago Sociology and the sociology of Emile Durkheim and Georg
Simmel, both of whom he greatly admired.
However, his work should also be understood as a reaction against three
dominant intellectual traditions of this time.
The first is the ‘grand theory’ of Talcott Parsons, the second is the
psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud and the third is the positivistic,
quantitative trend of many social scientists of this era. Goffman’s work is therefore a response to
these three gravitational pulls. Goffman made a concerted effort to engage in
sociological research that did not acquiesce to the demands of these research
traditions. In addition to the literary
quality of his writings, the elegance of his formal sociology and the subtlety
of his observations, the theoretical sophistication of his work has assured a
continuing audience for his work after his death, even though there is to date
no ‘Goffman School’ of sociology to extend his research.
BIOGRAPHY
Erving
Manual Goffman was born on the 11th June 1922 in Mannville, Alberta,
Canada, the second of two children. His
parents, Max and Ann, were Jewish and among the 200,000 Ukrainians who moved to
Canada between 1897 and the beginning of the First World War. Erving Goffman had one sister, Frances, who
later became an actress. Max Goffman was
a shopkeeper, Ann Goffman a homemaker.
They raised their family in Dauphin, near Winnipeg, where Goffman
attended Saint John’s Technical High School.
As befits a school with this name, Goffman’s first intellectual interest
was the natural sciences. In 1939, while far away from the tumultuous events in
Europe, Goffman enrolled at the University of Manitoba, where he pursued an
undergraduate degree in chemistry.
Perhaps
the beginning of Goffman’s interest in sociology occurred in 1943-4, when he
worked temporarily at the National Film Board in Ottawa. In addition to the inherently sociological
nature of film, as both a record and as an interpretation of social life,
Goffman met Dennis Wrong during this time.
This chance meeting with someone who will also be remembered as a key
North American sociologist, was the impetus for Goffman to leave Manitoba and
enroll at the University of Toronto, where he studied anthropology and
sociology. Goffman was fortunate to
study under two eminent social scientists at Toronto: C.W.M. Hart and Ray
Birdwhistell. At this time he obtained a
thorough grounding in the work of, among others, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown,
Warner, Freud and Parsons. During his
studies Goffman also developed a close friendship with Elizabeth Bott (now
Elizabeth Bott-Spillius), who went on to become a leading Kleinian
psychoanalyst, based in London.
After
graduating from the University of Toronto in 1945 with a degree in sociology
and anthropology, Goffman began graduate study in sociology at the University
of Chicago, one of the centers of sociological research in the United States,
and a department already with a rich tradition dating back to the mid
1890s. The University of Chicago was at
that time a hive of activity, with its student numbers swelled to near breaking
point by the G.I.Bill. Under these
trying circumstances, the close mentoring of students by professors was almost
impossible and was replaced by close intellectual friendships among students,
who learned to rely on themselves (Fine 1995). Goffman did not initially thrive
in this uncertain environment. However, gradually he settled into the rhythm of
graduate school life, taking numerous courses, most notably Everett Hughes’
seminar, ‘Work and Occupations’.
According to Burns (1992:101) it was here that he first encountered the
idea of the ‘total institution’ that later became the conceptual cornerstone of
Asylums (1961), his idiosyncratic ethnography of Saint Elizabeth’s
hospital.
In
1949 Goffman successfully completed all the requirements for his Master’s
degree, including a thesis. This
unpublished manuscript played an unexpectedly large part in his intellectual
development, as it is his only research project that employed interview, survey
and quantitative data. In the thesis,
Goffman analyzed interview responses from middle class Chicago women to a then
popular radio soap opera called ‘Big Sister’.
Following the lead of his advisors, Goffman attempted to use – and
failed by his own estimation – a then popular measure called the Thematic
Apperception Test. His dissatisfaction with his own findings grew into general
dissatisfaction with the analysis of variables, marking a significant moment in
his intellectual development (Smith, 2003).
For
his doctoral dissertation Goffman chose to study rural life in the Shetlands
Islands. This was a far cry from the
hustle, heterogeneity and sprawl of Chicago life. Instead, in December 1949, Goffman arrived on
the Island of Unst, a small, static community.
In his published work, Unst is often referred to as ‘Dixon’. His
research was sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on
Social Science Research at the University of Edinburgh. While masquerading as a student of
agricultural techniques, Goffman actually studied social interaction among the
islanders. After initially suspecting that he was a spy, the islanders warmed
to Goffman, who stayed there until May 1951.
For
reasons that are no longer clear, Goffman did not return immediately to
Chicago, but moved instead to Paris, where he spent a year preparing the first
draft of his doctoral dissertation. Upon
returning to the United States, Goffman married the 23 year-old Angelica
Choate, whom he had met earlier at the University of Chicago, where she was
pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology.
Unlike his own modest upbringing, Angelica came from a prominent American
family, some of the members of which were significant shareholders in media
companies. Erving and Angelica had one child, Tom, who was born in 1953, the
same year that Goffman was awarded his doctorate from the University of
Chicago. Although Goffman was at this
time far from being an influential sociologist, his personal transformation was
striking. He was no longer a boy from a
poor and under-educated family. Through both education and marriage, he was now
part of an intellectual and economic elite.
Goffman’s
dissertation was a mixture of observations and classifications: part case
study, part general theory. As such it
was the forerunner to nearly all his later work. It was also perplexing to his examiners, who
had expected a traditional community study.
Nevertheless, the dissertation was approved and soon after Goffman began
working for Edward Shils. In 1955
Goffman left Chicago and moved with his young family to Washington, D.C. where
he conducted ethnographic work at Saint Elizabeth’s hospital. This project was one of several qualitative
sociological studies funded by the National Institutes on Mental Health (NIMH)
at this time, and it was impossible for anyone to know then that the ensuing
book – Asylums (1961) – would become one of the most influential pieces
of sociology in the 20th century.
On
1st January 1958, Goffman began work at the University of California
at Berkeley, at the invitation of Herbert Blumer, who had himself moved to
California from Chicago. Goffman’s
academic career progressed very rapidly and he became a Full Professor in 1962.
In the decade from 1959-69 Goffman published seven significant books – a
remarkable achievement. In addition to
his considerable academic success, Goffman also showed himself to be a knowledgeable
and successful investor on the stock market.
In his spare time, he collected antiques and enjoyed playing poker and
blackjack, the former badly, the latter well.
Goffman’s social interest in blackjack later became a scholarly one: he
returned to school to earn certification to become a blackjack dealer, a
position he occupied periodically at the Station Plaza Casino in Las Vegas,
where he was later promoted to Pit Boss.
This experience was intended as research for an anticipated ethnographic
project of the social world of the gambler.
However, nothing was ever published, although his paper ‘Where the
Action Is’ touches upon the topic.
Although
the 1960s were a time of intellectual and career success for Goffman, he also
experienced tragedy. In 1964, his wife
Angelica killed herself after struggling with mental illness. Goffman’s reflections on his own experiences
of living with someone who is mentally ill are captured, albeit in a detached
way, in his 1969 paper, ‘The Insanity of Place’.
In
1966, Goffman spent a sabbatical year at the Harvard Center for International
Affairs, at the invitation of Thomas Schelling.
During this year Goffman prepared two papers on game theory, which were
published together in Strategic Interaction (1969). In 1968 Goffman resigned from Berkeley in
order to accept a Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and Anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Faculty in
the sociology department opposed his appointment, and Goffman was initially
housed in an office of the Anthropological Museum, whose letterhead he happily
used. He continued to be a very
productive scholar, publishing Relations in Public (1971) his hoped-for
magnum opus, Frame Analysis (1974), Gender Advertisements (1979)
and Forms of Talk (1981).
In
1981 he married the linguist, Gillian Sankoff, with whom he had one daughter,
Alice. Tragically it was a short marriage, as Goffman developed a stomach
cancer that killed him on the 20th November, 1982, aged 60. In the year of his death he had been elected
President of the American Sociological Association. One of his duties as such was to give the
Presidential Address. He had prepared
this ahead of time, but spent his final weeks revising the manuscript. He chose a nostalgic title, ‘The Interaction
Order’ which was the title of the conclusion to his dissertation almost thirty
years earlier. It symbolized the unity
and consistency of his intellectual interests.
In keeping with his detached and reflexive manner, Goffman anticipated
the posthumous reading of his paper at the upcoming annual meeting and added a
Goffmanesque preface concerning the difficulties of such presentations.
CENTRAL THEMES
(1) The Interaction Order
Goffman’s
overarching theme is the investigation of face-to-face interaction, primarily among
the unacquainted. At the beginning and end of his career (but not in the
middle) he referred to this as the study of the interaction order. The burden of this investigation was the
classification of the different elements of face-to-face interaction. The
subsidiary tasks involved the use of theatrical and game metaphors to explore
deception in the social world, and an analysis of the role of reflexivity in
sociological investigation, particularly as revealed by the ‘framing’ of social
life. In addition, Goffman made
significant contributions to the related fields of the sociology of mental
illness and the sociology of stigma.
Goffman’s
primary ambition was to establish the study of face-to-face interaction as a
substantive concern in its own right. This flew in the face of both grand theorists,
such as Parsons, who – while admiring Goffman’s analyses – nevertheless wanted
to absorb this and other fields into a larger theory, and of politically minded
sociologists of all persuasions who judged Goffman’s analyses to be as trivial
as those of his intellectual predecessor, Georg Simmel. The subtlety of Goffman’s observations was
largely lost on the former, whereas the quiet tone of moral outrage was lost on
the latter.
The interaction
order is a conceptual map to each and every occasion of face-to-face
interaction. This map is therefore
intended to cover behavior in, among other places, restaurants, elevators,
stadiums and dinner parties. Literally
speaking, all face-to-face interaction requires the ‘co-presence’ of
participants; that is, people must sense that others are close enough to them
to be able to register whatever it is that they are doing. In Behavior in
Public Places (1963:13-22) Goffman distinguished three types of
co-presence: the ‘gathering’, the ‘situation’ and the ‘social occasion’. For Goffman, a gathering is simply a coming
together of two or more people, a situation occurs whenever there is ‘mutual
monitoring’ and a social occasion is bounded by space and time and is likely to
involve props or special equipment.
Thus, a social occasion such as a birthday party becomes the background
against which gatherings and situations can occur. For each of these types of co-presence there
are distinctive patterns of ‘communication traffic order’ which Goffman called
‘’situational proprieties’ (1963:24).
These patterns are ‘focused’ when there is a single focus of attention
and ‘unfocused’ when there is not.
Focused
interaction occurs when people ‘extend one another a special communication license
and sustain a special type of mutual activity’ (1963:83). This involves ‘face-work’ of various kinds
among friends, acquaintances and, under special circumstances, the
unacquainted. The initiation and
continuation of unwanted focused interaction was for Goffman an interesting
topic in its own right.
Unfocused
interaction predominates in urban settings where people are unacquainted with
each other. Even if efforts are made to
slow down the flow of information, people ‘read’ each other through ‘body
idiom’ and perceived ‘involvement’.
Through our body idiom people glean information about us by judging us
against conventional standards. Our body
idiom therefore consists of impressions that either we willingly ‘give’ or
inadvertently ‘give off’ (Goffman 1959: 13-14).
Involvement refers to the attention we give – or fail to give – to the
social situations in which we find ourselves.
It is an internal state that other perceive through observable,
behavioral markers. Frequently, people
simultaneously manage both a ‘main’ and a ‘side’ involvement, as when a student
listens to a lecture and doodles on a notepad at the same time. The group and
the present situation determine what constitutes a ‘dominant’ involvement. By
contrast, a ‘subordinate’ involvement is whatever the group tolerates once
appropriate respect is shown for the dominant focus of group attention.
Ritual regard
for the unacquainted is preserved in unfocused interaction through ‘civil
inattention’. This involves initial eye
contact among the unacquainted and then a studious looking away. The function of civil inattention appears to
be to display mutual regard and the absence of threat. It is as if the person were to say: ‘look at
me, remember my face if you wish because I will not harm you in any way’.
Goffman extended
the analysis of the interaction to the presentation of relationships in public
settings. Understood thus, we are ‘sign
vehicles’: our body idiom conveys information about ourselves and our social relationships. This will often be sensitive material that
has to be handled delicately by others, with appropriate ritual care. In Relations in Public (1971) Goffman
used an ethological perspective to analyze how people negotiate their way
around often packed urban spaces, mark their territories while so doing, signal
their relationships to others by various ‘tie-signs’ and manage their
appearances so as to appear normal or unremarkable. By these elaborate means we all contribute to
what Herbert Spencer called in the prominent quotation given at the beginning
of this book the ‘government of ceremonial observance’. To fail to do sounds alarm bells for others
because it threatens the predictability and routinization of everyday encounters. Thus, Goffman was able to show the interwoven
complexity, necessity and fragility of ordinary behavior.
Goffman’s
analysis of the interaction order presents a set of classifications with which
to continue the investigation of face-to-face interaction. He assumed that there would be both further
conceptual and classificatory refinement and increasing levels of empirical
detail. Particularly through the work of
ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts, some of whom trained with
Goffman, empirical specification has occurred, but the former project of
conceptual refinement has not seen the same level of progress, or even
interest.
CENTRAL THEMES
(2) The Sociology of Mental Illness and Stigma
Goffman began
fieldwork in 1955 at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, a large facility housing about
7000 patients. It is important to
remember that this research was conducted at a time when psychiatry was heavily
influenced by psychoanalysis, just before the rise of psychopharmacology. Psychoanalysis and psychiatry were therefore
interwoven fields at the height of their prestige. Sociology was then a small but emerging
discipline thought to have connections to the study of interpersonal
difficulties. Goffman was, then,
unwittingly ideally placed to study the final moments of the mental hospital as
it was then understood. Goffman’s
perspective was somewhat different: as a product of the Chicago School of
Sociology, he understood himself to have a special obligation to side with the
‘underdog’ and to criticize institutionalized authority. Curiously, while he conducted research at
Saint Elizabeth’s, Michel Foucault was conducting similar research at a mental
hospital in Paris, although the similarities between Goffman and Foucault’s
analysis of disciplinary power were not to become evident until much later.
Goffman spent
about a year and a half at Saint Elizabeth’s, collecting the ethnographic data
that informed Asylums (1961). As
with his dissertation, this book is highly unusual: it provides very little
detailed information about the hospital; rather it conveys a ‘tone of life’
(Fine and Martin, 1990:93). Goffman
investigated the characteristics of ‘total institutions’, of which he took
Saint Elizabeth’s as an exemplar. All total
institutions sequester inmates, set schedules and monitor behavior. Inmates are subjected to ‘batch living’ and
its attendant indignities. Goffman drew
on both his own data and research from other total institutions, such as
monasteries, prisons and boarding schools to produce a general theory of the
characteristics of the total institution.
Asylums
promises an analysis of the pre-patient, in-patient and ex-patient phases of
the ‘moral career’ of the mental patient; in point of fact it only delivers the
first two. Goffman provided a subtle and
moving account of the process whereby a person can become a candidate for
institutionalization. Pre-patients pass
through a ‘betrayal funnel’, as the people they trust most – family and friends
– conspire against them, reporting their questionable actions to physicians and
other members of the ‘circuit of agents’ who often play a decisive role in the
decision-making process.
Once
institutionalized, inmates experience ‘civil death’ as they lose many of the
freedoms that had taken for granted.
There is a further ‘mortification of self’ as patients are standardized:
they are given regulation clothes and subjected to a myriad of
indignities. Uncooperative patients are
punished by being placed in an unpleasant ward, ostensibly for their own good. Patients may advance through the ward system
only through good behavior, taken by the psychiatrists as indicative of
improving mental health.
Over time,
patients at Saint Elizabeth’s – as at other total institutions – are offered
‘privileges’ for good behavior, as shown by following the ‘house rules’. In its own way, acquiescence to privilege is
as demeaning as the mortification of self.
Both phases of total institutional life demonstrate to inmates that they
are less than they took themselves to be.
As Goffman put it, the total institution is a ‘forcing house’ for
changing people. In the face of these
overwhelming challenges, inmates must either accept a massively diminished
sense of self or insulate themselves from the social psychological threat posed
by the total institution itself. The latter
is achieved without direct confrontation by what the patients at Saint
Elizabeth’s called ‘playing it cool’ (1961:62-3). This consisted of a set of strategies
designed to restore a sense of autonomy and self-worth to the patient. Ironically, Goffman suggested, hospital
personnel often misunderstood these strategies, mistaking them as further
evidence of mental illness.
Asylums
remains a controversial book. It is a
provocative new approach to ethnography, in which the traditional case study is
transformed into comparative analysis, producing an ethnography not of a place
but of a concept, in this case, that of the total institution (Manning
1992). Goffman’s findings are also
controversial because they suggest that psychiatrists may have weak clinical
knowledge. The central issue for Goffman
is that although everyone commits ‘situational improprieties’, only some of
these cases of inappropriate behavior are considered by psychiatrists (and
others) to be ‘symptomatic’ of mental illness.
Psychiatrists need but lack a ‘technical mapping’ that could distinguish
symptomatic from non-symptomatic situational improprieties. Thus, the occasionally transparent, often
latent, message of Asylums is that psychiatrists lack a scientific
understanding of mental illness and rely instead on lay interpretations. As a result, Goffman thought that
psychiatrists routinely misunderstood the behavior of their patients. This aspect of Goffman’s work put a special
burden on his analysis to demonstrate how sociological knowledge can undermine
psychiatric knowledge. Probably he
failed to do this; however his analysis of Saint Elizabeth’s did contribute
positively to the reevaluation of psychiatry and the treatment of the mentally
ill (see Manning 1999a, 1999b).
In the early
1960s Goffman also analyzed the interpersonal management of stigma. Stigma (1963) emerged out of lectures
he gave at the University of California at Berkeley. Goffman defined a stigma
as a ‘deeply discrediting’ attribute in the context of a set of relationships
(1963:3). He distinguished three types:
abominations of the body, blemishes of character and tribal stigmata
(1963:4). The focus of his analysis was
primarily the stigmatized person’s techniques of ‘information control’ by which
discrediting, undisclosed, information could be managed. Goffman recognized that the management of
potentially damaging information was critical for three aspects of our
identity: the ‘personal’, the ‘social’ and the ‘ego’. Our personal identity is what makes each of us
unique; it consists of ‘identity pegs’ (such as fingerprints) and life
histories (1963:57). Our social identity
is what others understand about us by virtue of the groups to which we belong. Our ego identity refers to what we think
about ourselves. Goffman introduced the
term ‘identity politics’ to characterize the interactions between the
stigmatized, the ‘normals’ and the ‘own’ (who understand the world of the
stigmatized without being stigmatized themselves). In the latter part of Stigma
Goffman suggested that we are all, to some degree, stigmatized. At best we are ‘discreditable’ if we are not
already ‘discredited’. Thus, there is a
continuum rather than a binary opposition between normals and the
stigmatized. Among the stigmatized are
‘normal deviants’ who share the perspectives of normals and ‘social deviants’
who rebel against conventions.
CENTRAL THEMES
(3) Metaphorical Investigations: The
Dramaturgical and the Game Theoretic
In The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) Goffman outlined a conceptual
framework in which any occasion of face-to-face interaction can be interpreted
as a theatrical performance. Expanding
the ideas of Kenneth Burke, who pioneered a ‘dramatistic’ approach, Goffman
developed his own ‘dramaturgical’ investigations based on six themes: the
performance, the team, the region, discrepant roles, communication out of
character and impression management.
These themes had initially been explored in his dissertation. Here they are separated from a case study and
presented instead as general theory. The
Presentation of Self offers re-descriptions of familiar events in which
there is a heightened sense of suspicion.
Nothing in Goffman’s dramaturgical world is quite what it seems. Rather, we are all portrayed as performers
enacting rehearsed lines and roles in places that are carefully constructed in
order to maximize the potential for deception.
Goffman suggests
that as performers we both knowingly ‘give’ and unwittingly ‘give off’
impressions. Because nearly all of us
are skilled in the arts of impression management, we monitor all aspects of the
behavior of the people we encounter.
Goffman’s actors seek to deceive others while seeing through the
deceptive practices of others. Even when
among team members in backstage areas, our performances are not necessarily
more authentic, although there we often ‘knowingly contradict’ (1959:114) our
front stage behavior. Goffman’s
dramaturgical world is thus one of misdirection in which general suspicion is
necessary. In fact, Goffman developed an
interest in espionage practices precisely because he recognized these as
extensions of everyday behavior. This way of thinking was perhaps part of a
broader cultural shift in the United States: the safe assumptions of mainstream
Americans in the 1950s were being challenged by the radicalized generation of
the 1960s. To some degree, Goffman gave
expression to this emerging sentiment.
There is a
clearly a literary quality to all of Goffman’s published work, and this in part
explains their success. The broad appeal
of his investigation of everyday conduct is a version of Freud’s appeal – and
in fact Goffman emerged at the peak of American interest in Freud and
psychoanalysis. In this sense, all of
Goffman’s work involves the elaboration of apt metaphors. Nevertheless, theatrical and game metaphors
are given pride of place.
Goffman
clarified the main terms of game theory, establishing appropriate definitions
for ‘players’, ‘moves’ and ‘rules’ (1969). Players can represent themselves or
others. They may be ‘pawns’ that may be
sacrificed or merely ‘tokens’ who express a position. A player may be a ‘nuncio’ who can only
represent a party or a ‘procurator’ who can negotiate for a party but cannot
represent it. Goffman identified five
basic moves in social interaction: the ‘unwitting’, the ‘naïve’, the
‘covering’, the ‘uncovering’ and the ‘counter-uncovering’ move
(1969:11-27). Each is designed either to
achieve some advantage directly, or to reveal the strategies of other
players. These moves are used in social
worlds, or as Goffman called them, ‘situated activity systems’. Each of these is regulated by internalized
norms known by each system’s members.
Goffman
speculated that game theory was a possible successor to Blumer’s symbolic
interactionism. Rather than focusing on
the production of meanings, the definition of the situation and relevant
symbols, as Blumer advocated, Goffman proposed the study of ‘strategic
interaction’ using the vocabulary outlined above. For unclear reasons, neither Goffman nor
anyone else developed this proposal, and the relationship between symbolic
interactionism and strategic interaction has been largely ignored.
CENTRAL THEMES
(4) Frames and Reflexivity
Goffman expected
Frame Analysis (1974) to be his crowning achievement: the 586 page book
took a decade to prepare and marked a subtle departure from his earlier
work. In this project, Goffman
emphasized reflexive aspects of social life – that is, the ways in which what
we think about what we do affects the performance of the activity itself. This was showcased in the book’s preface, in
which Goffman interrogated the idea of writing a preface itself.
Goffman defined
a frame as a way of organizing experiences: we use frames to identify what is
taking place. For example, a story may
be a joke, a warning, a lesson, an invitation and so on. Frame analysis is therefore the study of the
‘organization of experience’. The most
fundamental frameworks are ‘primary frameworks’ which reveal what is ‘really’
happening either in the natural or social world. The meaning of a primary framework can be
challenged in various ways. It can also
be ‘keyed’: this occurs when its meaning
is transformed into something patterned on but independent of the intiial
frame. For example, a keying may
convince us that what appears to be a fight is in fact just play. However, caution is needed because every
keying can itself be re-keyed. In
addition to keys, there are ‘fabrications’. These are frames that are designed
to mislead others. Fabrications are
‘benign’ when they are for the benefit of the audience or ‘exploitative’ when
they are for the benefit of the fabricator.
In an attempt to prevent the keying, re-keying and fabrications of
frames, we often attempt to ‘anchor’ them so that audiences can accept them as
real.
Goffman extended
this analysis into an investigation of various kinds of talk. These essays were published together as Forms
of Talk (1981). The central theme of
the five essays was the ‘footing’ of talk.
This referred to the participant’s projected self during a
conversation. Thus, we can change
footing by re-aligning ourselves. This
is simply another way of discussing a change in the relevant frame for
events. Goffman gave the example of then
President Nixon commenting on the dress style of the reporter, Helen
Thomas. Goffman argued that this
interlude was intended by President Nixon to be a brief time-out from the
formal duties of the day, a moment in which he could reveal himself as an
ordinary, if sharp-witted man who could thrive without the protection of
presidential authority. Goffman
suggested that in this President Nixon failed, as his performance was too
wooden, and his jokes were laughed at only out of respect for his office. This small example, taken from one of his
final projects, epitomizes his overall concern: the development of general
classifications to be used to understand concrete examples of the interaction
order.
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