Goffman Stigma

16/03/2024, 15:18 Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman saw magic in the mundane | Aeon Essays
The magic of the mundane

Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman realised
that every action is deeply revealing of the social
norms by which we live
by Lucy McDonald
Lucy McDonald is a lecturer in ethics at King’s College London. Her work has
appeared in the Journal of Moral Philosophy and the Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, among others.
Edited by Nigel Warburton
T hink back to the last time you fell over in a public place. What did you do next?
Perhaps you immediately righted yourself and carried on exactly as before. I bet
you didn’t, though. I bet you first stole a furtive glance at your surroundings to see
if there were witnesses. If there were, then you may well have bent over and
inspected the ground as if to figure out why you tripped, even if you already knew
why. Or maybe you smiled or laughed to yourself or uttered a word like ‘Oops!’ or
‘Damn’. At the very least, I bet your heart rate increased.
These behaviours seem irrational. If you were uninjured, why do anything at all
after the stumble? For some reason, such public mishaps – stumbling, knocking
something over, spilling something, pushing a ‘pull’ door, realising you’ve gone
the wrong way and turning around – provoke an anxiety that compels us to
engage in curious behaviours.
This is because, the sociologist Erving Goffman shows us, there is nothing simple
about passing through a public space. Instead, we are always expected to reassure
strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the
social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing,
for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes
and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves
and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of
ready mutual intelligibility’.
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When you fall over, you fail to comport yourself in an acceptable way, and so
immediately pose a threat. ‘Is she dangerously out of control?’ others might
wonder. ‘Is she a menace?’ Fear of social punishment – from a dirty look to
outright ostracisation – will prompt you to engage in what Goffman calls
‘remedial work’, an attempt to show that you’re not a problem after all.
Looking at the ground signals that you didn’t choose to move strangely – you were
subject to an unexpected obstacle. Smiling signals that you see the incident ‘as a
joke, something quite uncharacteristic’. And swearing signals that, since you can
use language, you are compos mentis, and that your fall was a blip in an otherwise
ordinary life. In performing such a ‘normalcy show’, you re-establish yourself as
an insider, and order is restored.
Goffman realised that behaviours of this kind, much as they might feel like it, are
not the results of idiosyncratic anxieties, of excessive self-consciousness or
awkwardness. Instead, they are sensible responses by people appropriately
attuned to the complexities of the social world.
Goffman’s ‘microsociology’ reveals that even the most incidental of social

interactions is of profound theoretical interest. Every encounter is shaped by
social rules and social statuses; ‘whether we interact with strangers or intimates,
we will find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact’.
Such interactions contribute to our sense of self, to our relationships with others,
and to social structures, which can often be deeply oppressive. Never mind the
dealings of the courtroom, the senate, or the trading floor, it is in the mundane
interactions of everyday life, Goffman thought, that ‘most of the world’s work gets
done’.
E rving Goffman was born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to Jewish immigrants from
Ukraine. After completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto,
he began graduate studies in sociology and anthropology at the University of
Chicago. His fieldwork led him to Baltasound, a village on Unst in the Shetland
Islands, Scotland. Here he developed his unique version of ethnography. The
resulting thesis, ‘Communication Conduct in an Island Community’ (1953),
displayed the innovative methods and perspective for which Goffman would
become famous.
He described his research as a study ‘in a community’, not a study ‘of a

community’. To understand a social world, he thought, you could not merely
observe it; you must get inside it, be a participant observer. You must get so far
inside it, he thought, that you ‘forget about being a sociologist’. Thus, from
December 1949 to May 1951, he became a member of the Baltasound
community; he attended auctions, weddings, funerals and concerts; he played
billiards and whist with the locals; and he both dined and worked as a dishwasher
at the local hotel. This immersive approach would become his modus operandi –
famously, he would later work incognito in a psychiatric hospital to study its social
rules.
Goffman used this methodology to pursue a novel research agenda. Leading

sociologists at the time, such as Talcott Parsons, were interested in large-scale
social structures, like economies, religions and political institutions. Goffman
eschewed this macrosociology in favour of analysing minute face-to-face
interactions. He examined, for example, how Baltasound locals greeted one
another as they passed on the roads, how they changed their behaviour
depending on whether they were among customers or colleagues, and how they
dealt with social gaffes, such as getting someone’s name wrong.
In this PhD research, we find the kernel of Goffman’s most famous idea: that
social interactions are governed by a complicated set of norms and expectations
he called ‘the interaction order’. Understanding this interaction order was key, he
thought, to understanding how humans develop individual and group identities,
how relationships are formed and navigated, and how systems of exclusion and
oppression form.
In perhaps his best-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956),
Goffman developed a dramaturgical analysis of interaction, taking seriously
Shakespeare’s suggestion that ‘All the world’s a stage’. Just as an actor behaves
differently on stage from in the wings, so too does each of us alter our behaviour
depending on the context. When we are in the presence of others, we strive to
present ourselves as occupying a particular social role, be that an employee, an
employer, a teacher, a student, a neighbour. We use our bodies and our words to
give off certain strategic information. Goffman called this ‘the frontstage’.
When we leave these social settings, we step out of our costumes and enter ‘the
backstage’. The backstage typically involves barriers to perception – when in the
wings of the theatre, the kitchen behind the restaurant, or the bathroom of the
house hosting a dinner party, we are hidden from others, and no longer need to
tightly control the image we give off. Sometimes the backstage infringes on the
frontstage; we might be caught in a state of undress, or overheard muttering
malevolently about a colleague. This causes acute embarrassment because the
identity we try to cultivate on the frontstage is undermined.
G offman’s dramaturgical metaphor is sometimes misunderstood. He did not

claim that we are all frauds constantly misrepresenting ourselves. Rather, his
point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant
process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others
through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an
actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative
project, performed to and with an audience.
This work remains pertinent today, when social media influencers have turned
identity construction and curation into an art form. Goffman’s theatrical
metaphor also finds echoes in the contemporary idea of gender as performance,
developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and elsewhere. Goffman was
ahead of his time in noticing that identity is constructed not just through talk, but
through the body. We express our identities not only in words but also in how we
move and how we dress – or what Goffman calls our ‘body idiom’.
During his time on Unst, Goffman noticed that when the locals needed to
disagree with one another, they would not simply reject a statement outright, but
would soften the blow with a phrase such as ‘There’s something in what you say.’
In his later essay ‘On Face-Work’ (1955), he would characterise these tactful
social manoeuvres as forms of ‘face-work’, attempts to save a person’s ‘face’.
Building on ideas from Chinese society, Goffman characterised ‘face’ as the
‘positive social value’ a person constructs and claims for themselves in a social
interaction.
We typically work hard to avoid undermining another’s ‘face’. For example, if we

need to ask someone to do something, we show that we respect their autonomy
by couching the request with ‘Do you mind if…’, ‘I’d be very grateful if you
could…’, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but…’ All Brits will be familiar with the
conversational move one makes when, from a sitting position, one slaps both
hands on one’s thighs, and begins to stand up slowly – a movement sometimes
accompanied by the utterance of ‘Right’. Why risk undermining your host’s face
by saying ‘I’ve had enough of this and I want to leave’ when you can perform this
little ritual instead?
We also respond quickly when a person risks losing face. If someone falls over or
is caught in an unflattering state, we avert our gaze. If they are snubbed or
insulted, we might apologise (if responsible), compliment them, or give them gifts
and invitations. It is tempting to think that the primary goal of conversation is the
exchange of information. Indeed, this remains an assumption in much
contemporary philosophy of language. Goffman shows us that conversation is far
more than this and can be just as much about preserving each other’s sense of
self as about communicating facts or opinions.
The interaction order governs far more than just our conversations. Goffman
thought that we were subject to invisible rules even when merely existing in the
presence of strangers. Consider how you act when you sit next to a stranger on
the train or pass someone you have never seen before in the street. It’s likely that
you will momentarily glance over them – a mere flicker – then conspicuously look
away, like a car dipping its lights. Through this procedure, ‘the slightest of
interpersonal rituals’, you abide by what Goffman calls the ‘norm’ of ‘civil
inattention’; you subtly acknowledge the other’s presence, while signalling that
you have ‘no untoward intent nor [expect] to be an object of it’.
If you see a friend in public, Goffman thought, you may need a reason not to enter
into an interaction with them. You will likely feel obligated to wave, nod or smile.
When you encounter a stranger, in contrast, the default expectation is that you
ignore them – almost, but not quite, completely. In some cases, this can be rather
hard to do; ‘a rule in our society’, Goffman wrote, with his usual rhetorical
flourish, is that generally ‘when bodies are naked, glances are clothed’.
There are exceptions, however, to the norm of civil inattention. Certain ‘open
persons’ are not subject to it; the very old, the very young, the police, people with
dogs and parents with children, for example, are all deemed approachable. It is
OK to grin at an unknown child on a train – not so much at an unknown
middle-aged man.
Although Goffman himself did not delve into the politics of civil inattention, it is
clear that social hierarchies at least partly determine who can approach whom
and who is deemed approachable. Goffman’s student Carol Brooks Gardner went
on to apply his analysis of public space to catcalling: lone women are often treated
as open persons by street harassers, she noticed, in ways that reinforce oppressive
gender norms.
W hile Goffman loved to shine his sociological torch on the intricate web of social
norms, he saw no intrinsic value in the norms themselves. In fact, he was often
highly critical of their exclusionary potential. In books such as Asylums (1961),
Stigma (1963) and in a series of essays on prisons and hospitals, he showed great
sympathy for the plight of ‘deviants’, people who did not or could not comply with
the interaction order, for psychological or physical reasons, and who were
therefore excluded from social participation.
In the mid-1950s, Goffman spent 12 months acting as an employee at St

Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Washington, DC aiming to ‘learn
about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively
experienced by him’. He was scathing in his findings, describing hospitals of this
kind as ‘hopeless storage dumps trimmed in psychiatric paper’.
He characterised psychiatric hospitals, along with prisons, care homes, army

barracks, convents and boarding schools, as ‘total institutions’. These are
institutions where individuals are cut off from the rest of the social world, and are
forced to undergo all of the basic routines of daily life – work, play, sleep – in the
same place, with similarly placed others, according to a timetable set by an
authority.
Goffman observed that, upon arrival in such an institution, inmates typically

underwent a ‘series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations
of self’ – for example, in a prison or a hospital, their belongings were confiscated,
their bodies stripped, examined, washed, and sometimes shaved, and their means
of contact with acquaintances in the outside world removed.
Through this process, Goffman thought, patients were forced to forego their
‘civilian self’, in favour of a sanitised institutional self. The acts of petty
insubordination the patients would then engage in, like keeping forbidden
stashes, racketeering, or sex work, were not symptoms of degeneracy but rather
attempts to cling on to their sense of self as forces around them worked hard to
eliminate it.
G offman was deeply critical of what we might now call the ‘medical model’ of
mental illness, and of the processes by which a person became institutionalised.
He argued that many symptoms of mental health conditions were in fact
‘situational improprieties’ – failures to abide by the norms of the interaction
order.
Institutionalising people who committed such ‘improprieties’, Goffman thought,

would lead them to commit more of them: ‘If you rob people of all customary
means of expressing anger and alienation and put them in a place where they
have never had better reason for these feelings, then the natural recourse will be
to seize upon what remains – situational improprieties.’
Here Goffman identified what the philosopher Ian Hacking has labelled social
‘looping’: characterising a person as a member of a social category (in this case,
someone who is mentally ill) leads to their developing more of the characteristics
that warrant such a characterisation. The psychiatric hospital was ostensibly
merely reacting to mental illness, but was in fact constructing it to some extent.
In Stigma, Goffman turned his attention to processes of social alienation beyond

the institution. He conceived of a stigma as ‘an attribute that is deeply
discrediting’, which made a person ‘tainted’ or discounted’, and thereby
‘disqualified from full social acceptance’. There is bodily stigma, he thought, like
disability; moral stigma, like alleged blemishes of character; and tribal stigma, like
membership of certain races, nations, religions or classes.
Goffman was clear that a stigma is ‘neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing
in itself’. Instead, society determines which attributes are ordinary and natural,
and which are not. He was particularly astute on the challenges faced by people
with stigma, and on what we might now call ‘respectability politics’: ‘to display or
not to display’, the stigmatised person must wonder, ‘to tell or not to tell; to let on
or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when and
where’. In a characteristically crisp turn of phrase, Goffman described blind
people who choose to wear dark glasses to conceal their eyes as ‘revealing
unsightedness while concealing unsightliness’.
A stigmatised person, Goffman argued, will forever remain a ‘resident alien’. Her
ostensible inclusion in any community will always be provisional and precarious,
and she will live in fear of discomfiting those who deign to include her. Such a
person will be expected to extend to her new community an acceptance that they
will never quite extend to her in return. She can hope for, at best, a ‘phantom
acceptance’, which in turn allows for a sense of ‘phantom normalcy’.
Late in his life, Goffman turned his eye to gender. Alert, as ever, to the socially
constructed nature of identity, he rejected physical difference as a basis for the
social inequality of men and women, and argued that gender differences were
produced through an ‘identification system’ that dictated what kinds of work
people do, who they interact with, how they dress, and even what toilets they use.
‘Expression[s] of subordination and domination,’ Goffman thought, are not ‘a
mere tracing or symbol or ritualistic affirmation of the social hierarchy.’ Instead,
‘these expressions considerably constitute the hierarchy; they are the shadow and
the substance.’ Gender is a product of differential social practices, not a
justification of them.
T hroughout his career, Goffman refused to describe his work as offering a theory
of the social world. In his presidential address to the American Sociological
Association, published posthumously due to his early death at 60, Goffman
described himself as offering merely ‘glimmerings’ about the structure of social
interaction. This may explain why, despite his fame, many sociologists are
ambivalent about his work, and why in the neighbouring discipline of philosophy,
he is often ignored.
It is hard to know exactly what to do with Goffman. He offered no foundational

principles, no overarching analyses of the world in its totality. Nor was his
methodology always clear; he used too much data to qualify as a theoretician, but
his work was often too abstract, too impressionistic and too literary to qualify as
ethnography proper. He did not help matters by refusing to engage with other
people’s analyses of his work.
Yet Goffman’s rejection of theorising is itself theoretically significant. He showed

that one need not articulate a grand theory of the world in order to improve our
understanding of it. Indeed, such grand theorising might be premature when we
haven’t yet appreciated the full complexity of even the most minute phenomena –
like a person falling over in the street. Goffman thought that there could be great
value in the provision of even ‘a single conceptual distinction’, ‘if it orders, and
illuminates, and reflects delight in the contours of our data’.
In identifying the ‘interaction order’, Goffman also illuminated a dimension of life

previously hidden to most of us. Railing against what he referred to as the
‘touching tendency to keep a part of the world safe from sociology’, Goffman
showed us that life is social all the way down – nothing we do is untouched by the
norms and expectations of our community.
One might find this revelation depressing; is there no respite from the demands
and opinions of other people? But it’s also possible to find hope in this. What we
might write off as personal awkwardness is in fact evidence of acute attunement
to social norms. Features of our bodies, our behaviours and our minds that others
have told us are inherent flaws are in fact of no moral significance – their alleged
defectiveness stems from arbitrary social standards of ‘normality’. And ultimately,
it is only once we grasp the contingency and artificiality of such social norms,
especially those that oppress, that we can begin to transform them.
aeon.co 15 March 2024

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16/03/2024, 15:18 Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman saw magic in the mundane | Aeon Essays

The magic of the mundane

Edited by Nigel Warburton

Goffman’s ‘microsociology’ reveals that even the most incidental of social

He described his research as a study ‘in a community’, not a study ‘of a

Goffman used this methodology to pursue a novel research agenda. Leading

G offman’s dramaturgical metaphor is sometimes misunderstood. He did not

We typically work hard to avoid undermining another’s ‘face’. For example, if we

In the mid-1950s, Goffman spent 12 months acting as an employee at St

He characterised psychiatric hospitals, along with prisons, care homes, army

Goffman observed that, upon arrival in such an institution, inmates typically

Institutionalising people who committed such ‘improprieties’, Goffman thought,

In Stigma, Goffman turned his attention to processes of social alienation beyond

It is hard to know exactly what to do with Goffman. He offered no foundational

Yet Goffman’s rejection of theorising is itself theoretically significant. He showed

In identifying the ‘interaction order’, Goffman also illuminated a dimension of life

aeon.co 15 March 2024

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