Sundered selves: mental illness and the interaction order in the work of Erving Goffman WILLIAM GRONFEIN

2002 ◽  
pp. 89-111
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Interaction Order

scholarly journals Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imogen Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
The Relationship

This article offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman’s account. This article resituates Goffman’s conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking ‘the social interaction order’ to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this article that these explosive political movements against the ‘humiliations of racial discrimination’ invite revision of Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma. This historical revision of Goffman’s stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the USA. Throughout, it reads Goffman’s Stigma through the lens of ‘Black Sociology’, a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this article that placing Goffman’s concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of dehumanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below.

scholarly journals Normal Deviants and Erving Goffman: Extending the Literature on Organizational Stigma

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommy Jensen ◽  
Johan Sandström
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Level ◽  
Stigma Management ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Explorative Study ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Micro Level

The paper highlights two problematic tendencies in the burgeoning literature on organizational stigma. The first tendency is conceptual, where stigma is treated at the organizational level, thereby neglecting social encounters at the micro-level. As a way of remedying this, we enroll the seminal writings of Erving Goffman to situate organizational stigma in the interaction order. The second tendency is empirical, where the inclusion of actors performing stigma management is limited to managerial and organizational actors, thus neglecting many of those faced with managing organizational stigma. We report from an explorative study of ordinary wage laborers in the Swedish arms and pornography industries situated toward the bottom of their organizations and referred to as ‘normal deviants’. The paper shows how and why the organizational stigma literature could be more sensitive and inclusive toward whom, how, when, and where organizational stigma is managed.

scholarly journals Revisiting Mead on Pragmatic “Fusion”: From Emotion to Function

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Weigert
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
Affective Dimensions ◽  
Pluralistic Contexts

<p><em>A recent biography and re-issue of George H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society emphasize the emergent meanings of his work and of self’s cognitive and affective dimensions in interaction. Erving Goffman likewise posits an interaction order based on individual and social identity. Mead’s metaphor of fusion furthers recognition of an emotional merging of selves with each other and with emerging community. He initially characterizes this experience as “precious” and illustrates its presence in interactional domains such as teamwork, religion, and patriotism. Among other scholars, Charles Taylor uses fusion to interpret aspects of the contemporary secular age. Application to terrorist identities finds that emotional fusion motivates actions that threaten the moral imperative informing presentation of selves that grounds public order. From a pragmatic perspective, selves in pluralistic contexts must subordinate emotional fusion to functional fusion within an interaction order that fosters a larger self and more inclusive community to address common issues. </em></p>

scholarly journals Daily Deference Rituals and Social Hierarchy in Vietnam

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kien Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Reform ◽  
Middle Income Country ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Doi Moi ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Mean Time

<p>Since <em>Doi Moi</em> (i.e. <em>the Renovation</em>) in 1986, Vietnam has substantially transformed its society from one of the poorest countries into a middle-income country. The socio-economic reform have led academics to the focus on studying macro problems such as economic reform, weak government, civil society or social inequality. In the mean time, the investigation of micro aspects presented in everyday life has been often neglected. The presentation of everyday life, however, is essential to understand social structure in general. This paper employs the concept of “deference rituals” developed by Erving Goffman to investigate the ways Vietnamese people address others, give them exclamations, and perform salutation rituals in their day-to-day life. By doing so, the paper aims to answer the question that why it is functional for society that those deference rituals are carried out; and what their performance does accomplish for maintenance of social interaction order. The paper finds out that although these small rituals are usually considered as mundane forms, their displays serve to help Vietnamese participants show their respect to and readiness to comply with the wishes of the seniors, ensuring the stability of a hierarchical order.</p>

scholarly journals Can the Discreditable be an Advantage? Mental Illnesses as Metaphors on Rhetorical Usages for Language Teaching

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Yu-Chun Shih ◽  
Shu-Chuan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The Stranger

Mental illnesses often inspire artists and writers and are omnipresent in various works, yet the moral adequacy of portraying their images remained controversial: Erving Goffman (2010) had described the challenges the “discreditables” might have faced and the privileges they might get once being uncovered in his essay. However, Susan Sontag believed that wrapping disease in metaphors discouraged, silenced, and shamed patients in her Illness as Metaphor. This paper aims to center the discussion on what the diseases and the patients will represent and the privileges be demonstrated in these texts from a rhetorical aspect? By applying principally the theories of uncanny, abjection, and stigma, this paper has built a theory on presuming Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger has Asperger, then analyze the power of stigma in two recent works: the episode “ADHD Is Necessary” in Taiwanese TV drama: On Children, and a French novel: Nothing Holds Back the Night. The results showed that the mental illness can be an advantageous and necessary metaphor, just as an endowing “Mark of Cain”, threatening yet defensive. Meanwhile

Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order.

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 837
Author(s):  
Robert Dingwall ◽  
Paul Drew ◽  
Anthony Wootton
Keyword(s):  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Interaction Order

The Interaction Order and Musical Sound: Shopping with Erving Goffman

2018 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael James Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Erving Goffman ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Interaction Order
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