Abstract
When theory aficionados reflect on the development of sociological ideas, biography is one of their last concerns. Contextual issues and controversies, and even the extent to which theoretical insights are generally applicable, are usually prioritized. Two recent studies about Goffman, by, respectively, professors Gary Jaworski and Dmitri Shalin, are the latest installments to demonstrate the relevance and value of investigating intellectual lineages. The publication of Shalin’s Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination and Jaworski’s Erving Goffman and the Cold War is a testament to the durability of this innovative and provocative figure and to how biographies and academic outputs often intersect to harvest unforeseeable possibilities. Readers are likely to conclude, as I have, that the corpus of Goffman’s scholarship generally reflects the dictum by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1994) about how life experience, and not capricious impulses, conditions our interpretations of social reality, a conclusion that should not surprise those who routinely read about the lives of luminaries in our profession (Adelman 2013; McCraw 2007; Fretigne 2021; and Bortolini 2021).
These two meticulously crafted books share an unbounded dedication to details and a careful analysis of Goffman’s persona and the evolution of his ideas. Each study approaches the subject from quite different levels of analysis. Jaworski follows a more traditional intellectual and historical approach, emphasizing how structural conditions often impact attempts to theorize. This book presents a very persuasive argument to demonstrate how Goffman’s encounter with the anticommunist euphoria of the early Cold War affected his interpretation of social relations. As it turns out, before he embarked on the required fieldwork to support his doctoral dissertation in 1949, Goffman witnessed how the Broyles Commission’s zealous antisubversive campaign arbitrarily targeted several Chicago professors, including two of his closest mentors, Ernest W. Burgess and Donald Horton. The circumstances associated with these investigations “stayed with Goffman and entered his developing intellectual point of view” (p. 27), Jaworski assures us.
Shalin’s intellectual biography, on the other hand, is somewhat dismissive of the effects of international forces and structural configurations, emphasizing instead how life course events condition scholarly outputs and intellectual trajectories. Relying on information gathered from archival research, interviews, and numerous testimonials, we learn about how thorny relations and personal ambitions often defined the career of the theorist. Nowhere is this connection more apparent than in Shalin’s depiction of how gendered considerations had a bearing on Goffman’s formative years. In this respect, Shalin concludes that “his causal observations sometimes sounded like running commentaries on his own marriage or self-referential asides about his romantic predilections” (p. 236). Two of Goffman’s pivotal career moves—his migration from Berkeley to the University of Pennsylvania (pp. 185 and 187) and his ascendance to the helm of the American Sociological Association (p. 291)—are also attributed to life course events, albeit without the level of scrutiny the reader would expect of such noteworthy transactions.
Furthermore, we learn that signs of Erving’s determination were already apparent when he was growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in the Canadian province of Manitoba, where he excelled in school and revolted against his provincial community surroundings and family identity. His perseverance eventually took him to the University of Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate degree before pursuing his doctoral studies. During his graduate school years, some of the traits that would later dominate his unfettered career were already detectible. In Shalin’s representation, Goffman comes across as erudite, keenly observant, fiercely competitive, dedicated to his craft, and enthusiastic about consuming interdisciplinary ideas to interpret meanings and processes he would later cast as interaction orders. Jaworski concurs with this assessment, observing that “Goffman had indeed carved out his intellectual territory—the interaction order—and was totally dedicated to its development” (p. 35). Reading about Goffman reminds me how much his conduct and creativity parallel Bob Dylan’s.
Goffman’s strong convictions and fierce determination to engage with other social scientists and contending adversaries, even at the risk of not always being received enthusiastically, drove him to challenge many conventions considered canonical in disciplines outside sociology. One such instance took place in the mid-1960s, when Goffman questioned the most basic premises articulated by proponents of the nuclear research strategic agenda patronized by the Rand Corporation at a conference sponsored by the University of California-Berkeley Institute for International Studies. In this instance, his intervention went on to spearhead new research agendas that questioned the underlying assumptions of policy domains and perspectives related to rational decision-making, game theory, and international cooperation. His observations also earned Goffman many accolades from other social scientists, including Thomas Schelling, the future Nobel Prize economist, who went on to extend an invitation to spend a sabbatical year at the Harvard Center for International Affairs in 1966 (Shalin, p. 187). However, his fieldwork at St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital, conducted while he struggled to secure a steady academic position despite the acclaim for The Presentation of Self, fueled some discord with psychologists and strengthened his contempt for psychiatric practices he regarded as humiliating and degrading, as well as his qualms about institutionalization as a mental health treatment.
Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination consists of ten chapters. The first two examine Goffman’s formative years, his journey from Manitoba to Chicago, and how he wiggled through his doctoral program to complete his degree in 1953. Goffman demonstrated early signs of intellectual independence and ingenuity when, without much hesitation, he broke with early interactionists associated with the first Chicago School to depict social interaction orders as rituals purposely manipulated to control dynamic situations and encounters. Goffman also deviated from the influential class-based interpretation of demeanor proposed by W. Lloyd Warner and others, siding with Émile Durkheim’s general conceptions of the sacredness of rituals and symbols. About the question of social impulses and representation, he proposed that, rather than being a “process of self-interactions,” as Herbert Blumer had claimed (Blumer 1969:64), these actions are usually used strategically to manage the perception and behavior of others.
Shalin organizes the rest of the book along major themes in Goffman’s research, with the chapter dedicated to frame analysis being the most eloquent. What ties these thematic chapters together is Goffman’s persistent preoccupation with integrating diverse, eclectic views into his work and his commitment to espousing a fresh and creative imagination and adherence to the ethnographic craft, looped around the many incidents that reverberated around his colorful public persona. Today’s academic intolerance for many of Goffman’s scandalous predilections confirms how much our university environments and norms have changed over the years. Nevertheless, one of the most remarkable features of his intellectual journey is the persistent references to some of the basic tenets that anchored his early work, particularly his commitment to constructivist epistemology and situational considerations. Later in his career, when he toned down his early dramaturgical metaphors, Goffman insisted on uncovering different types of frame-breaking activities.
In his penultimate and concluding chapters, Shalin wrestles to explore the lasting relevance of Goffman scholarship despite our rapidly changing, globalized intellectual milieu (Delantry 1997). The emergence of perspectives (Go 2016) that increasingly question the embedded ethnocentrism and biases in western sociology makes any such undertaking formidable. Shalin succeeds remarkably well in using the depth of citations of Goffman’s scholarship to demonstrate the weight of his contributions. This exercise illustrates how, despite recent theoretical and methodological innovations (Platt 1998), between 1977 and 2020, Goffman continued to be cited “more often than any other author” in the interactionist subfield and in sociology in general (pp. 322–23). Here again, Shalin reaffirms Goffman’s standing as one of the towering figures of his generation.
Jaworski’s Erving Goffman and the Cold War presents provocative arguments concerning the lasting impact of Goffman when he christens Goffman as “a social theorist of the Cold War” (p. 5). Jaworski supports his iconoclastic characterization by stating at the outset of his book, “this book includes specific studies of the ways that Goffman metaphorically extended cold war terms in his own unique ways” (p. 6). In each of its seven chapters, the book takes on specific themes associated with anti-communist euphoria to show how the zenith of the Cold War affected Goffman’s prolific writings. His encounters with victims of brainwashing and cases of propaganda during the Korean War, while consulting for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, constituted the backdrop for his arguments exposing deception. The Red Scare related to McCarthyism informed his thinking about loyalty and secrecy, while Goffman’s observations of superpower strategic interactions, Jaworski argues, found their way into his notion of interaction orders.
Although some chapters back this thesis more persuasively than others, overall the book does convey a sense that sociology must consider the implications of the macro/micro dichotomy more seriously. Goffman’s twist on the confrontational nature of social relations provides an opportune illustration. Inspired by the recurrent tensions the world experienced during “the long peace” between superpowers in an adversarial bipolar world (Gaddis 1989), Goffman asserts the important point that social order is not without its share of microaggressions. What is uniquely different under conditions of order is that the ordinary spillovers of aggressive communication, gestures, or scuffles are managed and contained to avoid escalations and disruptive crises. Even when Goffman considers the zero-sum gamesmanship associated with game theory, competition among players may not escalate into hostilities. As game theorists have persuasively argued, altruism, generosity, benevolence, or payoff alterations might marginally encourage cooperation outcomes. Instead, risk-averse behavior results from the “shadow of the future” (Blake, Rand, Tingley, and Warneken 2015), as recurrent interactions prompt players to adjust their expectations and assume the risk of collaboration, anticipating that they may dominate future interactions.
Despite any inevitable shortcomings the reader may find in these studies, the contributions and insights articulated by these authors make their work very relevant today. For one, whether through the extensive biographical details about Goffman’s life or his interpretation of social conditions, each author contributes significantly to the ongoing scholarship about Goffman’s legendary contributions. In this sense, these books constitute an indispensable reference for the historiography of sociological ideas. In addition, the interpretative capacity of each author is sure to generate further reflections, a necessary dialectical condition to sustain the growth of knowledge production. The reader will find the complementarities of each argument refreshing. Most important, however, is the consideration that at the time this review is being drafted, we find ourselves in another heightened state of hysteria and polarization that, although not analogous to the conditions experienced by Goffman, still requires us to think creatively and unyieldingly to uncover the implications of how power and authority relations affect our sociability. Goffman is an exemplar of how to formulate ingenious ideas under challenging conditions.