192 ERVING GOFFMAN
Society provides us with a range of roles and
identities that are considered “normal.”The role-identity we enact in public
(for example, teacher, doctor, nurse, storekeeper)
is defined for us by society.But the self-identity we have in private,
when we are not subject to public scrutiny, is who
we actually are, our “essential” self.When there is a major discrepancy between our public
identity and our private self, and when performance
of our role identity is unconvincing, we are liable
to be labeled negatively.When this negative labeling is repeated
over time, stigma occurs.IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
StigmaKEY DATES
1895 Émile Durkheim explores
the concept of stigma and its
relation to social order.1920s The concept of
symbolic interactionism
emerges at the University
of Chicago as the leading
US social theoretical model.1934 Mind, Self, and Society
by US social psychologist
G.H. Mead is published and
later influences Goffman’s
ideas about identity.2006 In Body/Embodiment,
Dennis Waskul and Phillip
Vannini (eds.) see Goffman’s
work as a “sophisticated
framework” for understanding
the sociology of the body.
2014 US sociologist Mary Jo
Deegan applies Goffman’s
theories to the analysis of sex,
gender issues, and feminism.E
rving Goffman was a
Canadian sociologist whose
work draws heavily on
the US social theoretical tradition
known as symbolic interactionism.
This tradition focuses on micro-
level interactions and exchanges
between individuals and small
groups of people, rather than on
the far more impersonal, macro-
level relationships between social
structures or institutions and
individuals. Interactionist thinkers
examine issues such as personal
identity, selfhood, group dynamics,
and social interaction.
The basic idea underpinning
symbolic-interactionist thought is
that the individual self is first and
foremost a social entity: even the
most seemingly idiosyncratic
aspects of our individual
selves, according to symbolic
interactionists, are not so much
the product of our own unique
psychology, but are socially
determined and culturally and
historically contingent. Who we
think we are, who we imagine
ourselves to be, and perhaps most
importantly, who it is we are able
to be, is inextricably bound upwith and mediated by the types
of people we interact with and the
institutional contexts we inhabit.
Of specific interest to Goffman
was the subject of deviance and
the socially enacted processes
whereby individuals and groups
come to be stigmatized (from
the Greek word stigma, meaning
“mark,” “brand,” or “puncture”), or
marked with disgrace. Deviance
is implicit in the notion of stigma
because, as Goffman points out,
stigma occurs whenever an
individual or group is perceived
to have deviated from the socially