Quotes by Erving Goffman

About Erving Goffman:

Erving Goffman was considered "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century". In 2007 he was listed by The Times Higher Education Guide as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Anthony Giddens and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is...

Erving Goffman

...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

Erving Goffman

In our society, defecation involves an individual in activity which is defined as inconsistent with the cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of our performances. Such activity also causes the individual to disarrange his clothing and to...

Erving Goffman

individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, bu...

Erving Goffman

Author Bio

  • NameErving Goffman
  • DescriptionSociologist, writer, academic
  • BornJune 11, 1922
  • DiedNovember 20, 1982
  • CountryCanada; United States Of America
  • ProfessionSociologist; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship