The Contemporary Goffman

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415996815
• eBook ISBN: 9781135168780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The sociology of Erving Goffman has inspired generations of sociologists throughout the world. Students and scholars alike have in Goffman's unsurpassable and generous ability to capture the world of everyday life discovered an emporium of useful, incisive and quite often humorous analyses, concepts and ideas. The Contemporary Goffman highlights the continued relevance of Goffman to sociology and related disciplines – to theoretical discussions as well as to substantive empirical research – through contributions dealing with a variety of topics and themes. Some contributions concentrate on locating or reinterpreting Goffman's work as a special kind of sociology (as is found in his literary sensibilities or his fieldwork strategies). Others focus on overlooked aspects and neglected potentials of his sociology (by applying his perspective to studies of gender, emotions and violence), while others still relate his concepts and ideas to substantive research areas (such as the media, mobile telephones, hospitals, surveillance technologies and tourism).

Part I
Dissecting Goffman

1
Goffman’s Greenings

Yves Winkin

INTRODUCTION

At some point in his life, Erving Goffman was a kid. Perhaps hard to believe. It is worth reconstituting his personal, social and intellectual environnment from available historical data, from interviews and biographies of peers and fellow Canadians of his time. The ultimate objective is to delineate the main characteristics of the habitus which shaped Goffman the kid—and Goffman the adult (Boltanski 1973; Wacquant 1988; Winkin 1988, 1999).

QUIET LIFE IN DAUPHIN

Let us imagine the following picture. The whole Goffman family stands solemnly in front of their ‘Department Store’ on 4th Avenue, Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada: father Max, short, stocky, solid; mother Ann, thin, almost frail, looking much younger; Frances, 13 years old, already quite mature; Erving, 10 years old, short and sturdy, looking mischievous— probably pulling his sister’s hair when the picture is taken.

The picture does not show the next shop to the right, the clothing store owned by Eli Bay, Max Goffman’s loyal competitor and old friend. Eli has two sons: Sol, who will later take the store over, and Charles (Chuck), who will later marry Frances, Max’s daughter.

In 1932, there are eight stores in Dauphin selling clothes. They compete for attention in the Dauphin Herald and Press. While Eli Bay, who has been in the business since 1909, uses understatements like “Dauphin’s Busiest Store”, Max Goffman, who only came to Dauphin in 1926, offers the “greatest sales on earth” several times a year. He specialises in merchandise bought in bulk in Montreal; the Dauphin community knows his annual buying trips, as they are reported in the local press.¹ When he returns to Dauphin with his load of garments, he announces the event in the same newspaper. The 1932 advertisements are rhetorical jewels:²

“Emphatically an event not to be overlooked if you want a smart frock at an unusual saving”.

“We honestly believe that these models will set a new standard of value giving … ”

“You’ve never seen such a diversity of stunning hat styles. All designed to lend you the sort of individuality you admire in stunningly groomed women”.

Erving will not be trained in his father’s business. It may be conjectured at this stage, however, that one of his earliest intellectual ‘habit forming forces’ originates in his father’s stress on fashion as a ‘symbol of class status’, to allude to the title of his first published paper (Goffman 1951) or as a tool of ‘impression management’, to refer to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959). A “stunning hat” enables the female buyer to display “the sort of individuality” admired in other women, i.e. to put a new self on stage. The argument seems to lead all the way to Gender Advertisements (Goffman 1979).

Max Goffman arrived alone in Winnipeg in 1916 or 1917 from Novokrainka, in Ukrainia.³ He had escaped the pogroms and the likely fate of being conscripted into the Czar’s army for as many as twenty-five years, starting at the age of 12, since that was the way to Russify the Jewish community invented by Czar Nicholas I (Stanislawski 1983). Floods of Jewish immigrants from Russia arrived in the United States and in Canada in the late decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century—about two million in total.⁴ Canada had started to accept Russian Jewish refugees in 1882, with the idea of assigning them lands in the Northwest. From Montreal or Toronto immigrants were sent to Winnipeg by boat and train and then dispatched through Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. The Jewish community soon started to grow; Jewish farm colonies began to spread throughout the Prairie; and many small towns got a Jewish tailor, peddler or grocer. Actually the Jewish ‘colonies’ were not agriculturally as skilled as the Icelanders, Mennonites and Ukrainians who were also settling en masse; rather they fit the niches of artisans and small merchants.

When Max Goffman arrived in Winnipeg, he was probably helped by his landmanshaft. Such ‘associations of fellow countrymen’ structured the Jewish community of Winnipeg, helping the newcomers to find a room, a job and possibly a wife too (Gutkin 1980). As the story goes in the Goffman family, one of his friends once announced: “Max, I found the perfect girl for you”. Max was introduced to Ann (Annie) Auerbach, who had arrived in Winnipeg with her family in 1911. She mastered some English language and worked in a jewellery store. They got married in 1918; she was 18, he was 28. They first moved to Mannville, a very small town of 300 inhabitants in Alberta, where their daughter Frances was born in 1919, and their son Erving Manual in 1922. They started a women’s and men’s ready-to-wear store. But the business was not too good, and they wanted to get closer to Ann’s family in Winnipeg. So they moved to the far larger town of Prince Albert (still in Saskatchewan). But the business did not pick up. Ann and the children went back to Winnipeg and stayed with the Auerbach family, while Max kept searching around for a good business spot.

Their story started to sound like Papa Brusel’s in Raisins and Almonds, Fredelle Bruser Maynard’s autobiography (1964), in which she tells how her Russian-born father went in the 1920s and 1930s from one small town to the next in Manitoba in search of a good place to have his dry goods store prosper. Yet, Papa Goffman was not Papa Brusel.

In late 1926 he settled for good in Dauphin, about 180 miles northwest of Winnipeg. This proved to be a good choice. Dauphin was a prosperous ‘wheat and rail’ junction town of 4,000 inhabitants, with a strong Ukrainian community, whose early members arrived at the turn of the century (Little 1988). The town worked as a service centre for the rural surroundings, with train and bus connections to Winnipeg. Wheat was collected throughout the area, piled up in grain elevators standing by the station, and shipped on freight trains to Winnipeg and the world. It certainly was not a shabby little Prairie town by the time the Goffmans started to run their ‘Department Store’ on 4th Avenue. It had all the public and commercial conveniences a mid-size town could offer in the 1920s, with primary and secondary schools, a general hospital and a public library. Movies were seen at the Gay Theatre and at the Dauphin Theatre. There were plenty of sports, several ‘dramatic societies’ and town bands. People danced all over town every weekend in schools, community halls or dance parlours, like the Orange Hall, the Elk’s Hall or the Roseland Dance Garde (Watt 1932). And there were many churches: Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox— but no synagogue.

There were about a dozen Jewish households scattered through Dauphin.⁵ Families knew each other but did not constitute a strong community, spatially and socially. They did not feel on the defensive; there was no blatant public discrimination against Jews in the 1920s and 1930s in Dauphin, only isolated individual acts. But they did not feel integrated either. Only a lawyer like Alex Katz or a local politician like Sam Solomon moved freely in all strata of the Dauphin society and beyond. The artisans and merchants like the Goffmans and the Bays “kept to themselves”, as Charles Bay put it.⁶ They were on greetings terms with the Gentiles, and that was it. Max Goffman loved cards, and played bridge and poker with anyone who agreed to sit down. His daughter Frances used to play with children of very proper Anglo-Saxon descent. But both Max and Eli did much of their business with the Ukrainians because they spoke their language and gave them good credit.⁷ An alliance of the dominated, so to speak.⁸

Many years later, Erving Goffman wrote to his colleague anthropologist and linguist Dell Hymes: “You forget that I grew (with Yiddish) in a town where to speak another language was to be suspect of being homosexual” (Hymes 1984:628). The tone is not so playful—almost vengeful. While Jewish adults may have felt fairly comfortable in Dauphin, because they fitted niches quite accepted and respected in the Prairie towns of the 1920s (Gutkin 1980:84–86), Jewish children may have been more often harassed by their peers and by the environment because their non-occupational role did not protect them from verbal and symbolic aggressions. Fredelle Bruser, who was five in 1927—exactly Erving’s age—described very acutely her own mood as she lived in Birch Hills, Saskatchewan (“two streets, a line of grain elevators, and a railway station”: not unlike Dauphin, though much smaller):

Being Jewish, I had long grown accustomed to isolation and difference. Difference was in my bones and blood, and in the pattern of my separate life. My parents were conspicuously unlike other children’s parents in our predominantly Norwegian community. Where my schoolmates were surrounded by blond giants appropriate to a village called Birch Hills, my family suggested still the Russian plains from which they had emigrated years before. (Bruser Maynard 1964:19)

Erving Goffman was never more autobiographical than in the two lines quoted above (which were not written to be published). It is difficult to evaluate to what extent his early childhood experience matched Bruser’s. Dauphin was not as isolated as Birch Hills, but when it comes to the resentment a child may develop when he/she is deprived of Christmas presents, the size of the town matters little. Erving’s sense of alienation may have been close to Fredelle’s:

All year I walked in the shadow of difference; but at Christmas above all, I tasted it sour on my tongue. There was no room at the tree. ‘You have Hanukkah’, my father reminded me. ‘That is our holiday’. (Bruser Maynard 1964:21)

The Brusers were not Orthodox Jews; they cannot be said to have reinforced their daughter’s estrangement by a strict religious stand vis-à-vis the Gentile community at large. Neither did the Goffmans: they were in the middle on the continuum of orthodoxy and secular Judaism. Max and Ann Goffman still spoke some Yiddish at home but they did not systematically teach the language to their children. Erving could affectionately call Frances ‘Schwester’ and drop a few words in Yiddish but that was the extent of his command of the language. The Goffmans celebrated Sabbath and Passover at home, kept kosher and cooked traditional foods such as chicken soup, but Erving was not systematically trained in the Talmud or in Jewish observances and rituals. He had a Bar Mitzvah but did not attend a synagogue after that.

Just as Fredelle’s sense of otherness derived from her own perception of objective differences, it may argued that Erving felt estranged very early on for the same reasons. He was in any case a different child: strong, bright and impossible.⁹ He knew how to play cards by the age of five, as he used to watch the games behind his father’s back. “My son will either be a genius or a gangster”, once said his father to Chuck Bay. Erving also knew very early on what boys did to girls. He loved to poke the eyes out of his sister’s dolls. He also enjoyed conducting small experiments on animals. For example he once observed the reaction of the neighbour’s cat when funnelled alcohol of his own composition (the cat reportedly spent the whole night in the tree and refused to come down). But it was sheer accident when he suffocated his white rabbit; he loved it so much that he squeezed it to death on his chest.¹⁰

While Frances was calm, delicate, obedient to her parents and to her teachers, Erving was an ebullient daredevil. Yet, her mother admired him most—the more she spanked him. “He was the chosen one”, as his sister put it sixty years later. When he was in Junior High, ‘Goofy’, as his friends called him, received a chemistry set. He was enthralled. He soon went beyond the instructions. He could make powder that exploded under the feet (for example, in the staircases of the school). He also became good at electrical experiments. He once got hold of long carbon rods and linked them with wires in order to produce electric arcs. He asked his buddy Hugh Fox to come up and give him a hand. They climbed on the flat roof of the house and pointed the rods towards the neighbour’s windows. A beam of very bright light flooded the house. The neighbour’s panic barely matched ‘Goofy’s’ laughter.

Possibly because he was too busy experimenting, Erving was not too good in Junior High, to his father’s worry: “How come Frances is always first in class? How come you’re only 20th?”. Erving: “Don’t worry, Dad, there are twenty behind”.

And so life went on in Dauphin in t...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Dissecting Goffman
• Part II Reframing Goffman
• Part III Extending Goffman
• Contributors
• Index