Goffman, Erving

(born June 11, 1922, Manville, Alta., Can.—died Nov. 19, 1982, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) Canadian-U.S. sociologist. Goffman taught principally at the Universities of California and Pennsylvania. He studied primarily face-to-face communication and related rituals of social interaction; his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) laid out the dramaturgical perspective he used in subsequent studies, such as Asylums (1961) and Stigma (1964). In Frame Analysis (1979) and Forms of Talk (1981), he focused on the ways people “frame” or define social reality in the communicative process. See also interactionism.

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