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Broken Rules. Goffman's search for the key to this nonverbal language began at the University of Chicago. Born 46 years ago, in Mannville, Alberta, the son of a dry-goods merchant, he graduated from the University of Toronto and went to Chicago for dissertation work in sociology. There he came under the influence, which he fully acknowledges, of Charles Horton Cooley and G. H. Mead, whose theories on personal interaction, small groups and the social character of the self still inform sociology courses. An energetic and devoted scholar who avoids formal social gatherings, Goffman is currently a research professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1955, before joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Goffman spent a year of research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His experiences there, recorded in Asylums, strongly affected his developing theories on social behavior. Goffman's understanding of mental patients borrows more from the unwritten rules of social occasions than from psychiatric theory. In his opinion, many inmates are simply people who have so flagrantly broken the rules of seemly behavior that they have been dismissed from the game. "I know of no psychotic misconduct," Goffman has written, "that cannot be matched precisely in everyday life by the conduct of persons who are not psychologically ill nor considered to be so." Life in mental hospitals—"storage dumps" is one of his kindlier descriptions—also has its rituals. The patient who throws feces at an attendant, Goffman argues, is using a ceremonial idiom "that is as exquisite in its way as a bow from the waist. Whether he knows it or not, the patient speaks the same ritual language as his captors; he merely says what they do not wish to hear."
Eclectic Scholar. Such mordant views have made Goffman something of a maverick in his field. His work has been attacked as overspeculative, his scholarship as too eclectic; in illustrating a point, he is as likely to quote from a novel as from a sociological text. Goffman has also been accused of insulating his theories with purely supportive evidence. Then too, there may be some unexpressed envy on the part of his sociological peers about the fact that Goffman can write well; although his books have pages of jargon, they are enlightened with passages of dazzling clarity and wit.
Even his critics concede that Goffman has skillfully explored an area of life that has until now been both neglected and misunderstood. "The individual is known by the social bonds that hold him," writes Goffman in Behavior in Public Places. "And through these bonds he is held to something that is a social entity with a life substance of its own." However trivial social exchange may seem at the levels Goffman examines, "it is out of these unpromising materials that the gossamer reality of social occasions is built. We find that our little inhibitions are carefully tied into a network, that the waste products of our serious activities are worked into a pattern, and that this network and this pattern are made to carry important social functions. Surely this is a credit to the thoroughness with which our lives are pressed into the service of society."
*Besides Behavior, they include: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, Encounters, Stigma and Interaction Ritual.