Erving Goffman - Life and Career

Life and Career

Goffman was born in 1922 in Mannville, Alberta, Canada to Max Goffman and Anne Goffman (née Averbach). He was from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had joined the great inflow of Russians into Canada just before the beginning of the century. The family later migrated to Dauphin, in Manitoba, where his father had what must have been a fairly successful tailoring business. Goffman attended St. Johns Technical High School in Winnipeg then later became a student at the University of Manitoba (with chemistry as his ‘major subject’) in the first year of the Second World War, but left off studying to move to Ottawa to work in the film industry for the National Film Board of Canada established by John Grierson. Later he developed his interest in sociology. It was also during this time that he met Dennis Wrong, a renowned North American sociologist of the time. This meeting worked as a motivation to leave Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a B.A. in sociology and anthropology in 1945. Afterwards, he moved on to the University of Chicago and received his M.A. and Ph.D for sociology, in 1949 and 1953 respectively. While studying at the University of Chicago, Goffman did field research in the Shetland Islands. The research done here gave Goffman the inspiration to write his first major work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. After graduation from the University of Chicago, from 1954-1957 Goffman was a research fellow at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda. Participant observation done here led to his essays on mental illness and 'total institutions' which came together to from another one of his works Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Goffman was later a professor in the sociology department at Berkeley from 1957-1968. After Berkeley, Goffman moved on to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1982.