Erving Goffman as Social Anthropologist

Richard Handler (2012, 179) once called Erving Goffman “the most anthropological of all the great sociologists.” This trenchant remark draws attention to Goffman’s distinctive relationship with anthropology and, more broadly, to the close—yet often overlooked—ties between the sociology and anthropology programs at the University of Chicago, where Goffman was trained.

In a 1980 interview with Jef Verhoeven, Goffman acknowledged his intellectual debt to anthropology and its leading figures: “My main influences were Warner and Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim, and Hughes” (Goffman [1980] 1993, 321). His preference was for ecologically grounded, theoretically minded, interdisciplinary studies—research based on direct observation, akin to the methods of ethologists studying animals and humans in natural settings.

This essay explores Goffman’s passion for anthropology and his resistance to disciplinary separatism. It makes the case for interdisciplinary research and the generative possibilities that emerge when anthropological and sociological imaginations are mixed and crossfertilize.

Although Goffman earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago, taught in the sociology department at Berkeley, and was elected president of the American Sociological Association, his relationship with the discipline remained fraught. Interviews and memoirs collected in the Erving Goffman Archives (EGA, 2007-2024) offer numerous testimonies to his ambivalence toward academic sociology.

Dean MacCannell (2009), who studied with Goffman at Berkeley, recalls that EG (as those close to him sometimes called him), “was very, very derisive about sociology and sociologists. He held them in very low esteem, always saying that he preferred to be identified as involved in ethnography and anthropology more so than sociology.” Gary Fine (2009), then an undergraduate at Penn, remembers Goffman urging him to opt for a graduate program in anthropology, rather than sociology. And Carol Brooks Gardner (2008) switched midstream from sociology to the Annenberg School of Communication to complete her Ph.D. under Goffman’s supervision.

Goffman’s appointment in 1968 to a chaired position at the University of Pennsylvania further reflected his ambivalence toward sociology. There was no mention of sociology in his distinguished title: the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Psychology. His office, located in the University Museum rather than the sociology department, established social distance from his sociology colleagues.

For years, he avoided sociology department meetings, preferring to collaborate with scholars such as Dell Hymes, Bill Labov, and John Gumperz who studied language and interaction in other fields. Hymes, who played a key role in recruiting Goffman from Berkeley to Penn, enticed him with the opportunity to organize an interdisciplinary seminar and research center embracing such luminaries as Labov, Gregory Bateson, Ray Birdwhistell, Paul Ekman, Ned Hall, and Robert Sommer.

Goffman’s Intellectual Lineage and the Chicago Tradition

Goffman is the most cited North American sociologist, yet only 38% of citations to his work appear in sociology sources; the remainder are distributed across the wide array of social science disciplines (Shalin 2023, 2025). This dispersion reflects Goffman’s reluctance to fully embrace a professional identity as a sociologist and his enduring preference for ethnographic methods—an orientation consistent with the interdisciplinary ethos of the Chicago sociology tradition. It also signals a deeper affinity with anthropology and related fields, a connection often overlooked by both sociologists and anthropologists, and one that this essay seeks to bring into focus.

Historically, sociology and anthropology at the University of Chicago were closely intertwined. Until 1929, they shared a single department, and even after the formal split, students in both programs continued to take theory and methods courses together, shaped by a characteristically interdisciplinary approach. Two figures exemplifying this tradition—and central to Goffman’s intellectual formation—were W. Lloyd Warner and Everett C. Hughes.

Warner had studied anthropology at Berkeley and Harvard and was greatly influenced by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who had initially prompted him to do fieldwork in Northern Australia among the Murngin—the subject of Warner’s never-defended doctoral dissertation, later published as A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (Stocking 1995, 340). He is best known for the ambitious Yankee City project, where he set out to “use the techniques and ideas which have been developed by social anthropologists in primitive society in order to obtain a more accurate understanding of an American community” (Warner and Lunt 1941, 14). There, he drew on his skills as social anthropologist to pinpoint the status markers—such as manners, art collections, travel, and knowledge of foreign languages—that distinguished old money from the nouveau riche. Goffman’s first publication, “Symbols of Class Status” (Goffman 1951), bears the imprint of Warner’s research agenda.

Goffman’s interest in urban anthropology was also stimulated by Warner’s protégé, Ray Birdwhistell, a pioneer in socal anthropology and founder of kinesics who had taught Goffman as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto and recommended him for graduate study to his Chicago mentor. Birdwhistell’s cross-disciplinary approach sought to develop techniques for the objective analysis of body motion—facial expression, gestures, stances, and other kinesthestic behaviors (Birdwhistell 1970, 49). Goffman’s landmark study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life extended this line of inquiry, exploring how individuals and organizations construct public facades to manage impressions, while concealing their unseemly backstage realities.

Everett Hughes, another pillar of the Chicago sociology tradition, shared Warner’s passion for urban anthropology and naturalistic observation. He mentored a generation of sociologists, including Goffman, Howard Becker, Eliot Freidson and Robert Habenstein, schooling them in social ethnography. Hughes resisted the growing divide between sociology and anthropology, emphasizing participant observation as the cornerstone of sound research. As he explained: 

We put them [students] out in areas of Chicago and instead of having them pick a problem ahead of time we did it the other way around. We said, “Study the area of four or five blocks, learn all about it that you can as an anthropologist would, and then decide upon the problem which you would study in a similar area.” (Hughes 1974)

This pedagogical approach aimed to steer apprentice sociologists away from formal hypothesis testing, which had become standard practice in the discipline, and toward generating their research questions out of issues that emerged in their fieldwork. Goffman imbibed this spirit, as reflected in the advice he gave to his student Marjorie Goodwin: “You don’t want to be hypothesis testing. You want to be hypothesis generating” (Goodwin to Shalin, personal communication, February 11, 2024).

Goffman applied this strategy in his own doctoral research. Initially planning to use the Thematic Apperception Test to explore class differences, he ultimately abandoned that rigid approach in favor of situated observation of communication dynamics in a crofter community in the Shetland Isles. This ethnographic fieldwork laid the foundation for his theory of interaction order. In his dissertation, Goffman combined a concern with social order and ritual life with a keen anthropological sensitivity to communicative practices. He paid homage to Emile Durkheim for demonstrating that social situations “constitute a reality sui generis” (Goffman 1964, 134).

After completing his PhD, Goffman took a job at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he did fieldwork at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C.. Posing as an athletic director, he hobnobbed with patients and immersed himself in the life of the institution, observing patients and staff and taking notes on the organizational dynamics. The resulting study became Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Goffman 1961), a landmark in ethnographic sociology.

Goffman’s Later Work and the Case for Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Goffman’s next major fieldwork took him to the gambling halls of Nevada, where he did research undercover, working as a Blackjack dealer. His license was eventually revoked for card counting, but he compiled enough ethnographic material to write the essay “Where the Action Is” (Goffman 1967). In it, Goffman illuminated a culture that valorizes risk-taking, offering a glimpse of America as a society where success demands a willingness to take a gamble.

In the years that followed, Goffman collaborated with linguists in pioneering research premised on the idea that scholars of language and communication could benefit from close attention to social interaction. Here we can detect the influence of another polymathic genius, Edward Sapir, the anthropologist and linguist who had taught at the University of Chicago before Goffman’s time. In his essay “The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society,” Sapir ([1927] 1963, 556) observed: “We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.”

Goffman went to great length to unravel this code in his most ambitious theoretical work, Frame Analysis (1974, 7). There, he drew on the insights of another anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, who had conceptualized framing through observing animal play behavior in a zoo—specifically, the signalling of a shift from routine interaction to play, via the metapragmatic message “this is play.” Goffman acknowledged Bateson’s influence while distinguishing his own approach: “Bateson identified framing as a psychological process; I see it as inhering in the organization of events and cognition.” He credited Bateson with introducing the concept of “bracketing” and with recognizing that individuals can intentionally produce framing confusion in social interactions.

Bateson’s work also shaped Goffman’s thinking about mental illness. In his essay “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Bateson ([1956] 1972, 191-207) proposed the concept of the “double bind” to explain, ingeniously if problematically, how conflicting communicative cues might contribute to mental illness. Goffman, given his fieldwork at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for Asylums (1961), was likely influenced by this perspective, even if he did not cite Bateson directly. According to Bateson, the inability to correctly identify or shift between communicative frames—such as joking, grieving, or stage acting—could signal a psychiatric abnormality like schizophrenia. Goffman’s own approach to psychiatric disorders as violations of the interaction order resonates with this view (Shalin 2014, 2025).

Throughout his career, Goffman remained committed to resisting the increasing compartmentalization of the social sciences. He shared Everett Hughes’ concern about the professionalization of sociology and its growing reliance on standardized survey data and statistical methods. “I doubt very much whether we know the best possible prerequisite training for sociologists,” Hughes warned (2009, 467-68). “If we apply rigid rules of entry to training, we may limit too much the circulation of people, hence of minds, from our branch of social science to another.” In his 1954 presidential address, Hughes lamented the increasing professional isolationism, methodological rigidity, and narrowing of theoretical scope in sociology:

While professionalizing an activity may raise the competence of some who pursue it by standardizing methods and giving license only to those who meet the standard, it also may limit creative activity by denying license to some who let their imagination and their observations run far afield, and by putting candidates for the license (Ph.D.) so long in a straitjacket that they never move freely again. Our problem, as sociologists, in the next few years will be to resist the drive for professionalizing, and maintain broad tolerance for all who would study societies, no matter what their method. (Hughes 2009 [1963], 455)

Goffman echoed this critique in his own (never delivered) presidential address, where he lampooned disciplinary pretensions. He mocked economists for the “failure of rigorously calculated predictions,” psychologists who “ignore … many critical variables,” and members of his own tribe for their own shortcomings: “So we haven’t managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it” (Goffman 1983, 2).

For Goffman, efforts to compartmentalize the social sciences was inimical to free inquiry. The rationalization and departmentalization of disciplines carves up social reality into discrete domains—sociological, anthropological, psychological, economic, linguistic, and so on—each demanding its own methods and theories. But these domains are integrated in social reality, which does not arrive with the domains pre-labeled. Goffman insisted that fresh insights often emerge when scholars move beyond their discipline-set theories and methods and draw on diverse sources: biographical experience, journalism, literary fiction, and more.

In this spirit, Goffman pioneered a form of self-ethnography. A scholar of Russian-Jewish descent, he transformed the “Potemkin village” metaphor into a powerful research program that revealed how impression management shapes behavior in both private and public settings. Materials in the Erving Goffman Archives (EGA, 2007-2024) show that Goffman employed these strategies not only in his scholarship but also in his personal life. The most poignant example is his essay “The Insanity of Place” (1971), where he enciphered intimate details of his wife Angelica Schuyler Choate Goffman’s mental illness and eventual suicide. This personal tragedy profoundly influenced Goffman’s engagement with social psychiatry and led him to revise key aspects of his earlier work.

As I argue in Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination (Shalin 2025a, 2025b), Goffman’s entire scholarly corpus is crypto-biographical—deeply informed by his commitment to self-ethnography. His work stands as a testament to the power of interdisciplinary inquiry—by intellectual mavericks who resist the constraints of disciplinary orthodoxy.

Works Cited

Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” [1956] 1972. Pp. 205-232 in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. London: Jason Aronson Inc.

Birdwhistell, Ray L. 1970. Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brooks Gardner, Carol. 2008. “I Don’t Have Words Enough to Describe Goffman’s Generosity.” EGA, http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/archives/interactionism/goffman/gardner_08.html.

Fine, Gary. 2009. “Goffman Turns to Me and Says, “Only a Schmuck Studies His Own Life.” EGA, http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/archives/interactionism/goffman/fine_09.html.

EGA. 2007-2024. Erving Goffman Archives, http://cdclv.unlv.edu/ega/.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

———. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

———. 1964. “The Neglected Situation.” American Anthropologist. 66 (6, part 2): 133-136.

———. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.

———. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row.

———. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48:1-17.

Handler, Richard. 2012. “What I’m Reading: What’s up, Doctor Goffman? Tell us where the action is!” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18:179-90.

Hughes, Everett. 1971. The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.

———. 1974. Letter of Hughes to Milton Singer. April 29.

———. 2009 [1954]. “Professional and Career Problems of Sociology.” Pp. 464-72 in Everett C. Hughes. The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers. New Brunswick: Transaction Books

———. 2009 [1963]. “Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination.” Pp. 478-95 in Everett C. Hughes. The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers. New Brunswick: Transaction Books

MacCannell, Dean. 2009. “Some of Goffman’s Guardedness and Verbal Toughness Was a Way of Giving Himself the Space and Time to Do the Work He Loved.” EGA, http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/archives/interactionism/goffman/maccannell_09.html.

Shalin, Dmitri. 2014. “Goffman on Mental Illness: ‘Asylums’ and ‘The Insanity of Place’ Revisited.” Symbolic Interaction 37:2-40.

———. 2023. “Erving Goffman: The Social Science Maverick. Assessing the Interdisciplinary Impact of the Most Cited American Sociologist.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 52(6):752-777.

———. 2025. Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination. London/New York: Routledge.

———. 2025b. Podcast about Erving Goffman Biography, https://newbooksnetwork.com/erving-manuel-goffman.

Stocking, George W., Jr. 1995. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

Verhoeven, Jef. [1980] 1993. “An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980.”  Research on Language and Social Interaction 26:317-348.

Warner, W. Lloyd, and Paul S. Lunt. 1941. The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale University Press.

This piece was edited by Ira Bashkow and Benjamin Hegarty.