This one was recommended by Amazon, presumably based on previous purchases. The book is a series of related essays, originally published in journals and dating from the 1950s. Dr. Goffman seems to be respected elder in the field. It’s something I’m unfamiliar with, so I have no idea whether these ideas have been superseded by later work. Thus, I may be doing the equivalent of reviewing a 1950s text on computer science.


Even if it’s out of date, it’s still pretty interesting. This is “good sociology” or social anthropology; observing, recording and analyzing the way people behave without being “politically correct”, or even political at all.


The first essay is “On Face-Work”, “face” is in the Oriental sense, and Goffman discusses what it means to “lose face” and various ways losing face can be avoided or face, once lost, can be regained. Interestingly, although Goffman uses the Oriental term, he argues that it can be universally applied regardless of culture. Goffman makes the dispassionate but poignant observation that middle and upper class Negroes will avoid situations that might make them lose face with lower class whites. Times change.


“The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” discusses behavior in two wards at a mental hospital - one with relatively “normal” patients and one with schizophrenic girls. Goffman makes the point that one of the characteristics the schizophrenic patients is inappropriate deference; they treat the doctors with undo familiarity, interrupt them, attempt to gain access when they are behind a closed door, etc. But Goffman goes a little beyond this by also watching the behavior of doctors and nurses to see what “normal” deference is. Here’s one of the places where the books shows its age; it’s take for granted that all the doctors will be men and all the nurses will be women, and that it’s appropriate for a doctor to call a nurse by her first name but that a nurse must address a doctor by his title. Goffman does mention that, in this “progressive” hospital, it’s no longer required for nurses to rise when a doctor enters a room. Times change.


There follow short essays on “Embarrassment and Social Organization”, “Alienation from Interaction” (how people avoid a conversation they don’t want to be involved in or unintentionally decline conversation because they are preoccupied with something else) and “Mental Symptoms and the Public Order”, all of which are fairly obvious but still interesting. Almost half the book is devoted to the last essay, “Where The Action Is”, which is about gambling and risk taking. Goffman must have had fun writing this one, because much of it involves observation of gamblers at Las Vegas casinos. This includes an extensive discussion of what “action” is, and its importance to teenagers and men in general (including extensive quotes from Ernest Hemingway’s writings on bullfighting).. Goffman only briefly discusses women and “action”, speculating that young women gamble with their sexual reputations the same way young men gamble with their lives and money.


I’m interested enough to want to read some more of Goffman, and to see what’s been updated. ( )