Goffman and Social Organization by Greg Smith

Author:Greg Smith [Smith, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415112048
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1999-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Early ethnographic writings

As an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba in Canada in the 1940s Goffman initially pursued a career in the natural sciences and had intended to graduate with a degree in chemistry. It was only towards the end of undergraduate studies that he was drawn to the social sciences, and sociology in particular. At this time he transferred to the University of Toronto, where he graduated in 1945 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. With this in mind it is not surprising that his graduate work in sociology initially involved experimental and statistical research. His Master’s thesis employs a quantitative measure, but not successfully. In many ways, this project was an inauspicious beginning for one of the most prominent sociologists of the twentieth century, and it contains little to indicate either the scope or quality of the work to come.

For his dissertation, ‘Communication conduct in an island community’ (1953), Goffman chose to study everyday life on a small island off the coast of Scotland, which he called ‘Dixon’. This was an intriguing setting for a number of reasons. Perhaps nowhere could have been more antithetical to the Chicago of the 1940s, a maelstrom of crime, capitalism and ethnic diversity set against a rapidly expanding and already huge urban landscape. Dixon, by contrast, was little more than a rock jutting out of the Atlantic, struggling to support about four hundred inhabitants. Instead of ethnic diversity, Dixon possessed an exclusively white population, internally differentiated along class lines. Crime was rare and the island exhibited a strong sense of mechanical solidarity. The virtual absence of vegetation on the island further intensified the islanders’ sense that theirs was an almost exclusively public existence, since neighbours could almost always observe their behaviour.

Dixon was hardly an obvious research site for an ambitious man, following in the footsteps of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, to study. Goffman must have seemed equally foreign to the local crofters. When he first arrived on the island the local children rushed to meet his boat, only to hide their faces when Goffman stepped on to the island. Alarmed, he asked one of the adults for an explanation, and was told that some of the children had never seen a stranger before. Dixon and downtown Chicago might as well have been on different planets. Goffman explained his presence on the island to them by saying that he was interested in ‘the economics of island farming’ (1953:2), an explanation which they may not have found very convincing, especially after he began work as assistant to the washer-up in the kitchen of the local hotel.

Presumably, the Dixon study could have been written successfully in a conventional way, as a detailed ethnographic case study about an island community. Perhaps Goffman could have attempted to emulate Malinowski’s great study of the Trobriand islanders, with the added spin that Dixon is a lot closer to Western civilization. Perhaps in time Goffman could have written The Sexual Lives of Crofters or published his fieldnotes as historically interesting diaries (nowadays a growing industry).

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