Erving Goffman: Life and intellectual genealogy [Expression of Concern]

Abstract

What does happen when two or more persons are in a face to face situation? How the interaction develops when one of them commits an infamy, presents a physical disability or if he is considered as a mental patient? Erving Goffman (1922-1982), of Canadian origin, has tried to answer to this type of questions along his research life. It result an abundant, exciting but also controversial work because if some analysts see in Goffman the principal sociologist of the second half of the 20th century, others think that his analyses only constitute the reflection of a «petit bourgeois» point of view on the urban American society. This article presents both the life and the intellectual genealogy of this sociologist.