Goffman and Stigma: general reflections

1. Goffman and Stigma: general reflections

2. Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to work out why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for FIVE DAYS before anyone asked if he was feeling okay. George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proofreader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers. He quietly passed away on Monday, but nobody noticed until Saturday morning when an office cleaner asked why he was still working during the weekend.  His boss Elliot Wachiaski said "George was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn’t say anything. He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself." A post mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. Ironically, George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died....You may want to give your coworkers a nudge occasionally. (Birmingham Sunday Mercury (7th Jan 2001))

3. ‘The first point to note about biographies is that we assume that an individual can have only one of them...’ (81).

4. ‘...this being guaranteed by the laws of physics rather than those of society’ (81).

5. ‘Although the word ‘society’ is nowadays constantly used by laymen in all sorts of political, economic and ethical debates, it is easy to see that it has no recognizable substance. Nobody knows what it means’ (Wilhelm Baldamus, The Structure of Sociological Inference, p. 5).

6. ‘…every individual engages in consequential acts, but most of these are not problematic, and when they are (as when career decisions are made that affect one’s life) the determination and settlement of these bets will often come only after decades, and by then will be obscured by payoffs from many of his other gambles. Action, on the other hand, brings chance-taking and resolution into the same heated moment of experience; the events of action inundate the momentary now with their implications for the life that follows’ (‘Where the action is’, Interaction Ritual 1967, p.261)

7. we are dealing here with ‘common knowledge’, and with a version of sociology that says: one analytical framework for thinking about social life sociologically is to consider the way that life is structured according to what we know. • not book knowledge, not erudition, but knowledge about one another, and about the proper place of that knowledge in the way we deal with one another; and skill in applying that knowledge. It is, as Wittgenstein once put it, a knowledge, quite simply, of ‘how to go on’.

8. “...the arts of piercing an individual’s efforts at calculated unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behaviour, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained” (PSEL 20)

9. Sincerity and Cynicism • Sincerity – we believe the reality we are trying to sustain (PSEL 42 – Sartre’s attentive pupil; the yawning student is the really attentive one;) • Cynicism • we do not take others seriously: Orwell on knowing the second verse of the national anthem • we do not take our own performance seriously

10. Neither sincerity nor cynicism but the performance of sincerity and of cynicism • range of commitment, from: total commitment, e.g. basketball coaches, flight deck personnel on aircraft carriers, to: non-serious participation, e.g. older children on a merry-go-round.

11. ‘There are not many French cooks who are really Russian spies, and perhaps there are not many women who play the part of wife to one man and mistress to another, but these duplicities do occur, often being sustained successfully for long periods of time. This suggests that while persons usually are what they appear to be, such appearances could still have been managed. There is, then, a statistical relation between appearance and reality, not an intrinsic or necessary one’ (PSEL p.77)

12. role distance: implies range of commitment: total commitment, e.g. basketball coaches, flight deck personnel on aircraft carriers; non-serious participation, e.g. children on a merry-go-round • strategic performance – strategy can take many forms, from being assertive to being its opposite (PSEL 48 American college girls; Shetland crofters) • we may and often do decide not to take others’ failed performances seriously (‘Face Work’ )

13. Goffman’s‘methods’ • observation • eclectic use of sources - newspaper clippings, novels, memoirs, imagined examples (e.g. in analysis of talk) systematic ethnographic findings/data (mental hospitals, Scottish crofting community in the Hebrides, petrol station attendants) • imagination and use of metaphor (both systematically and anddramatic effect • conceptual constructivism/proliferation of terminology

14. ‘The most fortunate of normals is likely to have his half-hidden failing, and for every little failing there is a social occasion when it will loom large’ (152) • ‘The question of social norms is central, but the concern might be less for uncommon deviations from the ordinary than for ordinary deviations from the common’ (152)

15. ‘The term stigma will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatises one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another’ (Stigma, p.13)

16. Values and Norms in social life • Durkheim – social integration depends on a shared set of values, values that we may be able to specify in terms of traditions of thought (religion, ideas written down in books). • Weber – influence of ascetic Protestantism on the birth of the modern world. • Talcott Parsons: normative functionalism (societies are held together by shared values and norms)

17. Goffman on norms • not interested in ‘shared beliefs’; what makes a world in common possible can be investigated without any reference to specific sets of ideas. • The norms here are those whose maintenance or violation has much more direct effect on psychological wellbeing. • They are identity norms: and a mere desire to uphold these norms is not enough, because ‘it is a matter of the individual’s condition, not his will’.

18. Biography and stigma • The ‘Puritan’ character of stigma behaviour (one trait stands for all the rest): e.g. shouting at blind people; attributing mental illness to those in wheelchairs.

19. Identity and identity norms: • Sightedness • literacy ( some individuals may not measure up). • physical attractiveness, sometimes quite well-defined (everyone may fall short in some way).

20. The politics of identity • ‘the special situation of the stigmatised person is that society tells him he is a member of the wider group, which means he is a normal human being, but that he is also ‘different’ in some degree, and that it would be foolish to deny this difference. This differentness itself of course derives from society, for ordinarily before a difference can matter much it must be conceptualised collectively...’ (Stigma p.149)

21. Goffman on Deviance • Doesn’t like the term (‘there are categories of persons who are created by students of society, and then studied by them’ (167))

22. Three types of normal-deviant relationship • A category of people may support a norm but define themselves as unable to support it. • Voluntary alienation • Deviator remains attached to the norm because of cooperation between normal and deviant: others respect his secret or don’t draw attention to it, and he in turn doesn’t push claims for recognition.

23. ‘The general identity values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living’ (153). • ‘the patterns of response and adaptation considered in this essay seem totally understandable within the framework of normal psychology’ (155) • Someone with abnormal beliefs will employ familiar ‘normal’ strategies for concealing them; the ageing person who cannot recall names may be perfectly able to avoid difficult ‘naming and shaming’ situations (so he/she is not too old for that).

24. ‘The normal deviant’ • Goffman reaches the point where he ironises the earlier phrase ‘we normals’. • People suddenly relieved of a stigma may feel a new personality and be very able to act that way; people who have just acquired a defect may be able to adapt equally quickly. • ‘That both types of transformation can be sustained...suggests that standard capacities and training equip us to handle both possibilities’ (158). • Painfulness of sudden stigma comes not from confusion of identity but from knowing all too well what one has become.

25. Self and other, normal and stigmatized • ‘the stigmatised and the normal are part of each other’ • If the stigmatized fails to present a failing in a normal way, the normal may step in to do so. • If the normal gives unnecessary help, the stigmatized may accept it out of respect for the effort (p.144-5) • Role reversal in psychodramas (mental patients can do it as well). • Professional representatives of a stigmatised group may caricature their identity to other members of the group. (e.g. British Library staff).

26. The problem of significance • Stigma symbols are to be contrasted not with status symbols (conventional markers of position in social structure) but prestige symbols. Stigma symbols are signs that are effective in drawing attention to something debasing, which breaks up what would otherwise be something coherent. G is not interested in differences of significance here: so he says that the shaved head of the collaborator after end of World war II (e.g. Paris) is one e.g., but so is someone ‘affecting a middle class manner’ by using sophisticated sounding words but pronouncing them incorrectly.

27. The problem of empathy in Goffman • There seems to be not much of it. • BUT ‘direct empathy’ is not the sociologist’s task. • If there is a task here it is to say something interesting (analytically interesting, sociologically interesting) about the plight of others. • Sociology is about indirection, not telling it to you straight, not calling a spade a spade.

28. How to think sociologically about Angelina Jolie ‘when stigma refers to parts of the body that the normally qualified must themselves conceal in public places, then passing is inevitable, whether desired or not. A woman who has had a mastectomy or a Norwegian male sex offender who has been penalised by castration are forced to present themselves falsely in almost all situations, having to conceal their unconventional secrets because of everyone’s having to conceal the conventional ones’ (Stigma p.95)

29. What is sociologically interesting about individuals is not their individuality but the social circles to which they belong and the typical situations, describable as such, in which they find themselves – e.g. the single double life and the double double life (p.98).

30. Double biographies (99) – old Jews telling Jokes 2 (part 2, 4.46)

31. General lessons • ‘the normal and the stigmatised are not persons but rather perspectives’ (163-4). • Stigmatizing attributes do not determine the nature of normal and stigmatized roles. • In sociology we need an analytical perspective that can cut across specific problems, particular domains of interest (‘the sociology of education, culture, politics, art, whatever). Progress in this area ‘is not likely to come from those who restrict their interest exclusively to one substantive area’ (173).

32. Can such progress come from those who restrict their interest to one discipline?