Sociology & Social Psychology
Erving Goffman
The Sociologist Who Watched Us Watching Ourselves
Where to Start Reading
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
The book that made Goffman famous. Social interaction as theatre — front stage, back stage, audience, props. Readable, witty, and once you've read it, you can't unsee the performance. Start here.
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
How people manage identities that deviate from social norms — disability, mental illness, criminal record, any form of 'difference.' Short, compassionate, and far ahead of its time.
Asylums
Goffman's study of psychiatric hospitals as 'total institutions' — places that strip identity and rebuild it according to institutional logic. Based on fieldwork done undercover. Disturbing and brilliant.
“The individual does not simply go about his business; he goes about constrained to sustain a viable image of himself in the eyes of others.”