In a brilliant series of books about social behavior, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, and Stigma, Erving Goffman has exposed all that is at stake when people meet face to face. Goffman’s work, once of the great intellectual achievements of our time, is an endlessly fascinating commentary on how we enact ourselves by our responses to and our readings of other people.

From the exemplary opening essay of Interaction Ritual , “On Face-Work,” —a full account of the extraordinary repertoire of maneuvers we employ in social encounters in order to “save face”—to the final, and classic, essay “Where the Action Is,”—an examination of people in risky occupations and situations: gamblers, criminals, coal miners, stock speculators—Goffman astounds us with the unexpected richness and complexity of brief encounters between people. For Goffman, as for Freud, the extreme cases are of interest because of the light they shed on the normal: The study of the trapeze artist is worthwhile because each of us is on the wire from time to time.

戈夫曼（1922～1982）

Goffman,Erving

美国社会学家。符号互动论的代表人物,拟剧论的倡导人。1945年毕业于多伦多大学,1953年在芝加哥大学获博士学位。1962～1968年任加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校社会学教授。1968年在宾夕法尼亚大学任本杰明·富兰克林人类学和社会学教授。1981～1982年任美国社会学协会主席。1945～1951年间曾在设得兰群岛进行实地调查,并据此写出他的第一部重要著作《日常生活中的自我表现》。戈夫曼深受 H.G.布鲁默等符号互动论者的影响。他以个人经验观察的结果为主要资料来源,对社会互动、邂逅、聚集、小群体和异常行为进行了大量研究。其理论观点主要有：①在人际交往形式的研究中首创拟剧论,认为社会行为就是社会表演,人们在互动过程中,小心翼翼地扮演自己的多种角色,从而使自身的形象能为自己的目的服务。②在对异常行为研究中提出污记说,即对能够损害某人（群体）声誉的社会标记的研究 ,并由此提出“越轨生涯”概念。他的研究成果得到较为广泛的赞同。其他著作有《避难所》、《邂逅》、《公共场所行为》、《污记》、《互动仪式》、《框架分析》和《交谈方式》等。