Stigma;: Notes on the management of spoiled identity

by Erving Goffman

Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.

Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person's feelings about himself and his relationship to "normals" He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America's leading social analysts.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Social Science, Mental Health

147 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.
Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has taken me so long to read, but mostly because other things have gotten in the way. Really, it is the sort of short book that should take an afternoon, well, or a life time. This is a bloody great book.

Stigma is an odd idea. You know, Jesus had stigmata – the marks of his death, and therefore resurrection, branded on his body. They were there for all to see. And this is part of the point of the stigmatised. They have a mark that marks them out from those around them – the normals – and this mark is both an identity badge and also a source of shame and difference.

What is most striking about this idea is that a spoiled identity – one that is open to be stigmatised – isn’t only a physically obvious mark. It can also be a characteristic such as being homosexual – much more in Goffman’s time or in Russia or Uganda today say. But it isn’t enough to hide such an identity. Take a prostitute as an example – clearly there are places where a prostitute would much prefer not being known as a prostitute. The standard joke comes to mind of the stripper seeing her uncle or father in the brothel she works in and of her then having to hide. How we love ironic inversions. But prostitutes will hardly get enough work to make a living if they don’t let some people, possible clients, know they are prostitutes. Disclosure and the subsequent risks involved are available to all potentially stigmatised people, but such are virtually inevitable.

This is the book where Goffman came up with the idea of ‘passing’, I believe. Passing is when you share a stigma, but it is not so obvious on you that people might not remain unaware of it. Light skinned Aboriginals in Australia, for example, who, in fact, are often criticised for identifying with Aboriginals at all once their secret is out. “He’s whiter than I am….” Here the insult is felt by the normals who recognise in the Aboriginal still prepared to identify with the stigmatised minority as a rejection of the normals they so easily could assimilate into.

And then how and when should one ‘disclose’ their belonging to a stigmatised group if one can pass? The more interesting problem is around how ‘normal’ you will ever be allowed to be if you don't pass. There is a lovely scene in East of Eden where the cuckolded brother is recovering from his wife leaving him (not just a broken heart, but I've a feeling she stabbed him too) with his two sons and suddenly he realises that his Chinese servant has stopped talking with a Chinaman accent. The Chinese guy says he generally has to talk like that because that is what is expected of him and people literally couldn’t understand him if he didn’t ‘tark rike ris’.

Goffman has such a good eye. I guess the cliché is that he is ‘unflinching’ – and I really will give him that. His final point is that there are no real normals. We are all potentially discreditable. You know, one fart away from a spoiled identity. And if not now, we all hope to grow old enough for this to become virtually a matter of course. And we are not as innocent as we make out. Normals play act mocking the stereotypes of the stigmatised and the stigmatised do the same in mocking normals. The point being that to be able to play act the other means a kind of knowledge of the other – one which might have otherwise lead to empathy.

But, we are no better than we are. What is interesting here is the relationship between the individual and society. There is a sense where we desperately want to believe that the world is made up of individuals – but a quick glance at how we treat those with a stigma puts paid to that. We group people and force them to conform to our idea of how they should behave. Stopping them constantly from truly belonging outside of our definition of what is and is not right for them. They are not individuals; they are representatives of their group, of their kind.

This is such a good book and such a quick read – it is only about 140 pages. But it contains so much, particularly little quotes and footnotes along the way where the stigmatised discuss their strategies and their fears. Honestly, a wonderful read.

Just one thing before I finish - I have an intellectually disabled sister. Her disability is quite obvious, although, perhaps made more so in my mind as it has been a source of shame for much of my life. Anyway, I take her out sometimes and she often says that children have done something - made a rude face or tried to hit her. I generally tell her not to be so stupid and we continue on our way. So, of course, this quote Goffman finds along the way from someone with a stigma stopped me.

"One day I suddenly realised that I had become so self-conscious and afraid of all strange children that, like animals, they knew I was afraid, so that even the mildest and most amiable of them were automatically prompted to derision by my own shrinking and dread."

Here are some quotes.



Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in establishing settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. Page 2

We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. Page 2

A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype… page 3

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. Page 5

We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable, but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as ‘sixth sense,’ or ‘understanding’. Page 5

Where such repair is possible, what often results is not the acquisition of fully normal status, but a transformation of self from someone with a particular blemish into someone with a record of having corrected a particular blemish. Page 9

Ex-mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be taken as a sign of. Page 15

One day I suddenly realised that I had become so self-conscious and afraid of all strange children that, like animals, they knew I was afraid, so that even the mildest and most amiable of them were automatically prompted to derision by my own shrinking and dread. Page 17

The term ‘category’ is perfectly abstract and can be applied to any aggregate, in this case persons with a particular stigma. Page 23

Since it is through our sense of sight that stigma of others most frequently becomes evident, the term visibility is perhaps not too misleading. Actually, the more general term, ‘perceptibility’ would be more accurate, and ‘evidentness’ more accurate still. Page 48

The area of stigma management, then, might be seen as something that pertains mainly to public life, to contact between strangers or mere acquaintances, to one end of a continuum whose other pole is intimacy. Page 51

Thus, whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the finger tips of society have reached bluntly into the contact, even here putting us in our place. Page 53

By personal identity, I have in mind only the first two ideas—positive marks or identity pegs, and the unique combination of life history items that come to be attached to the individual with the help of these pegs for his identity. Page 57

Whenever an occupation carries with it a change in name, recorded or not, one can be sure that an important breach is involved between the individual and his old world. Page 58

While the biography has been used by social scientist, especially in the form of a career life history, little attention has been given to the general properties of the concept, except in noting that biographies are very subject to retrospective construction. Page 62

Although there is ample fictional, and even some case history, material on prostitutes, there is very little material of any kind on pimps. Page 79

This partitioning of the individual’s world into forbidden, civil, and back places establishes the going price for revealing or concealing and the significance of being known about or not known about, whatever his choice of information strategies. Page 82

A final possibility must now be considered, one that allows the individual to forego all the others. He can voluntarily disclose himself, thereby radically transforming his situation from that of an individual with information to manage to that of an individual with uneasy social situations to manage, from that of a discreditably person to that of a discredited one. Page 100

There is also ‘disclosure etiquette,’ a formula whereby the individual admits his failing in a matter of fact way, supporting the assumption that those present are above such concerns while preventing them from trapping themselves into showing they are not. Page 101

Whether closely allied with his own kind or not, the stigmatized individual may exhibit identity ambivalence when he obtains a close sight of his own kind behaving in a stereotyped way, flamboyantly or pitifully acting out the negative attributes imputed to them. The sight may repel him, since after all he supports the norms of the wider society, but his social and psychological identification with these offenders holds him to what repels him, transforming repulsion into shame, and then transforming ashamedness itself into something of which he is ashamed. Pages 107-8

He is likely to be warned against ‘minstrelization’ whereby the stigmatized person ingratiatingly acts out before normal the full dance of bad qualities imputed to his kind, thereby consolidating a life situation into a clownish role. Page 110

This something else is groups, in the broad sense of like-situated individuals, and this is only to be expected, since what an individual is, or could be, derives from the place of his kind in the social structure. Page 112

The individual’s real group, then, is the aggregate of person who are likely to have to suffer the same deprivations as he suffers because of having the same stigma; his real ‘group,’ in fact, is the category which can serve as his discrediting. Page 113

The character these spokesmen allow the individual is generated by the relation he has to those of his own kind. If he turns to his group, he is loyal and authentic; if he turns away, he is craven and a fool. Here, surely, is a clear illustration of a basic sociological theme: the nature of an individual, as he himself and we impute it to him, is generated by the nature of his group affiliations. Page 113

By hard work and persistent self-training he should fulfil ordinary standards as fully as he can, stopping short only when the issue of normalification arises; that is, where his efforts might give the impression that he is trying to deny his differentness. Page 115

And because normals have their troubles, too, the stigmatized individual should not feel bitter, resentful, or self-pitying. A cheerful, outgoing manner should be cultivated. Page 116

In these circumstances the stigmatized individual may, for example, attempt to ‘break the ice,’ explicitly referring to his failing in a way that shows he is detached, able to take his condition in his stride. In addition to matter-of-factness, levity is also recommended. Page 116

Innumerable times I have seen the fear and bewilderment in people’s eyes vanish as I have stretched out my hand for help, and I have felt life and warmth stream from the helping hands I have taken. We are not always aware of the help we may give by accepting aid, that in this way we may establish a foothold for contact. Page 118

The line inspired by normals, then, obliges the stigmatized individual to protect normals in various ways. Page 119

He will then attempt to participate in areas of contact which others feel are not his proper place … “I tried a joke, the usual thing about getting a haircut once every three months even if I didn’t need it. It was a mistake. The silence told me that I wasn’t a man who should make jokes, not even good ones.” Pages 119-20

When a stigmatized person employs this stance of good adjustment he is often said to have a strong character or a deep philosophy of life, perhaps because in the back of our minds we normals want to find an explanation of his willingness and ability to act this way. Page 121

The general formula is apparent. The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which ensures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Page 122

And in truth he will have accepted a self for himself; but this self is, as it necessarily must be, a resident alien, a voice of the group that speaks for and through him. Page 123

The special situation of the stigmatized 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. Page 123

This report argues differently. The most fortunate of normals is likely to have his half-hidden failing. Page 127

The fully and visibly stigmatized, in turn, must suffer the special indignity of knowing that they wear their situation on their sleeve, that almost anyone will be able to see into the heart of their predicament. Page 127

It is a question of the individuals condition, not his will; it is a question of conformance, not compliance. Page 128

For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblemished male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Page 128

One can therefore suspect that the role of normal and the role of stigmatized are parts of the same complex, cuts from the same standard cloth. Page 130

Questions about how I lost my leg used to annoy me, so I developed a stock answer that kept these people from asking further: “I borrowed some money from a loan company and they are holding my leg for security!” Page 136

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons but rather perspectives. Page 138

But in addition, social deviants often feel that they are not merely equal to but better than normals. Page 145

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

The basic distinction Goffman makes towards understanding the literature on stigma (mostly qualitative) is that between virtual and social identity.
I found it useful to cash out this distinction in phenomenological terms as follows. Virtual identity is comprised of those meanings material to an individual person which her whole bodily presence motivates for the other person. The features of the person's bodily presence that motivate these meanings are signs, such as a scar. The presence of a scar can motivate a whole new horizon (cluster) of meanings for the other person, against the background of the other person's world-horizons-- his complex web of meanings linked by motivation, which in psychological terms we would call the saturation of his stream of consciousness with memories that current experiences call up by association. Virtual identity is of key importance to the study of stigma because it enables us to understand people's delicate manipulation of their bodily presence to conceal potentially discrediting signs from others. A discredited person is one who, in a certain social setting, has been "read" by someone who knows how to interpret the social signs the discredited person is displaying, whether or not he or she knows the other is "wise." A professional criminal may be easily discredited if, for example, a former criminal who was "gone straight" is able to read his social identity off of his virtual identity.
Here we come to the meaning of social identity: it is the complex of the habitual forms of life in which an individual is involved and by which others come to define him over time. Occupation, stores and public places frequented, circle of friends, sexual activities and affiliations, and political affiliations are all components of one's social identity. The actual correspondence of the virtual identity one reads off of a person's bodily presence in a certain social context, to that person's larger social identity, is necessary to what Goffman calls discrediting. The discredited person has already been successfully "read" as having a social identity that motivates many other pejorative meanings for most others in a given society. The discreditable person has a social identity with such pejorative connotations, but this is not yet evident to the other.
This disparity between social and virtual identity can be the result of the discreditable person's voluntary effort to control her own virtual identity by manipulating the signs of her stigma, insofar as she is aware of these signs and how they function to reveal the stigma in different social settings. The stigma might have a certain focus, so that the signs that would reveal it to "wise" persons are only on display in a narrow range of social situations. Of course, the stigma may be only readable by an in-group that is familiar with the interrelated meanings that a sign can motivate. This is the human social equivalent to an expert art appraiser, for example, who can "read" an inauthentic piece from just a few superficial signs, with a good record of successful "readings" of this kind when the more in-depth data are consulted (X-rays, paint samples, etc.)
By the end of this long essay, however, it becomes clear that the stigmatized are not any particular social group, nor could the concept of stigma be adequately defined with any laundry list of the behaviors that makeup social roles, or with a list of signs that mediate the awareness of such social roles, for that matter. Stigma is always relational, in several sense. Stigma is the persistent negative evaluation of one social role, or the physiological differences in an individual that predispose him to that social role, by one social group by another. The group that stigmatizes is as essential to the existence of a stigma as the group that may form among those who are stigmatized. One of the upshots of Goffman's analysis here is to throw into relief the active social construction of stigma and the stigmatization of individuals who are known, or believed, to have one of the stigmatic social identities. A further sense in which stigma is relational is that which Goffman elaborates in his last chapter here. The strategies invented or adopted by the stigmatized for achieving a coherent picture of their role in society, also known as worldviews or life-philosophies, are no more than worldviews according to Goffman's account. Included among these worldviews are the dominant ways of self-interpretation common to the 'mainstream' of a society. The self-understanding strategy adopted by the alcoholic participating in A.A., for example, is no more nor less a discovery of the individual's true self than other strategies of self-understanding that same individual may adopt to form a coherent picture from his various social roles. In this final chapter, Goffman speaks of the tendency among the stigmatized to apply what I would call a substance metaphysics to their own conception of their identities. Upon adopting a particular worldview or strategy of self-understanding the stigmatized individual has "discovered" what he is, and always was. This self-understanding may form the descriptive basis for a particular normative project such as an identity politics. Goffman's account of the interplay between self-interpretation, social groups based on a common self-interpretation, and the truth that individuals "discover" in the process of joining these groups reminds me of Foucault's last lectures ca. 1980 on the "care of the self," in ancient Greek, 'gnothi seauton.' There he considers the differences between ancient procedures for obtaining the truth about oneself and the universe, as in neo-Platonism, and the Englightment's turn away from such procedures. The transition described is that between a procedure that any one can carry out without changing himself in the process, and a procedure according to which an "adequation" between the self and the universe is required in order for either to be truly understood. Such a process of refining oneself according to a regimen of behaviors, in order to achieve a position from which the truth can be understood, is found no more in the ancient Stoics than in A.A., Buddhist meditation procedures, or various Christian churches.
Reading Stigma in 2009, with the benefit of having Goffman's later work on hand (e.g., Frame Analysis) it becomes clear that Goffman's own descriptive project as outlined in the essay is entangled in the interest-bound attempt to discover the truth as any stigmatized individual seeking a coherent picture of herself and the world. In Frame Analysis, he directly addresses the antifoundationalism that his pragmatic approach to sociology implies in books like earlier works like Stigma and Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. The interaction positions (and not individuals or identities) that the stigmatized and the normal turn out to be by the end of Stigma are subsumed within Goffman's notion of frame.
His account of frame-shifts in that work goes a long way towards explaining just what it is that the "social deviant" (described in Stigma's final chapter) is up to when he consistently refuses to become either an in-group insider or an in-group outsider. The latter is specifically excluded from proper membership within that group, but having a known identity within that group by virtue of that very exclusion. I found myself making marginal notes in Stigma around this section on social deviants. One of these speculations of mine pertains to the concept of "hipness," which seems in our society to depend on representing oneself as a true social deviant in Goffman's sense, while nevertheless depending on certain "in-group outsider" identifications by others in order to consolidate the hip social role. To put it in somewhat Hegelian terms, the freedom emphasized by the hipster is conditioned by the Other's recognition of it as freedom, as much as by his consciousness of being free (for-himself). To put it in Bob Dylan's terms, "Like A Rolling Stone" does it very nicely.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is written in an unnecessarily pedantic and obscure (read: Academic English at it worst) style. While the subject is fascinating, the author took great pains to present it in a horrifically dry and unpalatable way.

[emre · Rating 2 out of 5]

sosyal bilimlere bakışımı psikoloji üzerinden temellendirdiğim için mi bilmiyorum, sosyolojinin dili bana bazen inanılmaz indirgemeci ve hadi açıkça söyleyeyim, yavan geliyor. kıyaslamak ya da kötülemek niyetiyle söylemiyorum bunu, ikisi de bambaşka kulvarlarda, bambaşka şekillerde ve fakat ilgileri ortak biçimde insana, insanlığa dair neticede.

goffman'dan ve damga teorisinden, bu teoriyi temel alarak yapılan/yazılan psikoloji ve sosyal psikoloji çalışmaları sayesinde haberdar olmuştum, göç çalışmak istediğim ve göçmenlik de yabancılığın ve dolayısıyla damgalanmışlığın bir türü olduğu için artık doğrudan teoriyi okumanın vakti geldi diye düşündüm, sonuç olarak hayal kırıklığına uğramadım ama umduğum derinliği de bulamadım. dili biraz sorunlu geldi, bunu yazıldığı dönemin şartları falan diyerek geçiştiriyorum, ama "biz normaller", "biz normaller" deyip durması gına getirdi ne yalan söyleyeyim, damga teorisini geliştiren birinden, bu kitabın "normal"ler kadar, hatta muhtemelen onlardan daha fazla "damgalı"lar tarafından okunacağını öngörmesini beklerdim, hadi buna da neyse diyorum, "normal"lerin kurdukları düzenin problemlerinden nasıl etkilendiğinden, damgasız olmanın öyle matah bir şey olmadığından, hatta damgalı olmanın bir bakıma özgürleştirici olmasından falan bahsedeydin bari goffman diyorum, bir de ilk iki bölümde uzun uzun fiziksel damgalanmadan bahsetmiş, etnik, cinsel, inançsal ve diğer alanlardaki damgalamalar üzerinde pek durmamıştı; kitabın -bence- can alıcı kısımları olan 3, 4, ve 5. bölüm ise biraz aceleye gelmiş gibiydi.

neyse, fazla beklentiye girmişimdir belki.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

These the second Erving Goffman book that I've read this year (the other being "Asylums", please see my review on Amazon.com if interested).
I work as a criminal defense attorney and I read "Asylums" in an effort to gain perspective on the attitudes of institutionalized persons (i.e. convicts). I was suprised by how brilliant "Asylums" was, so I picked up "Stigma". I was similarily impressed with Stigma.

Where "Asylums" dealt with the relationship of individuals and institutions, "Stigma" deals more with inter personal relationships. The role of instituions in forming identity is noted in footnotes throughout, but the primary focus is in discussing the relationship between identity and stigma.

Goffman, of course, defines the dickens out of his concepts. If you gain nothing else from this book, you will have a thorough understanding of what it means to have a "stigma". The heart of the book consists of Goffman defining a five phase process which individuals with stigma go through. First you learn what it is to be "normal". Then you learn you're not "normal". Then you learn to control disclosure of information about your stigma, then you learn to "pass" as someone without a stigma and then you learn how to "voluntarily disclose" your stigma.

I don't have a degree in sociology, so I'm not sure about the theoretical backgrounding of this approach, but it made sense to me.

The best part of this book was the end, where Goffman argues (persuaively, I thought) that even "Normal" people have to deal with some sort of stigma at some time in their life. In that way, by studying people with stigma we study the interactions of "normals" with each other. So really there's no difference, just a continuum of stigma, ranging from those who are always suffering frm stigma, to those who rarely ever have to deal with it.

I thought that was an interesting insight. I recommend this book highly, and I look forward to reading his classic: "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life."

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I'm starting a PhD in Sociology this fall and I'd read other Goffman texts, and they had this book at Borders, so I figured it was probably a big deal in Sociology. Overall, I think Goffman uses way too many words to explain his concepts, and the concepts themselves are poorly organized. Really, it could have fit in 1/4 of the pages he used, and it was a short book to begin with. It feels like he didn't make an outline before he wrote it. Parts of it were historically socially interesting, like where he used the example of people being refused hotel rooms due to the ethnicity of their surname.

What I learned were a few keywords to use when discussing stigma, and since this guy is a big deal in Social sciences, that should help me write a paragraph or two about stigma as a socially constructed problem. He uses the terms "virtual" and "actual" identity, but I think this oversimplifies it. It's a reasonable place to start.

I'm glad I read this to see where the social science study of stigma has come from, but I'm appreciative that today we have different perspectives and frameworks with which to study stigma.

[Lauren Levitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goffman is the unsung father of queer theory. Just as Gender Trouble wouldn't exist without The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The Trouble with Normal wouldn't exist without this book. Goffman is really good at analytically breaking down and assigning specialized vocabulary to complex social processes in a way that seems commonsensical. Even though this book was written in the 1960s, it is still relevant today.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Received this one as a gift from a sociologist friend. Perhaps it was just me, but the greatest insights that this text offers remain at its margins, rather than being central to the expression of the text. Said otherwise, I came away with stimulated thoughts, but more so in departing from the text rather than digging deeper into it.

For example, early on Goffman presents a distinction between the real and the virtual social identity. Immediately I was wary of whether such a "real" social identity could be said to exist as fundamentally distinct from any virtual social identity. 'Real' and 'social' seem to deny any smooth synthesis in conceptualization, as sociality implies a sort of staging, an act, or a mimetic art, which displaces the originality of the real. If the real is already social, is this not as much as saying that it is, to a degree, always already virtual, or bound to the virtual, in a manner which the interior/exterior or private/public distinctions already appear to collapse in upon themselves?

But then, mere pages from the work's close, Goffman offhandedly remarks that the distinction is, in a sense, a methodological fabrication, a sort of didactic metaphor. The distinction between the normal and the stigmatized is a relation of fabricated differentiality, or that there is no original or fundamental normalcy from which the stigma marks a divergence or a lack. Rather, the conceptual relation is perpetually being produced and reinstated in a fluctuating relationship between what is taken as normal based upon a negative determination of excluding a certain number of divergent possibilities. This in itself would be a fascinating theory to flesh out, though Goffman does no such work, unfortunately.

The stigma, then, is the mark, the style or figure which marks out the inscription of a life within a complex social field. The mark of a difference, of the stranger or outsider, who is denounced and deplored not because they themselves are different, but rather because they expose for us, in us, marking us with the realization of the difference or strangeness which inheres in each of us, but which we do not wish to see, to remark upon and respond for. The stigmatized person is less the one marked by their difference, and more the one who marks the stigma inscribed on the face of our own social being, the unavowed difference marking each of us, marking us off from "ourselves."

[Kressel Housman · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few weeks ago, a woman who teaches psychology at Breuer’s women’s seminary spoke at my Shabbos shiur. She spoke about the interplay between status and stigma, particularly in the frum world. A person can maintain his high status only if other people give him honor, and they will do so if they fear that if they don’t, the high status person will stigmatize them. It’s not the only way to maintain status, of course, but it’s an effective way.

The speaker stirred up our group so much, I just had to check out the book she cited, which was titled with the single word stigma. The thing is, I may have gotten the wrong book on stigma because the book was not nearly as interesting as her speech. If it is the same book, then she took its lessons off in her own direction, and as I said, her way turned out better.

As another Goodreads reviewer said, this book is academic jargon at its worst. The best parts were direct quotes from individuals from various stigmatized groups – the physically disabled, gays, and criminals. These sections were real people writing about real life experiences. The author could have followed up by interpreting their experiences into an equally real and human narrative, but instead, he used cold, distancing, clinical terms. That may have been the accepted style of academics in 1963 when this book was published, but I much prefer today’s style in which academics like Steven Levitt and clinicians like Oliver Sacks, M.D. put the narrative first. Having said that, I’m still curious about the author’s first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I can’t deny he’s got something to teach. I’m just not that wild about the way he gives it over.

[mkfs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this while locked out of GR due to some no doubt well-intentioned addition of captcha software to the login process, so initial impressions were not captured.

This is not a scientific book, nor is it an analysis. As the title and introduction both indicate, these essays are notes or thoughts in response to Goffman's various readings on stigmatized individuals. These would be referred to as "marginalized" now, and 21st-century readers may take issue with some of the groups identified as such. That would miss the point, though: what Goffman has noticed is that the strategies for dealing with a stigma are similar across different communities or stigmas or what have you, and it is these strategies that interest him. What also intrigues him is the gradient nature of stigma, or as someone who spends too much time online might say, how stigma is a spectrum: the criteria that define the "normal" are very, very narrow, and every person is guaranteed to pass out of it at some point in their life (too young, too old, unemployed, etc). So in a very real sense, everybody is stigmatized at some point in their lives, and the stategies they have adopted for coping with this are similar to, or even learned from, those who are stimagtized for their entire lives.

It's a good book, worth reading. Other GR reviewers seem hung up on the fact that it's not written like a self-help book. Let's be honest: if you find this book to be dry or difficult reading , you're not going to make it very far past the sort of thing offered in airport newsstands. Goffman is readable, he makes a few amusing points some of which might be generously construed as "jokes", and he neatly summarizes information or episodes from multiple sources (synthesizes, as a friend used to describe it, and really that is what social scientists do). What Goffman does *not* do is start from a premise and work towards a definite conclusion, and this can make the book feel pointless or meandering: but as the title says, these are notes, not a Theory.

[Elliot Ryland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly was going to give this three or four stars because this book could really make more use of enthymemes to prevent some needless conceptual deconstructing:

“The individual who is known by others may or may not know he is known by them; they in turn may or may not know that he knows or doesn’t know of their knowing about him. Further, while believing they do not know about him, nonetheless he can never be sure. Also, if he knows they know about him, he must, in some measure at least, know about them; but if he does not know that they know about him, he may or may not know about them in regards to other matters”

However, the last two sections made me change my mind. This book really changed how I thought about stigmatization. One of the core tenets Goffman presents is the idea that stigma is not a binary phenomenon—you are stigmatized or not. Rather, stigma exists on a continuum, with frequency of stigmatization being the unit of measurement, in which all people are placed in some respects. For such a short book it really packs quite a bit of weight, and Goffman writes quite lucidly, which is always a bonus in reading any sociological text.

[Sunny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps a bit too intellectual for me overall but quite academically and well written book about the concepts of stigma. Its about what it feels like to be a black dude or a Jewish dude or a gay dude. What and how does labelling yourself with that stigma influence the way you perceive yourself and the way in which you interact in society. Actually I didn’t understand sections of this because I is a little bit dumb innit, but writing this has helped me understand the book better. As a Pakistani / Kashmiri living in England that will also have a certain stigma with it and perhaps subconsciously influenced the way I interact at home and work etc vis a vis how I would interact if I was a WASP in this country. Sections covered in the book are stigma and social identity, information control, group alignment and ego identity and the self and its other and deviations from the norm.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was terribly boring, but it had this one great example in it about how people treat someone when they just find out about their stigma. They made up an example of someone having a quiggle. People won't know what to say so they ask totally inappropriate questions like "how do you bathe with that quiggle?" and then they try to related it to their own life so it wont seem like they're making a big deal out of it, hence "my uncle had a quiggle!" It's totally true and it was really funny. My friends and I wandered around asking each other inapproprate questions about each other's quiggles for a month. I wanted to make a T-shirt that said "embrace your inner quiggle!"

[xenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I swear everyone in my university department is going through a protracted breakdown, but they're all too tactful to ever reveal this collective stigma (which is, ironically, what brought them to the department to begin with), so they instead gather around the tea room eating weenie dogs and talking about actor network theory and pizza toppings.

This is what I've gotten from Goffman.

[T H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading, but I'd recommend taking notes throughout as Goffman likes to throw multiple ideas at the reader and circle back to them throughout the chapters. Personally, I found it a bit difficult to understand-but enlightening nonetheless.

Would rec to anyone interested in sociology (this was assigned in my deviant behavior class). perhaps not a casual read.

[Madeley]

Loved it 10/10

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quanto mais eu li, mais certo fiquei de que somos babuínos esquizofrênicos.
O modo de como o estigma (Mudança comportamental em relação a outros grupos) é demonstrado e sua dinâmica intragrupal e extragrupal é absurdamente esquisita (digo esquisita por realmente me faltar vocabulário).

Não sei que nota eu dou,

tenho certos problemas com ciências humanas estadunidenses, é visível que há uma tentativa de extrapolação de sua cultura e sociedade para explicar as outras, como se todas se comportassem daquela forma, ou como se o comportamento presente lá fosse o mais apropriado para explicação e dedução de algum fenômenos social

obviamente isso não é diferente aqui, por exemplo quando artistas de jazz são exemplos de indivíduos desviantes

talvez fosse uma obra mais apropriada para seu tempo e espaço, porém na Academia engolimos anacronismos incessantemente, assim, não causa espanto a leitura obrigatória dessa obra.

A proposta é interessante, talvez pudesse se revisitada através do comportamento das comunidades cibernéticas, ou revisitada através de um uso maior das ciências cognitivas e estatísticas. Afirmo que o sociólogo hodierno tem infinitamente mais ferramentas disponíveis para análise e formulação teórica social do que Goffmann tinha em 1963.

Provavelmente em uma releitura, quando eu possuir um arsenal teórico, intelectual (e léxico) maior, eu vá ter uma visão diferente; isso sempre acontece, sempre aconteceu e é muito provável que se repetirá, porém, por enquanto fica a minha visão confusa e nebulosa a respeito do livro.

/porém, fica o axioma de que somos todos macaquinhos tecnológicos esquizofrênicos/

[Emir · Rating 5 out of 5]

goffman'ın toplumsal sapma ve damgalama şekillerini anlattığı bu eser, tanıklara bağlı sosyolojik anlatım açısından muazzam bir kaynak. düzenli olarak verilen örnekler topluma birebir ayna tutarken toplum içerisinde yaşarken belirli damgalarla yaşayan bireyleri anlamak konusunda ufuk açıcı. keza günümüz toplumundaki suçluluk ilişkileri için de modern bir şerhi elzem olmuştur.

[Anna]

Finally finished my thesis 😭😭😭

[Dorian Winter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun little overview about stigma in its many forms, interesting to think about how far psychology/sociology has come over the years as well

[Moa · Rating 4 out of 5]

sir goffman really hit the nail on the head with this one

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf

[gurleen ★.ᐟ · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this for school but i did spend the entire weekend reading it so i think it deserves to be logged on here

[gabri_2085 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me lo he leído para un examen de la universidad. Digamos que el concepto y las situaciones son interesantes pero la narrativa del autor hace que no se entienda mucho (pone ejemplos hasta en las notas de pie de pág., y algunas son de media hoja💀).

[Sofia DR · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10 bro it was just too wordy. some key ideas were good but it was a very black and white thought process.

[Данило Судин · Rating 5 out of 5]

Поняття "стигма" та "стигматизація" є загальноприйнятими не тільки в соціології, але і в побутовій мові. Отже, можна було б очікувати, що однойменна робота Ірвіна Ґофмана нічого нового читачу не скаже. Наприклад, читання Орієнталізм нічого нового не дає тому, хто чув дайджестові виклади цієї книги.

Але з цим дослідженням справа зовсім не така проста. По-перше, автор показує, що стигма - це зовсім не ярлик, як деколи припускають певні автори. Стигма - це, перш за все, відчуття вини через наявність певної риси/характеристики. Тобто індивід, якого можна було б назвати ретритистом (згідно з класифікацією Роберта Мертона), апріорі не може мати стигми, адже йому думка оточуючих людей є байдужою. А відтак і відчуття вини/сорому в нього виникати не буде. Які практичні наслідки має стигма? Про це найкраще можна дізнатися, прочитавши цю книгу І.Ґофмана. Зазначу тільки, що намагання стигматизованих людей діяти як "нормальні" - це і є ознака стигми. Наприклад, в одному дослідженні виявилося, що люди з функціональними обмеженнями здоров’я намагаються поступати у внз нехтуючи пільгами для інвалідів (так, наша держава не дуже політкоректна). Попри очевидний висновок, що це ознака відсутності стигми, насправді це пряма ознака стигми. Наприклад, поступати в університет з документами про сільські школи (які раніше давали пільги) не соромилися, а деколи - спеціально такі документи отримували. З документами про навчання в гірських школах також поступають, бо це дає пільги. А чому так не є з інвалідністю? Почуття вини/сорому.

По-друге, автор показує, що межа між стигматизованим індивідом та нестигматизованим є дуже плинною. В одних ситуаціях стигматизований стає тим, хто стигматизує тощо. І.Ґофман пише про ідеал 1950-х: білий чоловік, що живе в місті, заможний, гетеросексуальний та в чудовій фізичній формі. Очевидно, що такому ідеалові відповідатимуть не всі чоловіки. Відтак, всі ті, хто відрізняються від ідеалу, будуть стигматизованими в тих чи інших ситуаціях. В цьому контексті І.Ґофман класифікує типи девіантів, адже це дуже широка категорія. Одних девіантів група буде захищати, а щодо інших їм буде байдуже. І в цьому контексті І.Ґофман впритул підходить до питання про функції девіантної поведінки, але не заглиблюється в цю проблему.

Третім важливим аспектом цієї роботи, який опускають, є аналіз ідентичності індивіда - особистої/біографічної, соціальної та ідентичності еґо. Як не парадоксально, але саме на прикладі стигми І.Ґофман демонструє, як формується ідентичність "нормальних" людей. (Цікаво, що в польському перекладі не використовується поняття normalny, а normals: гарний спосіб підкреслити, що нормальність є соціальним конструктом.) Як зазначила автор передмови до цієї книги, І.Ґофман, як і Г.Ґарфінкель та Г.Бекер, наче пишуть про девіантів, але насправді описують нормальних людей, адже саме через аналіз "відхилень" можна побачити рутини, якими твориться соціальна реальність.

Ця праця чимось нагадує Банальність зла: книга, про яку всі чули, але мало хто читав. Тому читати її варто!

[Psychön von Reznhör · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abominations of the body - the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family.' In all of these variousinstances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found : an individual who might have been received ea-ily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. He possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals."

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways the book shows its age. Some of the language--for instance, using the word "normal" to describe non-stigmatized people (implying others are "not normal") sounds odd and--to use a word that wasn't available to Goffman when he wrote--"ableist" today. As is often the case for me when reading sociology books, I was frequently irritated or critical of the way this author, like others in this field, makes sweeping generalizations about how people behave. The beauty and complexity of individual experience is smoothed over; the only way sociologists seem to write about "society" is by lumping everyone together into a bland wad of humanity and then write about how alike we all are. What I'm writing here all sounds highly critical of the book, and I have to say I spent much of my time as I read in a state of actively disliking what I was reading on the page. And yet it challenged my thinking and made me re-examine my notions about stigma and identity and even challenged how I thought such things should be written about, which are all great things.

This book makes an interesting contrast with Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree," which deals with the same topic--how society treats people who belong to marginalized and stigmatized groups--but Solomon builds his arguments by piling on one unique anecdote after another in a beautiful mosaic, a book that celebrates individuality rather than erasing it.

[aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

s/o a mi sabio que hace mas llevadero esto de ser estigmatizado <3

[Larry-bob Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it at the prompting of Covering, The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, the author of which got the concept of covering (not being totally closeted, but downplaying aspects of one's identity when one is part of a stigmatized group) from this book.

Several of the footnotes about homosexuality reference Evelyn Hooker (whose works could stand to be collected into a book - also, it seems that the documentary on her is not easily available, although there is a short video of her on YouTube.

I was also interested to see a reference to the book The Little Locksmith, which had recently been recommended.

While slightly dated in language and heavier on theory and anecdote than research and statistics, it is nonetheless an important work. Could stand to have an index, though.