Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination By Dmitri N. Shalin (Routledge, 2024). It is about time a comprehensive biography of Erving Goffman was written. Perhaps the most canonical American sociologist, Goffman's appeal certainly endures more than his most famous contemporaries—David Riesman, Lewis Coser, Robert Merton—even though he died well before them. Dmitri Shalin calculates that Goffman is the most cited North American sociologist; between 1977 and 2020, Goffman has been cited in this journal more than anyone, even though he had an uneasy—if not hostile—relationship with symbolic interactionism and its proponents. There is a virtual cottage industry dedicated to interpreting Goffman's ideas and debating how they fit within sociological traditions. We know a lot about Goffman as an “epistemic individual” (to quote Bourdieu). Comparatively, we remain ignorant about Goffman as an “empirical individual.” Much of this was by design. Goffman was notoriously private. He seldom talked about his personal life; he almost never consented to interviews, recordings of any kind, or even to having his picture taken. His death directive to seal all his letters, notes, and manuscripts means that Goffman's life history was buried with him. Learning more about who Goffman was and how he carried out his research involves great effort. Just ask Yves Winkin, the Goffman aficionado (and erstwhile pupil) who schlepped to the Shetland Islands to track down Goffman's informants in the hopes of learning more about the fieldwork that produced his dissertation (Goffman 1953 2022). (We learn from Winkin that Goffman donned a khaki army jacket and combat boots in the field and remained aloof from village life.) The glimpses we get of “empirical Goffman” are intriguing. He was an iconoclast who flouted interactional norms and social scientific conventions of writing and evidence. Temperamentally, he was by turns cocksure and taciturn. Goffman (1989:126) once admonished “smart assed” graduate students starting fieldwork for refusing to cut their hair (a countercultural badge) to fit in and glibly dismissed the entire enterprise of interviewing (“I don't give hardly any weight to what people say”). He seldom worked with (or adequately credited) others. He used a sabbatical to become a card dealer in Vegas but was blacklisted from casino work after being caught counting cards. He would pause mid-speech to demand that photographers leave the room. He delighted in embarrassing others at social gatherings. And he allegedly acted unfazed after his first wife Schuyler (“Sky”) took her life by jumping off a bridge. At the University of Pennsylvania, Goffman studiously avoided the sociology department. His office was in the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (at the very edge of campus), his closest colleagues were linguists and ethologists, and he discouraged sociology students from taking his classes or pursuing a PhD in sociology. He refused to join the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction or accept any formal role in the American Sociological Association—only to shockingly turn around, in his last year of life, and agree to be ASA's president. Such titillating stories only leave Goffman admirers wanting more. Rather than wait for the day when Goffman's widow (or daughter) might allow access to his files, Shalin has been collecting documents and other biographical materials—including recollections from Goffman's sister, son, former colleagues, and students—for almost twenty years and posting them online. Erving Manuel Goffman weaves together the Erving Goffman Archives with Shalin's (re)analysis of key texts to produce a cradle-to-grave profile. Its conceit, to quote the abstract, is that “key turns in Goffman's career reflected dramatic events in his family and personal story.” The case for linking personal and career turning points is stronger in some instances than others. On the one hand, it would be surprising if Goffman's painful experience watching Sky descend into madness did not influence his thinking on mental illness. One can juxtapose Asylums, which was skeptical not just of institutionalization but also mental illness itself, with his haunting essay “The Insanity of Place,” which describes “families forced to endure manifestly disturbed members whose antics…turn home life upside down” (p. 141). While Shalin is not the first to connect the dots, he provocatively calls “Insanity” a “message in the bottle, a chance to present his side of the story” (p. 145). On the other hand, it is less demonstrable that Goffman's dramaturgical model is “self-ethnography” (p. 355). Empirically, we know Goffman was the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to Canada, and that Asylums mentions how a “group of pet inmates” may escort visitors “around the institution's Potemkin village” (Goffman 1961:103). From this and little else, other than Shalin's own experience growing up in Russia, Shalin surmises that “the enduring impact on the Russian psyche” (p. 96) of the Potemkin village trope imprinted on Goffman, and that he “parlayed” this Russian myth of dissembling into The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Shalin calls his evidentiary approach “biocritical hermeneutics,” which he says examines “self-framing as a somatic-affective-discursive process” and “stalks bios theoretikos—a life informed by principles” (p. 347). I do not know what this means, but the book reads like an intellectual biography that leans into innuendo and psychoanalysis. Goffman's religious background and short stature “must have been a stigmatizing matter for the young man” (p. 23); perhaps this explains the origins of Stigma. Goffman's public dissociation from his humble origins and Jewish heritage perhaps gave rise to his concept “role distancing.” And Goffman's propensity to bully and belittle others “reveals a tortured soul struggling to assert his dignity” (p. 277); this personal habit of breaking the frame of civility also, Shalin speculates, helped give rise to Frame Analysis (Goffman said that the inspiration for frame analysis came from Gregory Bateson, with whom he had a close association, and Schutz, among others). In the absence of evidence linking ostensible cause and effect, Shalin settles for what could be called “argument by parallel.” He notes that Goffman's application for a student visa required signing a U.S. immigration document attesting that the Canadian was not, among other things, mentally ill, sick, a vagrant, or a criminal. Shalin (p. 43) considers it “remarkable” that this “catalogue of stigmatized characteristics” includes groups that Goffman would later research (e.g., Asylums, Stigma), conjecturing that these works are in part born from this experience. Many biographical tidbits are fascinating—for instance, that Goffman was cynical enough about the academic job market to seek work as a night watchman. And some of the connections Shalin draws from them to Goffman's corpus are illuminating—to wit: young Goffman was known to bring notebooks to college parties and take copious jottings, foretelling his constant references to the etiquette of social gatherings. But Shalin appears so fascinated by his subject that every piece of minutia from his archives is worth sharing, including the genealogy of a girlfriend, Goffman's high school and college grades, and second-hand stories of inane moments, like the time he allegedly dined with a colleague in France and pushed a plate of food away after a few bites without explanation. A startling number of the stories—including the most salacious—are gossip (e.g., the police informed Goffman of Sky's suicide while he was lecturing, and he simply carried on; Goffman's son Tom was marooned in Paris as a teenager when he came upon his dad and ran after him, but Goffman just kept walking). Shalin acknowledges this, but cannot resist drawing inferences from hearsay to Goffman's scholarly trajectory anyway. (Tom Goffman was one of Shalin's informants before he committed suicide, but the Paris story did not come from him; Shalin did not verify it with Tom either. Some of the cutting remarks Tom made to Shalin about his dad, and Shalin's depiction of Tom's depression and having “took to the bottle,” feel unsavory given Tom did not live to see the finished book.) One wonders whether Shalin succumbs to what Bourdieu called the “biographical illusion.” A related issue is that major aspects of Goffman's work are given short shrift if they cannot be tied to turning points in Goffman's life. His relationships with game theorist Thomas Schelling and Army-sponsored researchers on brainwashing and deception, and the resultant book Strategic Interaction, appear as barely more than an aside midway through a chapter called “Mastering the Game.” Gary Jaworski (2023) convincingly argues that Goffman was a social theorist of the Cold War, but since there is no major personal event to point to on this matter (e.g., Red Scare persecution), Shalin does not linger on it. Goffman's sustained engagement with ethology and close association with students of animal behavior (especially John Smith and Thomas Sebeok) is relegated to little more than a page in the chapter “Facing Death,” where Shalin incorrectly suggests that Goffman only gravitated toward ethology at the end of his life. There is little in Goffman's background to suggest a personal connection to animals (e.g., a beloved family pet; going on safaris); I am left to conclude that Shalin does not see ethology as a formative influence on Goffman because of a dearth of “biographical sources” pertaining to animals in his archives. Thankfully, other parts of the book are more probing and intellectually satisfying, especially the chapter “Gendering Sex.” I have long wondered why Goffman's writings on gender rarely appear on syllabi or feature in scholarly surveys of his oeuvre. Not only do Gender Advertisements and the article “The Arrangement Between the Sexes” anticipate the idea of “doing gender,” they strikingly adopt the kind of normative and political stance that Goffman—whom Randall Collins (1986: 108) called a “Durkheimian conservative”—had otherwise refused to take. At a time when his colleagues were all “being a critic and a radical” (ibid.), Goffman (1974: 14) proclaimed he would rather “sneak in and watch the way people snore” than “awaken” them from “false consciousness.” Shalin deftly shows that Goffman in fact had his own awakening regarding misogyny, personally and intellectually. At the 1972 American Sociological Association meeting, Goffman joined his colleagues in a sit-in to protest the hotel restaurant's “men only” policy. He took pride in being one of the earliest and most prominent male sociologists to denounce sexism, Shalin reports, and even before he published his critiques of patriarchy in the late 1970s he had begun to be more supportive of female students (some of whom gush about his advising to Shalin) and switched to “gender neutral pronominalization” in his writings (p. 228). Some feminists were not convinced that Goffman had entirely abandoned his sexist views, but many agreed he engaged in serious self-reflection. As he began to write up his content analysis of gender advertisements, Goffman presented the unfinished work to a group of thirty sociologists—all women, at his insistence. He was reportedly nervous, and Arlie Hochschild (among others) chided his analysis as naïve. The final product (Goffman 1976) was undoubtedly better for it, however, and the second edition features an approving introduction by noted radical feminist critic Vivian Gornick. Goffman's subsequent essay, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes,” is even more stridently feminist. “Ours is a sexist society” Goffman (1977:326) remarks; he even nods to Marx: “Gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses” (p. 315). Chapters of Erving Manuel Goffman like “Gendering Sex” and “Coping with Madness” are notable scholarly contributions, helping sociologists understand the context and import of Goffman's key ideas. While other chapters tilt more toward biographical trivia that are unlikely to rack up citations, there appears to be enough interest in Goffman lore that a number of readers will likely be pleased that Shalin indulges their desire to geek out about Goffman. I know I was. Colin Jerolmack is professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at New York University. Recent publications include a series of coauthored articles examining Erving Goffman's engagement with ethology. 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Colin Jerolmack (Tue,) studied this question.