Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad..." (more)
Key Phrases: discreditable person, stigma symbols, stigmatized individual, New York, Free Press of Glencoe, American Journal of Sociology (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

About the Author

Erring Goffman was born in Manville, Alberta (Canada) in 1922. He came to the United States in 1945, and in 1953 received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He was professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley until 1968, and thereafter was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Goffman received the MacIver Award in 1961 and the In Medias Res Award in 1978. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1983.

Dr. Goffman's books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Encounters, Asylums, Behavior in Public Places, Stigma, Interaction Ritual, Strategic Interaction, Relations in Public, Frame Analysis, and Gender Advertisements.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (June 15, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671622447
• ISBN-13: 978-0671622442
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #114,914 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A life saving book for me, October 31, 1998

By A Customer

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I happened upon Stigma in the Tufts University Library on a Saturday afternoon in 1968 while I was looking for something else. I took it down from the shelf, read a paragraph, and then knelt between the stacks to read it straight through - hurrying, shaking a little from fear that someone might come along to stop me, forbid me the book. Or that I might lose my courage, or my sense of identification, and revert to thinking that I did not need to hear what was being said. I grew up crippled from a very early age (perhaps polio, perhaps congenital hip dysplasia). I had also been traumatized and further physically injured by a decade (ages 2-12) of 1940's orthopedic work. I reached age 13 weeping, stammering, weighing 73 lb, with noticeably poor bladder control. By age 28, when I read Stigma, I weighed 87 lb, smoked incessantly, drank sherry at breakfast, and (although unbelievably, impossibly married) was - like a high-fashion model or a female marathoner -sexually only marginal. I had never stopped liking my body (if not its appearance) or being grateful for all the ways in which its physical intelligence was intact, but until I read Stigma I did not know how to cope with the shame and social vulnerability that being crippled had created -except to follow my mother's cryptic advice, "Just stare right back." That afternoon in the empty library was worth five years of individual psychotherapy. It set me on a line of march that led directly to an amicable divorce, the National Organization for Women, Alcoholics Anonymous, and another 20 lb.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Breaking Down Barriers Between the Normal and Stigmatized, November 10, 2003

By	S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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."

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Social rules identified most strongly when they are broken, April 9, 2000

By	"[e-mail]" (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This text was assigned reading in a Psych101 back in 1970, but its themes have stayed with me so strongly I am now ordering it for my personal library. I was born with a club foot, and experienced the power of being different, even though my personal defect was so minor as to be rarely noticed by others. STIGMA gave me an appreciation of the force behind my own shame and the reaction to my difference of others. More importantly, I learned about the degrees of identity-- which differences make the most difference (sex, race, disabilities...) and the increasing intensity that comes with breaking the most closely held norms. A classic study.