ABSTRACT

Erving Goffman was seen as an unconventional, ambivalent, and brilliant personality: a shy, somewhat difficult loner and a quirky outsider, but also headstrong. Through confidence, diligence, and tenacity, however, he managed to attain recognition, scale the professional and institutional heights of US-American sociology. Finally to rise to the status of a “key sociological thinker”. The renowned “key sociological thinker” remained true to his stance as “marginal man” throughout his life though he was a part of the action, he kept himself out of the center of attention and away from the pressure of action and raised himself above society as an observer. Goffman considered sociology to be primarily a science of empirical observation that established and maintained distance. Distance was for him the condition of possibility that enabled the recalibration of one’s perspective on the all-too-familiar in order to approach what was supposedly natural and self-evident in a different way.