ABSTRACT
H. S. Becker’s The Other Side was a powerful plea by a group of sociologists for greater tolerance of the unconventional. Erving Goffman’s Stigma extends Erikson’s concepts and his own previous work in Asylums to a consideration of the mechanisms of stigma and ‘spoiled identity’. Stigma was published in 1963, but there is evidence that Erving Goffman was developing the concepts of stigma and deviance as early as 1957. A range of strategies can be used to reduce the effect of being stigmatised; these are: removal, countering, fighting, avoiding, passing and covering. The stigmatised person will spend much time and effort in considering the social contacts which he or she is likely to encounter with non-stigmatised people, and to arrange life around avoiding them. Two groups of people will be particularly sympathetic to the stigmatised individual, those whom Goffman calls the Own and the Wise.
