# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/erving-goffman
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:17:03.423Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/erving-goffman"
name: "Erving Goffman"
slug: "erving-goffman"
description: "He argued that all of us are actors managing impressions, that asylums strip identity, that stigma is social machinery. His dramaturgical lens — everyday life as performance — reshaped how sociology reads human behavior."
tagline: "Canadian-American sociologist (1922–1982)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/E._Goffman_c._1940.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "CA"
category:
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profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1922-06-11"
deathDate: "1982-11-19"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  historical:           24.638496
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  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Erving Goffman was born in Canada in 1922 and became an American sociologist whose work on symbolic interaction redefined the field. In 1956 he published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, introducing dramaturgical analysis: the idea that social life is theater, each of us constantly performing and managing how others see us. Over the next twenty-five years he extended that vision into asylums, stigma, interaction rituals, and the frames through which experience gets organized — always dissecting the subtle mechanics of selfhood and social control. He served as the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association and by 2007 stood as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences. He died in 1982, having spent a career showing that identity is not innate but assembled in every glance and gesture.