Goffman and Garfinkel : Joint enterprises, theoretical differences and personal sympathies

Abstract

Different to the picture that is sometimes drawn, the relationship of Erving Goffman to Harold Garfinkel was anything but hostile. As Meyer argues, the acquaintance of the two scholars goes back to the early 1950s when Garfinkel and Goffman were finishing their PhDs, and their contact remained lively throughout the 1960s. Other than sometimes assumed, it was shaped by great mutual esteem. Both scholars were engaged in the establishment of a sociology of everyday life and of social interaction in these years, and much of the theoretical developments in this field resulted from their discussions. They exchanged and read each other’s texts closely and often before publication, and they used them in their university courses and even pursued joint publication projects. However, Garfinkel and Goffman were aware of differences in their basic theoretical orientations, thus also exchanging critique on each other’s work. These differences are reconstructed in detail in Meyer’s text. After the establishment of conversation analysis and Goffman’s moving to Philadelphia, a growing estrangement might have occurred in the 1970s, in particular around Goffman’s enduring sympathies for the concept of “ritual”, disapproved by Garfinkel, as well as about some methodological orientations of conversation analysis, criticized by Goffman. However, these differences were far from being inimical or from resembling an intellectual fight.