Communication Conduct in an Island Community

Overview & Synopsis

Canadian-born Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was the twentieth century’s most important sociologist writing in English. First published by mediastudies.press in 2022, Goffman’s 1953 dissertation is presented here in a new edition featuring an introduction by Yves Winkin. Based on fieldwork on a remote Scottish island, the remarkable study presents in embryonic form the full spread of Goffman’s thought. Framed as a “report on a study of conversational interaction,” the dissertation lingers on the modest talk of island “crofters.” It is trademark Goffman: ambitious, unconventional in form, and brimming with big-picture insight. The thesis is that social order is made and re-made in communication—the “interaction order” he revisited in a famous and final address before his death in 1982. As Winkin writes in his introduction, the dissertation is the “Rosetta stone for his entire work.” It was here that Goffman revealed, quietly, his peerless sensitivity to the invisible wireframes of everyday life.