Why this book?
- It traces the concept of stigma from its historical roots in ancient Greece to its present-day usage.
- Drawing on autobiographies and case studies, it shows the lived experience of stigmatized people from the inside.
- It analyzes the reciprocal relationship between the stigmatized person and the "normals," not just the situation of one side.
- From physical disability to addiction and mental illness, it brings a wide range of situations of exclusion under a single theoretical framework.
- It is a foundational text in the sociology of identity and has become a reference point for later research on social stigma.
About the book
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, by the eminent American sociologist Erving Goffman, has been published in Persian in a translation by Masoud Kianpour, issued by Nashr-e Markaz. Its subject is the social position of those between whose actual and potential social identities there is a gap, so that they cannot conform to the prevailing norms of society and are not accepted by ordinary people.
Goffman considers this broad group, ranging from the illiterate and those with epilepsy to people with all manner of physical defects and moral or personality deviations. Drawing on autobiographies and case studies, he analyzes the stigmatized person's feelings about himself and his relationship with the "normals," showing that the person's self-image is confronted every day with the image that others reflect back at him. The book begins with the historical meaning of the word and notes that social scientists have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma.