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Title: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman ISBN: 0-385-00016-2 Publisher: Doubleday Books Pub. Date: 10 November, 1961 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Indispensable
Comment: As a Nurse Lecturer I recommend this book to all my mental health students. I first read it as a first year trainee psychiatric nurse and it saved my career. There I was sitting in a care of the elderly ward in a mental hospital thinking "what the (*&^ is going on here!?", ready to pack it in, and then I started to read this book. As I progressed through the book it all began to make sense and Goffman became my hero! What a man, what a researcher, what a writer. His theory is punctuated here and there with anecdotes and as such his writing is highly accessible. Fortunately, the world I experienced as a student and that Goffman wrote of is dying, but its vestiges linger and this book is still useful today. This book will one day become a historical account, but will always stand a a testimony to the need for and effectiveness of covert qualitative research.
Rating: 4
Summary: What Part Of "Encampment" Didn't You Understand?
Comment: Erving Goffman's *Asylums*, a work once widely circulated as a mass-market paperback, has gone through several cycles of reception: but in this "anti-anti-psychiatry" era, it is easy to forget its initial promise as a "tough-minded" analysis of psychiatric exigencies, an institutional travelogue none too enthusiastic. In other words, Goffman's "labeling" theory of psychiatric treatment is not really to be divorced from the detailed and sympathetic accounts he offers of mental hospitals at a time when their function was to "sideline" marginalized individuals indefinitely, rather than provide a theodicy for such social dynamics as effectively restrict the freedom of the individual generally: *Asylums* gives the reader a portrait of *exemplary liberalism*, as social research in the service of maintaining standards of public discourse such as permit the most felicitous resolution of social dilemmas: no "planned obsolescence" was ventured with this material, and perhaps it is not really to be gained.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Little Classic of Sociology
Comment: I'm not a sociologist, a student of sociology or really, even that interested in sociology. I read about this book in David Orland's, Prisons: Houses of Darkness, where Orland often referred to Goffman's work in this book. I was not disappointed.
Goffman uses a mixture of field observation and references to literature to describe and critisize the theory and practice of the "Total Institution". As the reviewers note below, a "total institution" is an elastic concept. Goffman focuses on "strong" examples of T.I.'s: the mental hospital, prison, a 19th century man of war, monastery. Through these "strong" examples he fairly describes the concept and applies it well.
Less clear is the implications of Goffman's concept to those institutions which are either "weak" total institutions or non-total institutions with total institution tendencies. After reading this book, I saw aspects of "total" institutions in almost every institution I cared to think about: schools, churches, courts, etc.
I think it is fair to say that "All institutions dream of being total institutions." Therefore, this book has application beyond the world of "strong" total institutions. I recommend it highly.
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Title: Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman ISBN: 0671622447 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1986 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman ISBN: 0385094027 Publisher: Doubleday Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1959 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior by Erving Goffman ISBN: 0394706315 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1982 List Price(USD): $12.75 |
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Title: Forms of Talk by Erving Goffman ISBN: 081221112X Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1981 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam ISBN: 1586481614 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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