Despite an academic career teaching at the more prestigious universities of North America, as well as an impressive output of scholarly sociological research, Erving Goffman was perhaps best known for his perceptive and popularly-read observations on everyday life--what Goffman himself called "micro-sociology." Much of his early work focused on human interactions within the context of small institutions, as was the case with Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961), perhaps his most widely-read book. In that work, Goffman argued that mental institutions do not seek to totally transform people after they are committed--that is, achieve a kind of "cultural victory"--but rather they strive to keep patients' aware of both the world inside and outside the institution, so as to create a kind of "strategic leverage" over them.

Erving Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia...