Erving Goffman's 'Participant Observation'
sSeven excerpts from Erving Goffman’s 1974 remarks on fieldwork can serve as his virtual preface to this narrative about his legacy. I begin with Goffman’s definition of participant observation: “By participant observation,” he said, “I mean a technique . . . of getting data . . . by subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their . . . situation” (1989: 125).
For Goffman, fieldwork is a thoroughly embodied struggle to grasp other people’s point of view as best one can. Good fieldwork “tunes your body up” and with your “tuned-up” body and with the ecological right to be close to them (which you’ve obtained by one sneaky means or another), you are in a position to note their gestural, visual, bodily responses to what’s going on around them and you’re empathetic enough-because …show more content…
In this vein, Goffman says that, “[the way to make a world is to be naked to the bone, to have as few resources as you can get by with. . . . the way to get it is to need it” (1989: 127). Goffman thus offers a microlevel, situation-specific variant of what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967: 47) call “world openness”: “You have to open yourself up in ways you’re not in ordinary life.” Often one also has to grapple with hierarchy in the field: “If you’ve got to be with a range of people, be with the lowest people first” (Goffman 1989: 130). Finally, Goffman talked about writing field notes and field-based narratives: “Write [your field notes] as lushly as you can, as loosely as you can, as long as you put yourself into it, where you say, ‘I felt that.’ . . . To be scientific in this area, you’ve got to start by trusting yourself and writing as fully and lushly as you can” (Goffman 1989:
For Goffman, fieldwork is a thoroughly embodied struggle to grasp other people’s point of view as best one can. Good fieldwork “tunes your body up” and with your “tuned-up” body and with the ecological right to be close to them (which you’ve obtained by one sneaky means or another), you are in a position to note their gestural, visual, bodily responses to what’s going on around them and you’re empathetic enough-because …show more content…
In this vein, Goffman says that, “[the way to make a world is to be naked to the bone, to have as few resources as you can get by with. . . . the way to get it is to need it” (1989: 127). Goffman thus offers a microlevel, situation-specific variant of what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967: 47) call “world openness”: “You have to open yourself up in ways you’re not in ordinary life.” Often one also has to grapple with hierarchy in the field: “If you’ve got to be with a range of people, be with the lowest people first” (Goffman 1989: 130). Finally, Goffman talked about writing field notes and field-based narratives: “Write [your field notes] as lushly as you can, as loosely as you can, as long as you put yourself into it, where you say, ‘I felt that.’ . . . To be scientific in this area, you’ve got to start by trusting yourself and writing as fully and lushly as you can” (Goffman 1989: