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
you’ve been through the same crap they’ve been taking-to sense what it is they’re responding to. To me, that’s the core of observation. (Goffman 1989: 125)
Also at the core of observation, Goffman implies, is taking the role of the other. As struggle, fieldwork requires no less: “The standard technique is to try to subject yourself, hopefully, to [your subjects’] life circumstances, which means that although in fact you can leave at any time, you act as if you can’t and you try to accept all the desirable and undesirable things that are a feature of their life” (Goffman 1989: 125).
Fieldwork thus amounts to coconstituting a world with the people whose point of view one hopes to grasp.
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:
131).
More concisely than most, Thomas J. Scheff affirms Goffman’s adherence to these criteria, at least with reference to Asylums. Scheff observes that Goffman “wandered the halls of St. Elizabeth‘s hospital. Dressed shabbily, he was usually taken to be a patient. . . . In his analysis he identifies with the patients; most of his narrative is from their point of view. Readers of Asylums report some of the reactions that occur when an axis that is assumed to be absolute is reversed: fear, fury, and awe” (Scheff 1984: 158).
-------------------------------------------------
Extracts from: Mary F. Rogers. The Personal Is Dramaturgical (and Political): The Legacy of Erving Goffman. In Goffmanv’s Legacy, A. Javier Trevifio (ed.). New York: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. pp. 71-72.