Seven excerpts from Erving Goffmans 1974 remarks on fieldwork can serve as his

virtual preface to this narrative about his legacy. I begin with Goffmans 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 peoples
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 youve
obtained by one sneaky means or another), you are in a position to note their
gestural, visual, bodily responses to whats going on around them and youre
empathetic enough-because youve been through the same crap theyve been
taking-to sense what it is theyre responding to. To me, thats 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 cant 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, situationspecific variant of what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967: 47) call world
openness: You have to open yourself up in ways youre not in ordinary life. Often
one also has to grapple with hierarchy in the field: If youve 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, youve 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 Goffmans adherence to these
criteria, at least with reference to Asylums. Scheff observes that Goffman
wandered the halls of St. Elizabeths 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 Goffmanvs Legacy, A. Javier Trevifio (ed.). New York:
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. pp. 71-72.