The Cradle

Abstract

Erving Goffman spent a total of 12 months between December 1949 and May 1951 in Unst (Shetland Islands), which he considered as a natural laboratory for the study of social interactions. His 1953 dissertation, Communication conduct on an island community, is not a Chicago-inspired piece of ethnography but the blueprint for his entire work, all the way to the linguistic elaborations of his later years. This argument is based on a close reading of the dissertation, on documentary research and on interviews conducted in 1988 with the last few islanders who still remembered Goffman. As opposed to the often-repeated comment about Goffman’s piecemeal work, the view offered here is of a global coherence of Goffman’s oeuvre. One only needs to read the dissertation to realize that it contains in a nutshell the program of his intellectual trajectory