Introduction

When Erving Goffman passed away and left his earthly shell in the early morning hours of November 20, 1982, something passed away with him, but something—and indeed something important—also lived on. Even though Goffman left his earthly shell, he had ignited an inextinguishable fire in the minds of those of his students and readers who saw in his work the discovery of a new realm of human and social life that needed to be charted and researched. Goffman is known to have provided a spark for new generations of scholars and researchers in their endeavor to excavate and carve out new details of what he himself had termed “the interaction order”—the heretofore relatively unchartered realm of face-to-face interaction. In the exploration of this realm, Goffman wanted to retain for himself and those who followed lead what he called “a spirit of unfettered, unsponsored inquiry” (Goffman 1983, 17), extending to all elements and areas of social life. It was this unfettered and unsponsored curiosity about a part of social life that had been so routinely overlooked—face-to-face interaction—that Goffman in his lifetime turned into a legitimate concern for sociologists.

Goffman died at the age of sixty, and we are only allowed to speculate what he could have invented and accomplished had he lived another ten or twenty years. But prior to his premature death he was a prolific writer publishing eleven monographs and a number of important journal articles. Perhaps if the quantity in itself was not impressive, the quality and originality of Goffman’s books was matched by few. Goffman was a maverick, a lone wolf, throughout his career. His books and articles were singleauthored, and compared to today’s publishing patterns and strategies (sometimes with a never-ending listing of authors even for a short piece), Goffman remained a DIY-man, relying mostly on his own wit and ideas but also creatively incorporating the inspiration of many fellow social scientists, novelists, playwrights, authors of technical manuals, etiquette books, and other types of unconventional material into his own corpus of work (often meticulously mentioned in his abundant footnotes, see Jacobsen 2022b).