Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

Goffman, E (1968) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity Penguin Group: London

I read the opening chapter of 'Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity' by Erving Goffman to get a bit more inspiration for my film shoot this weekend. I found the information particularly interesting and despite being quite an old source, very relevant to the subjects I am exploring in my film - stereotypes, identity, and so on.

Goffman begins the chapter by discussing how in Ancient Greece, any social deviant was marked so society could see that they were different - this was called a stigma. A stigma can take three main forms; physical stigma which relates to deformities or visible disabilities for example, stigma relating to a flawed, weak or undesirable character traits, and finally 'tribal' stigma which refers to the race, religion, personal history and so on of the individual in question (Goffman, E: 1968) Goffman believes that we have been culturally trained to react in certain ways to people carrying with them the various stigma described above. He talks mainly about the stigma that are immediately recognisable upon meeting or encountering an individual, and expresses the view that we automatically, subconsciously, categorise an individuals social identity/status within the first few moments of meeting them. (Goffman, E: 1968)

Goffman also believes that we are able to anticipate the certain interactions we will have with stigmatised individuals and have again been culturally trained how to react and interact in such situations,
"The routines of social intercourse in established settings allows us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought" (Goffman, E: 1968: 12)

How this relates to my project?

This is all relevant to my film as according to Goffman, homelessness is a stigma. We have been brought up with a stereotypical view of how a homeless person dresses and behaves, where they typically 'hang out' and so on. We have also been culturally conditioned with how to interact with a homeless individual, for example, putting a few coins into their hat if they are begging, or simply ignoring them.

The character of the support worker in my film has been brought up with a slightly different set of rules for dealing with interactions with homeless people due to the nature of his job, however, he still has a set of expectations for such encounters. My film breaks these anticipated set ups involving homeless people through the role reversal of the two characters. The homeless man behaves in a way that neither the audience or the support worker has anticipated thus forcing them to question what it was that immediately made them assume he would behave that way in the first place. The character of the support worker embodies the confusion of the audience, and in his line "Have you answered these questions?" he emphasises the idea, here suggested by Goffman, that stigmatised, in this case homeless, individuals are slightly 'less than human'. (Goffman: 1968)