Totally Committed

Abstract

The concept of the total institution (hereafter ‘TI’) was introduced in Erving Goffman’s (1961a) influential text, Asylums, a case study of St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC. Here, he spent a year observing under cover as ‘assistant to the athletics director’, thereby gaining access to both staff and patient areas. Inspired by his Chicago School mentors Everett Hughes and Robert Park, Goffman was working within the Symbolic Interactionist tradition (though he preferred to describe himself as an anthropologist or ethologist), and was concerned with the micro-level routines and practices through which social realities are created in everyday life. Methodologically, as an ethnographic field researcher, he sought to immerse himself within the culture he was studying, in order ‘to learn about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively experienced by him [sic]’ (1961a: 7). Although he did not sleep on the wards, he spent most of his time there, talking to patients and experiencing the daily round from their perspective. Goffman was unashamedly sympathetic towards these ‘inmates’, as he called them, and in acknowledging this bias, pre-empts Becker’s (1967) famous claim that sociologists have a moral duty to represent the views of the relatively powerless ‘underdogs’.