Erving Goffman's work on Social Stigma

Erving Goffman's work on Social Stigma

Introduction

The term 'Stigma' was coined by the Greeks which were used to refer to the body signs that signified the moral status and the unusual conditions of the individual. The signs were made of burns or cuts which promoted the individual having them as traitors, criminals or slaves. The signs depicted those individuals wearing them as those who are considered polluted by the rituals of the society, and they were to be avoided in the public gatherings. Later the stigma was added with a medical reference to depict those individuals who are suffering from physical disorders. The human beings have a natural tendency of categorizing the people whom they see as different from them and classify the other individuals based on their social identity and status. The human beings find attributes in the individuals which make them different from the others in the society. The society therefore calls those individuals who differ in terms of their attributes from the other people in the society as 'strangers'. The individuals who are known by their character as being polluted and tainted are discounted in the social setups and are degraded by the other individuals of the same society. The attributes which hence make an individual as less desirable and unnecessary in the social systems are regarded as stigmas and are also referred to as shortcomings and handicaps. The term stigma therefore is used to refer to all those attributes which cause the individual possessing them to feel discrete from the society. Therefore, the stigmas are often related with stereotypes because they distinguish an individual from the rest of society. The stigmatized individuals are at first discredited in the society and then they are regarded as discreditable by the members of the society.

There are basically two kinds of the stigma that exist in a society. The first kind consists of the individuals who have physically deformed. The second kind consists of those who have individual imperfections in their characters, and their records are known in the society, for example, individuals who have mental disorders, those who have been imprisoned in the past, alcoholics, drug addicts, those who have attempted suicides etc. The society hence regards such individuals as undesirable thinking that they will contaminate the others in the society.

The normal human beings who do not have any stigma regard the stigmatized individuals as not being humans. On the basis of this assumption the individuals in a society exercise many forms of discrimination while dealing with the stigmatized individuals. The normal individuals then develop a stigma theory in their perception which regards the stigmatized individuals as potential threats to the society and inferior in their personality. The normal humans in a society use a variety of words to refer to the stigmatized individuals in the society without even considering the meaning that those words convey.

Discussion

Relevance of Stigma theory to HIV/AIDS in Goffman's Theory

In the context of the diseases, the diseases which have the ...