Ceremonial degradation of a doctoral candidate: An essay on the social situation of graduate student ethnographers and other inmates

The recruit comes into the establishment with a conception of himself made possible by certain stable social arrangements in his home world. Upon entrance, he is immediately stripped of the support provided by these arrangements. In the accurate language of some of the oldest total institutions, he begins a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of the self. His self is systematically, if often unintentionally, mortified. He begins some radical shifts in his moral career, a career composed of the progressive changes that occur in the beliefs that he has concerning himself and the significance of others. (Goffman 1961: 14) His research areas are Deviance and Social Control and Social Psychology