Typology of Total Institutions
Total institutions are divided by Goffman into five different types:
- institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses and nursing homes.
- places established to care for people felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: leprosariums mental hospitals, and tuberculosis sanitariums.
- institutions organised to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the people thus sequestered not the immediate issue: concentration camps, P.O.W. camps, penitentiaries, and jails.
- institutions purportedly established the better to pursue some worklike tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: colonial compounds, work camps, boarding schools, ships, army barracks, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants' quarters.
- establishments designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are convents, abbeys, monasteries, and other cloisters.
Read more about this topic: Total Institution
Famous quotes containing the words total and/or institutions:
“Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)