Social Research articles from December 2003

Social Research archives from December 2003

Editor's introduction.(Editorial)
December 22, 2003... Where there is no shame, there is no honor. African proverb The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. George Bernard Shaw A great deal can be learned about communities by an examination of how they...

Five approaches to the phenomenon of shame.
December 22, 2003... IN this essay, I will approach the phenomenon of shame from five different perspectives: the anthropological perspective, the sociological perspective, the ethical perspective, the psychological perspective, and, finally, the historical...

Shame in ancient Greece.
December 22, 2003... Each emotion... is a very exact message. This exactness is comparable to the exactness of color sense in those who are not color blind. (For instance, each person knows instantly and without question whether they are seeing red or blue.)...

Honor dishonorable: shameful shame.
December 22, 2003... MUCH modern sensibility feels that it is a shame that shame exists. This paradox is seemingly dissolved because the first use of shame, in an easy, common, colloquial phrase, engages a different sense of the word from the second one. In "it's a...

The American national conversation about (everything but) shame.
December 22, 2003... IT is impossible to understand America's foreign policy, its relatively high homicide rate, its contentious discussions over values, and its zealous sense of mission without reference to shame. In fact, it is difficult to understand most issues...

Toward a deep cultural psychology of shame *.
December 22, 2003... WHEN it comes to the meaning of the emotions, "shame" is "shame," whether it is experienced on the East Coast of India or on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, by a man or by a woman, in 2004 or in 1789. That proposition--that "shame is shame...

The tortured, not the torturers, are ashamed.
December 22, 2003... The Tortured and the Torturers PRIMO Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, tells us that survivors of the Nazi camps felt shame about their experience (1989: 73). Levi calls that shame "absurd" and "paradoxical"; he says that "on a rational...

Shame, guilt, and violence.
December 22, 2003... DURING the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as "laboratories" in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call...

The role of the self in shame.
December 22, 2003... SHAME, as one of the self-conscious emotions, differs from what have been called the primary emotions because it comes about through self-reflection. While primary emotions require a self to experience the state (Lewis and Michalson, 1983),...

Evolution, social roles and the differences in shame and guilt.
December 22, 2003... THE fear of shame and ridicule can be so strong that people will risk serious physical injury or even death to avoid it. One of the reasons for this is because shame can indicate serious damage to social acceptance and a breakdown in a variety...

A King Lear of the debtors' prison: Dickens and Shakespeare on mortal shame.
December 22, 2003... WHILE he spoke, he was opening and shutting his hands like valves; so conscious all the time of that touch of shame, that he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning" (1.19.190). (1) That picture of the Father of the Marshalsea, as he is...

The waning of shame in modern life: Kundera's novels as a case study.
December 22, 2003... PRIVACY has been my obsession," Milan Kundera once declared in an interview. "I might exaggerate by saying that I am in a sense 'sculpted' for discretion." Whether the story takes place in Czechoslovakia after 1968 or consumerist western...

A narrative on "shame".
December 22, 2003... IN a poem entitled "Return the Bridewealth," Okot p'Bitek, an Oxford-trained anthropologist turned poet and novelist, offers a treatment of "shame" by focusing on three earthen mounds in a rural Acholi setting in northern Uganda (Okot p'Bitek,...

The birth of the picaro from the death of shame.
December 22, 2003... THE picaro is the first great anti-hero of Western literature. Born in the early sixteenth century from the social soil of Renaissance--and Inquisitorial--Spain, (1) and flourishing throughout the Spanish "Golden Age," he gave his name to an...

Losses of face: Rembrandt, Masaccio, and the drama of shame.
December 22, 2003... The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable, and yet we are drawn to a great work by involuntary chemistry, like a hound getting a scent.... Lucian Freud Cure yourself of the condition of bothering about how you...

Shame and the samurai: institutions, trusthworthiness, and autonomy in the elite honor culture.
December 22, 2003... ALTHOUGH shame is a complex notion in any culture, it has strong negative connotations in modern Anglo-American usage. It also often implies experiencing a passive emotion in a private space. Imposing such an image onto other cultures' usage of...