Shame, Blame, and Culpability

Crime and violence in the modern state

Judith Rowbotham, Marianna Muravyeva, David Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136275456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This ground-breaking collection of research-based chapters addresses the themes of shame, blame and culpability in their historical perspective in the broad area of crime, violence and the modern state, drawing on less familiar territories such as Russia and Greece, not just on material from familiar locations in western Europe. Ranging from the early modern to the late twentieth century, the collection has implications for how we understand punishments imposed by states or the community today.

Shame, blame and culpability is divided into three sections, with a crucial case study part complementing two theoretical parts on shame, and on blame and culpability; exploring the continuance of shaming strategies and examining their interaction with and challenge to 'modern' state-sponsored blaming mechanisms, including allocations of culpability. The collection includes chapters on the deviant body, capital punishment and, of particular interest, Russian case studies, which demonstrate the extent to which the Russian, like the Greek, experience need to be seen as part of a wider European whole when examining ideas and themes.

The volume challenges ideas that shame strategies were largely eradicated in post-Enlightenment western states and societies; showing their survival into the twentieth century as a challenge to state dominance over identification of what constituted 'crime' and also over punishment practices. Shame, blame and culpability will be a key text for students and academics in the fields of criminology and crime, gender or European history.

Part I

Theorising shame

1 Vergüenza, vergogne, schande, skam and sram

Litigating for shame and dishonour in early modern Europe

Marianna Muravyeva

In a moderate government, the idea of shame will follow the finger of the law . . .¹

Introduction

Historians have recently rediscovered shame as a fruitful and rich topic. However, its meaning has hardly ever been conceptualised and used as a tool to build a bigger picture. Shame has been approached from different disciplinary perspectives: psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural history, criminology and others to create an overarching history of emotions and so reveal its importance for contemporary society.² There are several sets of questions to be addressed through a reconceptualisation of shame. As an emotion, a type of passion, shame fits with the idea of a dichotomy between passion and reason, thus representing a non-rational ‘social’ emotion, activated both externally and internally for the very specific needs of an individual and a community. Shame has been consistently shown to be relatively successful as a strategy for upholding certain values, such as honour. Assuming that shame was (and is) a pan-human emotion, how universal was its functioning in European societies? Were the concepts of shame and honour interconnected in the same way in different European environments so that we can speak about an emotional and cultural unity within Europe? Or was this interconnection modified according to the specific conditions of each locality, producing the individual shame and guilt cultures as suggested by cultural anthropologists? To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the analysis of the concepts of shame and honour in different European countries during the period when Europe was trying to discover its identity through reason and enlightenment.

This chapter begins by giving an account of the understandings of shame 11 relevant in various disciplines, followed by a brief analysis of the lexicography of ‘shame’. After that, the focus is on shame as a means of punishment in different European penal codes in order to provide the necessary legal background. Finally, it will explore internal and external connections between shame and honour through analysis of the public litigation and associated penances to be found in various European jurisdictions.

What is shame? Ideal definitions versus material realities

Aristotle called shame a ‘phantasia’ – imagination about a loss of reputation.³The causes of shame were directly related to a person’s position in any given social situation and to the value placed on that position. Shame was enabled in certain circumstances: there could be no shame where there was no reputation to lose, where the loss of reputation was not recognised, where its loss was merely imagined, or where its loss had no repercussions. Shame activated the close interconnection between a variety of social institutions: where one’s reputation really mattered, where the opinions of others were valued, where social rank was effective, where credit could be given and debts owed, where honour could be realised or lost, where there were fragile bonds of intimacy, and where social prestige could be measured according to one’s institutional access to the truth.⁴ So Aristotle originally saw shame as socially constructed and dependent on the opinion of others. Aristotle also connected shame with reputation or honour, supposing that feeling shame was possible only in a situation where one’s reputation might be at stake.

During the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant offered the same connection between honour and shame but in the very different light of regarding law, duty and responsibility as the new markers of human morality. Kant approved of the love of honour, seeing it as an anticipation of moral concern that should ultimately be assimilated into a properly moral conception of self-respect. Desire for honour, in Kant’s point of view, was a longing for the actual esteem of others. In practice, that meant acting in ways that ensured an avoidance of meriting the scorn of others, regardless of their actual opinions.⁵ In the Doctrine of Right, however, Kant claimed that some killings, those committed to avoid dishonour or disgrace, should be punished less harshly than other kinds of homicide. He suggested that people have something amounting to a right to uphold their reputation and social standing. Kant argued that because the state could not be authorised to defend our honour, individuals always retain some sort of authority to do this on their own initiative and judgement.⁶ Kant used two explicit examples – infanticide and killing in a duel – of how this right to act in defence of honour could be exercised to avoid shame and why the punishment should consequently be lesser than in other cases involving killing.

Thus, in the case of an unmarried mother killing her newborn child, Kant argued that, a priori, the authorities (the state) could not punish an act that was the product of a situation which was itself outside its own law. In other words, since an illegitimate child was born outside the law, it could not as such be protected by that law. It was possible for the evidence of shame to be destroyed in the shape of the child, yet the shame of the mother could not be taken away or cleansed by any law, which made infanticide a sort of compulsive killing.⁷Kant here seemed to claim that the mother had a right to preserve her reputation for chastity, and that the mere existence of her illegitimate child infringed that right. The mother could not call upon the state to remove or conceal her child as such a move would be a public acknowledgement of the child’s reality, producing the consummation of the very disgrace that she had desperately sought to avoid.⁸

At the end of the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche identified Kant with what came to be called ‘guilt cultures’.⁹ In the light of Kant’s treatment of honour it is difficult to assess his ideas as typical of guilt cultures, which instead makes Kantian philosophy a transitional mode of knowledge. Kant undertook the analysis of shame and honour from a rational point of view, the results of which might have sounded unpleasant. It is Kantian treatment of shame that undermined the strict division between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ cultures and ultimately brings us to reassess their connections historically. The division between shame and guilt cultures are well known from anthropological work. According to this distinction, a guilt culture construes morality along the lines of a legal system, emphasising ideas of authority, obligation and responsibility within a modern autonomous self. Shame cultures, by contrast, are supposed to be fundamentally concerned with the nature of a person’s entire character, assessed with respect to the social roles that he or she occupies. Margaret Mead argued for the existence of cultures marked by an absence of the internalisation where individual members are controlled by fear of being shamed, but where (as long as no one knows of one’s misdeeds) individuals can and do dismiss misbehaviour from their minds. Members of a guilt culture, on the other hand, are compelled by their conscience to repent and atone for sin. Therefore, socialisation and modernisation are said to be at the root of this difference.¹⁰The Mediterranean basin, the Japanese, the Bedouins of Egypt and the Russians of Muscovy were all classified as shame cultures, while modern Western European nations were labelled guilt ones.¹¹

However, both cultures seem to develop parallel to each other, or, to put it differently, shame and guilt developed in relation to each other and other concepts such as honour, blame and culpability. Thus, John Carroll defined five stages of cultural evolution in England based on attitudes to guilt: the era of naive culture (that of early medieval England: no guilt); that of superficial guilt (1200–1530: medieval Catholicism); that of rampant, uncultured guilt (1530–1600); that of parricidal guilt (1600–60); and finally civilised guilt (1660–1800).¹² Taking into consideration the development of shaming in England, especially during the last three stages of guilt, it is obvious here that both concepts were well articulated and functioned together, enabling English society to cope with various political, social and economic issues.

Historical approaches to shame are originally based on the works of Elias and Foucault. Despite their different approaches, both saw the late early modern period (stretching into the eighteenth century) as crucial for the internalisation of shame as a result of the emerging conscious self. By creating the internal spaces of the soul, shame became the self-controlled internal emotion that eroded and diminished its public presence. Through it, Elias grounded the change in manners and thresholds of sensibility, while Foucault explained the changes in discipline and control.¹³ Indeed, shame was particularly visible in state and communal penal policies. Shame punishments, exercised on different levels, appealed to external control by either authorities or communities. It was the application of shame punishments that marked more or less progressive societies (according to Foucault) and which were eroded by Enlightenment attitudes to penology and the coming spread of incarceration as a substitute to physical and public punishments.¹⁴

The recent renaissance of shame punishments, through discussions by criminologists around the positive and negative aspects of shame, suggest that shaming was a stable form of community management, even in the situation when it was not supported by the omnipotent state.¹⁵ Authors such as John Braithwaite have argued that using appropriate ‘good’ shaming might help in the reintegration of criminals into society. A distinction is made between shaming (good) and stigmatisation (bad), taking shame and humiliation as core emotions. The reasoning advanced by Braithwaite for the effectiveness of shaming was that sanctions imposed by friends and family members (including the manipulation of shame) have more effect on the offender than sanctions imposed by a remote legal authority.¹⁶ Therefore, shaming has a better deterrent effect than other forms of punishments, especially for young offenders.

What is shame, then? If it is an important concept, have the contents been consistent over time? How much does early modern shame differ from current understanding of what amounts to shame? Did understanding of shame in various European societies differ significantly? The question of definition contributes to the methodological discussion of the extent to which emotions are similar or different across cultures and times.¹⁷ A modern definition, from the Oxford English Dictionary, define...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Shame, Blame and Culpability
• Routledge SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice Histories
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface: Towards a history of shaming and blaming
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Theorising shame
• Part II: Rethinking blame
• Part III: Issues of authority in shame, blame and culpability
• Bibliography
• Index