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  • Shame: A Brief History by Peter N. Stearns
  • Ute Frevert
Shame: A Brief History. By Peter N. Stearns (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2017) 163 pp. $95.00 cloth $24.95 paper

Stearns, one of the first American voices in the history of emotions, has written a courageous book. It is courageous for two reasons: First, it covers a vast and comprehensive subject, the history of shame, and, second, it does so in a mere 134-page text (followed by a 30-page bibliography). Given his suggestion at the outset that shame has to be explored in an interdisciplinary context, Stearns introduces his readers to how contemporary psychologists think about shame (as opposed to guilt). As a social historian, however, he criticizes the dominant approach to shame as a “self-conscious” emotion for its ignorance of social components. Furthermore, he questions the claim that shame is on the decline in contemporary societies.

Stearns’ main argument is that shame has been “ubiquitous” throughout history and only recently has it lost any of its appeal, if at all. As long as people lived in premodern or agricultural societies, they engaged in practices of social shaming, which served to enforce community standards. In hunter and gatherer communities, by contrast, shaming and shame were less prominent and, as anthropological studies suggest, milder forms of embarrassment and shyness abounded. Once agriculture became the predominant form of economic activity, such strategies were succeeded by more violent forms of shaming in the interest of social conformity. Using examples from classical China, ancient Greece, India, and Japan, as well as from Western Europe and colonial North America, Stearns identifies [End Page 316] similar patterns and formulations that all “confirm the central role of shame in the emotional vocabulary of premodern societies” (37).

Between 1750 and 1850, Western societies started to develop a “dramatically different take on shame.” Focusing on the United States, Stearns notices new standards of behavior and locates them in the penal system’s treatment of social offenders and in advice about child rearing. Among possible causal factors, he mentions the growing diversity of American communities due to immigration, which might have made common notions of decency and propriety more difficult to define and uphold. Nevertheless, one might wonder to what extent immigrant communities cultivated their own standards and shaming practices, and how these practices fared when confronted with other modes. But the main cause for change, as the Stearns contends, was the increasing valuation of individualism and a new sense of personal liberty, emphasized by the American Revolution.

Despite such cultural shifts, however, shame and shaming persisted even in America, as new codes of respectability strengthened rules regarding sex and manners, and schools continued to resort to shaming disobedient students. “New paths for shame” were invented during the late nineteenth century, with organized sports (for boys and men) and their particular shaming methods, or with general contempt for those who had failed in their businesses or had not managed to become middle-class.

Viewed against this background, Stearns’ observation about the “revival of shame” in contemporary history comes as a surprise. What has happened since the 1960s is structurally not so different from what happened during the nineteenth century: On the one hand, shame and shaming find ever-new targets and methods, from fat shaming to the shaming of bankers or tax evaders. The internet and social media widely enhance the possibilities of using shame to punish those who do not conform to certain moral standards. On the other hand, therapists continue to condemn shame as a factor that generates distress and emotional pain. Some movements— feminism, for one—have been successful in rejecting shamefulness as oppressive, and the gay liberation movement’s promotion of Gay Pride is not unlike civil-rights activistsʼ organization of campaigns about Black Pride. All in all, the debate continues, with rising levels of sensitivity on all sides.

The book offers much in the way of interdisciplinary opportunity. Psychologists will be keen to obtain an overview of the wide variety of shaming practices throughout history and their relation to social norms and the power of communities. Sociologists might find it helpful to look at the modern period as...

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