The Concept of Humiliation: Its Universal Core and Culture-Dependent Periphery

This article argues that the concept of humiliation may be deconstructed into seven layers, including a) a core that expresses the universal idea of ‘putting down,’ b) a middle layer that contains two opposed orientations towards ‘putting down,’ treating it as, respectively, legitimate and routine, or illegitimate and traumatising, and c) a periphery whose distinctive layers include one pertaining to cultural differences between groups and another four peripheral layers that relate to differences in individual personalities and variations in patterns of individual experience of humiliation. The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 2 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 The Concept of Humiliation: Its Universal Core and Culture-Dependent Periphery There is a long-standing assumption that the Versailles Accords after World War I (28 th June 1919) inflicted humiliation (‘Schmach,’ ‘Schande’) on Germany to an extent that it triggered World War II. Astonishingly, social psychology has not researched the issue of humiliation on a larger scale. However, it is important to research a process or mechanism that is assumed to have the capacity to trigger world wars. This paper is part of a series of texts written within a social-psychological research project on humiliation being carried out at the University of Oslo. The research presented here asks, ‘is it accurate to regard humiliation as force with such potency that it can lead to world wars? The question was refined as follows: What is experienced as humiliation? What happens when people feel humiliated? When is humiliation established as a feeling? What does humiliation lead to? Which experiences of justice, honour, dignity, respect and selfrespect are connected with the feeling of being humiliated? How is humiliation perceived and responded to in different cultures, for example, Somalian, Rwandan and Burundian culture? What role does humiliation play for aggression? What can be done to overcome violent effects of humiliation? What about practices such as rape in war – is war-rape humiliation turned into a weapon? And, at last, what about the link between microand macro-level, 1 This treaty included the now infamous war-guilt clause imposing complete responsibility for the war on the Germans and demanding that they ‘make complete reparation for all... loss and damage’ caused: ‘The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’ (Versailles Treaty 1919, part VIII, section I, article 231). See also Sebastian Haffner & Bateson, 1978, and Norbert Elias, 1996. 2 Lindner, 1999a; Lindner, 1999b; Lindner, 2000b, Lindner, 2000c; Lindner, 2000a; Lindner, 2000d; Lindner, 2000e; Lindner, 2000f; Lindner, 2000g; Lindner, 2000h; Lindner, 2000i; Lindner, 2000j; Lindner, 2000k; Lindner, 2000l; Lindner, 2000m; Lindner, 2000n; Lindner, 2000o; Lindner, 2000p; Lindner, 2000q; Lindner, 2000r; Lindner, 2001. A theory of humiliation is currently being built that draws together several academic fields. Loughborough based sociologist Dennis Smith is collaborating on this task, see for some of his publications, Smith, 1991; Smith, 1997; Smith, 1999; Smith, 2000a; Smith, 2000b; Smith, 2000c. 3 Its title is The Feeling of Being Humiliated: A Central Theme in Armed Conflicts. A Study of the Role of Humiliation in Somalia, and Rwanda/Burundi, Between the Warring Parties, and in Relation to Third Intervening Parties. See project description on www.uio.no/~evelinl. The project is supported by the Norwegian Research Council and the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I am grateful for their support, and would also like to thank the Institute of Psychology at the University of Oslo for hosting it. I extend my warmest thanks to all my informants in and from Africa, many of whom survive under the most difficult life circumstances. I hope that at some point in the future I will be able to give back at least a fraction of all the support I received from them! I thank Reidar Ommundsen at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Oslo for his continuous support, together with Jan Smedslund, Hilde Nafstad, Malvern Lumsden. The project would not have been possible without the help of Dennis Smith, professor of sociology at Loughborough University (UK), equally was Lee D. Ross’s encouragement and support; Lee Ross is a principal investigator and cofounder of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation (SCCN). Also Michael Harris Bond, Chinese University of Hong Kong, helped with feedback and support. The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 3 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 namely destructive effects of humiliation and its consequences for peace and cooperation in two kinds of relationships, the relations between nations and ethnic groups in the global arena, and the relations between people in the many contexts of everyday life? The four-year research project that addressed these questions and that currently is being carried out at the University of Oslo entailed fieldwork within which 216 qualitative interviews were carried out, from 1998 to 1999 in Africa (in Hargeisa, capital of ‘Somaliland,’ in Kigali and other places in Rwanda, in Bujumbura, capital of Burundi, in Nairobi in Kenya, and in Cairo in Egypt), and from 1997 to 2000 in Europe (in Oslo in Norway, in Germany, in Geneva, and in Brussels). The topic has been discussed with about 400 researchers working in related fields. 4 The title of the project indicates that three groups had to be interviewed, namely both conflict parties in Somalia and Rwanda/Burundi, and representatives of third intervening parties. These three groups stand in a relationship that in its minimum version is triangular. In case of more than two opponents, as is the case in most conflicts, it acquires more than three corners. Both in Somalia and Rwanda/Burundi representatives of the ‘opponents’ and the ‘third party’ were interviewed. The following categories of people have been interviewed:  Survivors of genocide were interviewed, i.e. people belonging to the group, which was targeted for genocide. In Somalia this was the Issaq tribe, in Rwanda the Tutsis, in Burundi also the Hutus. The group of survivors consists of two parts, namely those who survived because they were not in the country when the genocide happened, some of them returned after the genocide, and those who survived the ongoing onslaught inside the country.  Freedomfighters (only men) were interviewed. In Somalia these were the SNM (Somali National Movement) fighters who liberated the North of Somalia from the troops sent by the central government in Mogadishu; in Rwanda these were the former Tutsi refugees who formed an army and attacked Rwanda from Uganda in order to oust the Hutu government which carried out the genocide in Rwanda in 1994; in Burundi these were also Hutus.  Many Somali warlords who have their retreat in Kenya; the candidate got in touch with some of them there.  Politicians, among them people who were in power already before the genocide and whom the survivors secretly suspected of having been collaborators or at least silent supporters of the perpetrators.  Somali and Rwandan/Burundian academicians, who study the situation of their countries.  Representatives of national non-governmental organisations who work locally with development, peace and reconciliation.  Third parties, namely representatives of United Nations organisations and international nongovernmental organisations who work with emergency relief, long-term development, peace, and reconciliation.  Egyptian diplomats in the foreign ministry who deal with Somalia (Egypt is a heavy weight in the OAU).  African psychiatrists in Kenya who deal with trauma, and forensic psychiatry. In Kenya many nationals from Somalia and Rwanda/Burundi sought refuge, both in refugee camps, but also privately.  Those who have not yet been interviewed are masterminds of genocide in Rwanda, those who have planned the genocide. Many of them are said to be in hiding in Kenya or other parts of Africa, or in Brussels and other parts of Europe, or in the States and Canada. Some are in the prisons in Rwanda and in Arusha, Tanzania. 5 The qualitative interviews that were carried out in the course of the fieldwork by the present author started out in Somalia in November 1998 with the application of a structured interview guideline. However, the author quickly found that any attempt to administer the questions in a formal and systematic way reinforced conditions of mistrust that the researcher was trying to overcome. In fact, there was a great danger that the process of research, if carried out in that way, would humiliate the respondents. The author shifted to a methodology of asking fewer questions, allowing the interlocutors The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 4 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 The following preliminary working definition of humiliation has been developed in the course of the research: Humiliation means the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honour or dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed, against your will and often in a deeply hurtful way (although in some cases with your consent) in a situation that is much worse, or much ‘lower,’ than what you feel you should expect. Humiliation entails demeaning treatment that transgresses established expectations. It may involve acts of force, including violent force. At its heart is the idea of pinning down, putting down or holding against the ground. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless. Humiliation has not been studied as widely and explicitly as, for example, such topics as ‘shame,’ ‘trauma,’ or ‘stress,’ which are covered by a large number of publications. Humiliation and shame, for example, are often confounded rather than differentiated; the present author often met the assumption, for example in discussions with colleagues, that humiliation is just a more intense reaction than shame. However, the point of the research project that is the larger framework for this article is precisely that humiliation, though in many respects related to shame, deserves to be treated separately, and requires future research and theoretical conceptualisation that differentiates it from other notions. Humiliation has not been studied in a systematic and coherent way in the academic community; the list of publications is comparatively short and spread over very disparate thematic fields including international relations, love, sex and social attractiveness, to take the lead to a great extent, and framing the encounter between the researcher and the respondent as a shared search for understanding. This produced a great deal of important information and insights that would otherwise have been hidden from the researcher. The process of changing the methodological approach during the course of the fieldwork is described in the article ‘How Research Can Humiliate: Critical Reflections on Method’ (Lindner, 2001). 6 See Stoller’s work on sado-masochism (Stoller, 1991). 7 The role of the victim is not necessarily always unambiguous, a victim may feel humiliated in absence of any humiliating act, as result of a misunderstanding, or as result of personal and cultural differences concerning norms of what respectful treatment ought to entail, or the ‘victim’ may even invent a story of humiliation in order to manoeuvre another party into the role of ‘loathsome perpetrator.’ 8 Margalit defines humiliation as the ‘rejection of persons of the Family of Man,’ as injury of selfrespect, or, more specific, as failure of respect, combined with loss of control (Margalit, 1996). His position is disputed, however, for example by Quinton, who argues that self-respect ‘has nothing much to do with humiliation’ (Quinton, 1997, 87). See also Lindner, 2000l. 9 Among others, Silvan S. Tomkins (1962-1992), treats shame and humiliation interchangeably. Tomkins’ work is carried further by Donald L. Nathanson, and Nathanson describes humiliation as a combination of three innate affects out of altogether nine affects, namely as a combination of shame, disgust and dissmell (Nathanson in a personal conversation, 1st October1999; see also Nathanson, 1992 Nathanson, 1987 Also Thomas J. Scheff started out with studying shame (Scheff, 1988; Scheff, in Kemper, 1990; Scheff & Retzinger, 1991; Scheff, Retzinger, & Gordon, 1992). Tangney & Fischer, 1995, address The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride; see also Miller & Tangney, 1994 and Tangney, 1990, as well as Gilbert, 1997. See for further literature, Ahmed, in Ahmed, 1990; Allan & Goss, 1994; Braithwaite, 1989; Braithwaite, 1993; Campbell, 1994; Fischer, Manstead, & Mosquera, 1999; Heimannsberg & Schmidt, 1993; Miller, 1988; Mindell, 1994; Moore, 1993; Moses, in Volkan, Demetrios, & Montville, 1999; Nathanson, 1987; Nathanson, 1992; Peristiany, 1965; Retzinger, 1991; Rosaldo, 1983; Rybak & Brown, 1996; Scheff, 1988; Scheff, in Kemper, 1990; Scheff, Retzinger, & Gordon, 1992; Schenk et al., 1995; Steinberg, 1991a; Steinberg, 1991b; Steinberg, 1996; Swartz, 1988; Tangney, 1990; Wikan, 1984; Wong & Cook, 1992. 10 See, for example, Cviic, 1993; Luo, 1993; Midiohouan, 1991; Steinberg, 1991b; Steinberg, 1991a; Steinberg, 1996; Urban, in Prins, 1990. The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 5 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 depression, society and identity formation, sports, serial murder, war and violence. A few examples from writings of history, literature and film also take humiliation as their theme. This paper addresses the concept of humiliation and its components. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has developed the notion of the ‘depth of intention,’ or the ‘depth of questioning,’ or ‘deepness of answers.’ Naess writes, ‘our depth of intention improves only slowly over years of study. There is an abyss of depth in everything fundamental’ (Naess, in Wetlesen, 1978, 143). Warwick Fox, in his paper ‘Intellectual Origins of the ”Depth” Theme in the Philosophy of Arne Naess’ explains, ‘The extent to which a person discriminates along a chain of precizations (and, therefore, in a particular direction of interpretation) is a measure of their depth of intention, that is, the depth to which that person can claim to have understood the intended meaning of the expression’ (Fox, 1992, 5). In his book Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (chapters 4 and 5, Fox, 1990) Fox discusses how important the concept of depth was for Naess, and that greater depth means asking why and how to a point where others stop asking. How may the concept of depth be linked to the concept of humiliation? The research that forms the basis of this article started in 1996 with the following text (Lindner, 1996, 1): ‘I hypothesise that humiliation, better the subjective feeling of being humiliated, plays a central role in starting, maintaining, or stopping armed conflicts in most cultures. This is not to claim that objective factors as, for example, competition for scarce resources do not play a role in violent conflicts, it is also not to claim that conflict in itself is negative, since, for example, power imbalances might need conflict to be adjusted. But it is to claim that struggles around objective factors or power imbalances do not generate violent responses alone; conflicts around objective factors and power imbalances can also lead to non-violent confrontations, or even to compromise and cooperation. It is to claim that it might often even be the other way round, namely that feelings of humiliation feed on objective factors and then create a violent conflict (Hitler’s Germany being a horrible example: economic hardship and unemployment combined with feelings of humiliation after the First World War made the German population susceptible to Hitler’s demagogy).’ The original project description from 1996 included a number of hypotheses, such as follows: ‘I hypothesise that the significance of feelings of humiliation is universal or cultureindependent, and that these feelings carry the potential to hamper conflict solutions described by rational choice theory. What is rather culture-dependent is according to my experience the way humiliation is perceived and responded to. If this double-layer hypothesis is correct then third parties intervening in a violent conflict could develop and use a two-mode strategy which contains one basic module which deals with universally present fundamental questions of humiliation, and one rather culture-dependent module which addresses the specific ways of dealing with humiliation in the cultural domain in which the third party is operating at present (note: culture or cultural domain is here not understood as closed, self-contained entity).’ 11 See, for example, Baumeister, 1986; Baumeister, 1997; Baumeister, Wotman, & Stillwell, 1993; Brossat, 1995; Gilbert, 1997; Proulx et al., 1994. 12 See, for example, Brown, Harris, & Hepworth, 1995; Miller, 1988. 13 See, for example, Ignatieff, 1997; Kitayama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000; Markus, Kitayama, & Heimann, in Higgins & Kruglanski, 1996; Silver et al., 1986; Wood et al., 1994. 14 See, for example, Hardman et al., 1996. 15 See, for example, Hale, 1994; Lehmann, 1995; Schlesinger, 1998. 16 See, for example, Masson, 1996; Vachon, 1993; Znakov, 1989; Znakov, 1990. 17 See, for example, Peters, 1993; Stadtwald, 1992; Toles, 1995; Zender, 1994. 18 See, for example, Naess, in Linsky, 1952; Naess, 1953; Naess, 1958; Naess, in Wetlesen, 1978. The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 6 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 The text continued, ‘I hypothesise that it could be in many cases more effective to address and attend to feelings of humiliation, than neglecting these feelings and facing their violent effects. This requires a widening of the time perspective, placing an acute conflict into a discourse before and also after the acute conflict phase.’ The following hypotheses were formulated: Hypothesis Ia: In most cultures feelings of humiliation are a central determinant of violent conflicts, hampering the achievement of conflict solutions described by rational choice theory. Hypothesis Ib: What is perceived as humiliation and how it is responded to, varies across cultures. Hypothesis II: Feelings of humiliation can be attended to and its violent effects can be defused. This paper discusses the multi-layered hypothesis here presented, asking whether it represents different degrees of depth and whether this hypothesis was confirmed in the fieldwork carried out after this text had been written. The paper is organised in two parts. The first part presents the historic unfolding of the dynamics of humiliation in terms of the conceptualisation developed in the course of the fieldwork. In the second part, the concept of humiliation is dissected and categorised in terms of seven degrees of depth. The presentation of the current state-of-the-art concerning research on humiliation is also included in the second section. The Core and Periphery of the Concept of Humiliation 7 © Evelin Gerda Lindner, 2001 From Honour to Human Rights How do people understand humiliation? Many readers will answer – together with the 52 people that were interviewed in the pilot study for the project here presented – that humiliation is the subjugation of human beings (and of nature), and that it is illegitimate. This sentence, if carefully dissected, can be deconstructed in three parts, namely (a) putting down (subjugation, abasement, degradation), (b) human beings (as well as material objects), and (c) lack of legitimacy (or violation of human dignity and violation of environmental sustainability). Further analysis exposes that these three elements developed historically in relation to the particular historic context within which each of them was inscribed. Table 1 shows the three elements of humiliation that entered the cultural repertoire of human kind in three phases that coincided, approximately, with advances in technological and organisational capacity and shifts in the balance of power between humankind and nature and between human groups. During the first phase, in hunter and gatherer societies, the first seeds of the idea of subjugation entered the repertoire through small-scale tool making. In other words, the idea of subjugation was introduced or ‘invented’ (or ‘putting/keeping/striking down,’ debasing, abasing, lowering, degrading), and material objects (things, nature, the abiotic world) were subjugated. This subjugation was still mild in its practical application and did not yet reach the extent that we observe today, and also human beings were not yet abased (hunter and gatherer societies were rather egalitarian), however, the idea was born. In the next phase, that started with the advent of agriculture around 10 000 years ago, the resulting surplus enabled coercive hierarchies to develop. In other words, the idea of subjugation was extended from nature to human beings, meaning that also human beings were used as tools. Masters as well as underlings regarded this order as highly legitimate, because they perceived it as ordained by divine authorities. Sometimes underlings rebelled, however, not to dismantle hierarchy, but to replace the master. Thus the question whether hierarchy was legitimate or not, was not part of the cultural repertoire of this period (thus no cross has been introduced in Table 1 at this point). During the third phase, characterised by the current global information society and the advent of human rights, the idea became widespread that subjugating human beings (and, with certain limits, also the subjugation of nature) is illegitimate and morally wrong. THE THREE ELEMENTS OF HUMILIATION