From Vikings to valentines, crimes to dinner invitations, Miller
(Law/University of Michigan) here explores the mercurial history of
the emotions, attitudes, values, and behaviors associated with
honor - its defense, loss, survival, and display - drawing on
evidence from the Greek epics and Icelandic sagas to contemporary
horror movies. Miller (a self-described "social constructionist")
traces the sources of such uncomfortable emotions as shame and
humiliation to ancient and subtle codes of honor that still survive
today. Contemporary exchanges, however banal, he says, involve the
same issues of prestige, self-esteem, reciprocity, and violence as
did those in primitive societies, although modern manifestations
are often internalized and psychological. Miller finds reciprocity
to be a central concept in humiliation, involving not only the
appropriate responses to gifts and hospitality, however unwanted,
but also - on the dark side - retribution, paying back, maintaining
face, and shaming. The author offers useful and precise
distinctions between shame and humiliation, as well as between the
various strategies used to avoid them - assuming the mantle of
humility or indifference, for instance, or embracing and enduring
humiliation like Dosteyevsky's Underground Man. Miller's larger
purpose seems to be to dispute the universality of emotional
expression: Some emotions, he claims, produce "predictable somatic
displays" that can lead to a belief in a universal vocabulary of
emotional expression - but, in fact, these expressions should be
interpreted according to the different periods and cultures in
which they arise. Translating emotions over time and across
cultures is Miller's major methodological challenge - and he meets
it with ranging and learned references, a wry and unpretentious
style, and a genuine respect for the power of those ancient,
forgotten sources on which modern social exchange depends. (Kirkus
Reviews)
'In an illuminating and darkly intelligent study, William
Miller...has revealed...humiliation as the closet dominatrix she
is, an emotion whose power to discipline us makes the world go
round...Miller makes his pages blaze and roar...by throwing another
handful of hollow complacencies upon the fire....The five essays
making up this book...are about the persistence of the norm of
reciprocity in our daily lives, about the ways in which shame and
envy and especially humiliation sustain 'cultures of honor' to this
day.'-Speculum
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