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Shame and Pride Behind Face

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Negotiating multiple identities

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Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to bridge between the affective aspects of identity negotiation and the emotions in face-threatening incidents. In applying Thomas Scheff’s notion of shame and pride, I found that identity negotiation is closely related with how one goes about managing shame within a particular kind of identity. In any interpersonal relationship, shame and pride play an important role: pride generates a secure bond while shame generates a threatened bond.

According to Scheff, there are three kinds of shame: unacknowledged, acknowledged and bypassed. When shame is acknowledged and pride is restored, two parities make up for the damaged bond. However, in an interpersonal conflict, shame is likely to be unacknowledged or bypassed, and escalation of conflict may be attributed to the accumulated bypassed shame. This allowed me to specify my research questions: (1) what is the relationship between face and identity? and (2) how do shame and pride affect people’s negotiation of their multiple identities?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As the title of Wood’s (2000) article ‘That wasn’t the real him’ indicates, in most cases the abused party is the wife. However, to avoid gender bias, I have used ‘him/her’.

  2. 2.

    Aum Shinrikyo, which is also known as Aum and Aleph, is a Japanese cult that combines principles from Buddhism and Hinduism and is obsessed with doomsday. They made headlines around the world in 1995 when members undertook a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system. Investigation of the 1995 attack continued until 2012, when three remaining fugitives were tracked down and arrested (Council on Foreign Relations, 2013).

  3. 3.

    I modified Figure 3-1 in Sueda (2012, p. 36).

  4. 4.

    I modified Figure 3-2 in Sueda (2012, p. 36).

  5. 5.

    I modified Figure 3-3 in Sueda (2012, p. 37).

  6. 6.

    According to Sabini, Garvey, and Hall (2001), ‘people refer to themselves as experiencing shame when they believe that a real flaw of their self has been revealed, they refer to themselves as experiencing embarrassment when they believe that others have reason to think a flaw has been revealed’ (p. 104).

  7. 7.

    ‘Stigma’ is discussed in Goffman (1963).

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  1. Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

    Kiyoko Sueda

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Sueda, K. (2014). Shame and Pride Behind Face. In: Negotiating multiple identities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-008-7_3

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