Humiliation and Conflict

The article, based on interdisciplinary historiographical and anthropological studies and archival documents, collected folk literature and other documents, will reconstruct the ritual of blood feud with emphasis on the act of humiliation and penance as reflected in documents from Southeast Europe, comparing them with many fragments of medieval European cases, reflecting general ritual structure in the field of public affairs: Homage (gift, first approach), Fides (fidelity, oath, truce) and Investiture (appointment), and, in case of dispute settlement, Pace Perpetua – lasting peace (love, marriage), with particular focus on principles of the so called gift-exchange societies. The hypothesis of this article, based on collected material and on outlined cases, is arguing in favour of the principle of the general ritual structure for all public aff airs, in which precisely the gesture of penance and humiliation plays an important symbolic role, especially in the ritual of vindicta, that is in the customary system of conflict resolution.

Saving Face Humiliation, Shame, and the Affective Economy of War " I'm talking about having looked over the brink and seen the bottom of the pit and realized the truth of that linchpin of Stoic thought: that the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame! " —James B. Stockdale, Courage under Fire

This study explored how the study participants make sense of their experiences of humiliation in a society that stigmatizes fat persons.  Previous research in Fat Studies has not focused on humiliation.  The research project used interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the experiences of four men and women who self-identified as fat and who had experiences of humiliation related to their body size. 

The meanings of the words and events shared by the participants, within a phenomenological framework, illuminated eight themes that structured their experiences: avoidance; place in the world; impediments to well-being and growth; agency and empowerment; recognition, exclusion, and disconnection; blame and fault; and oppression.  A second framework used in this study was intersectionality, an analytic tool that helped examine the influence of race and gender in participants’ experiences.  The third framework was a multi-level analysis that enabled an examination of the findings from three inter-related levels of context and analysis: micro, meso, and macro. 

The study findings demonstrated that participants engaged in a cyclical process of experiences-interpretations-responses (EIR) when they faced a humiliating event.  Experiences informed interpretations, which informed responses.  New responses informed new experiences.

Traitée par les psychologues, les psychanalystes et les sociologues, l’humiliation est habituellement délaissée par les historiens. L’objectif de cet ouvrage interdisciplinaire, composé de vingt-cinq contributions, consiste à cerner les actes et le sentiment de l’humiliation, en synchronie et en diachronie, en prêtant attention au lien social et moral, fragilisé par l’offense. Qu’est-ce qui caractérise l’action d’humilier et le sentiment d’humiliation ? Quels mots et quels gestes revêtent un tel acte sur le plan social, religieux, judiciaire et politique ? Telles sont quelques-unes des questions traitées dans ce livre par vingt-six chercheurs issus des sciences sociales et humaines, et rattachés à des universités européennes et américaines.