Anthropologists and other scholars from a range of disciplines have examined degradation rituals and ceremonies, but their use in science has received little attention, perhaps because of the focus on rational features of the issues involved. Degradation rituals can be described in terms of various features, including degrading agents, contexts, means and severity. Attacks on scientists in a variety of fields can be usefully interpreted through the lens of degradation rituals.
On 25 March , Melvin Reuber - a leading researcher on pesticides and cancer who worked at the Fredrick Cancer Research Center in Maryland - unexpectedly received a severe reprimand from his boss, Michael G. Hanna, Jr. Until then, Hanna had given Reuber glowing reports on his work. A few weeks later, most of Hanna's reprimand letter was published in the trade journal Pesticide and Toxic Chemical News.
Reuber was so distressed by these events that he resigned Schneider, Like Reuber, most scientists place a very high value on their reputations. In the course of their careers, reputations are the basis for obtaining jobs, grants and awards. Independently of material and symbolic advantages, scientists value the respect and admiration of peers.
Reputation is the currency of the operation of science: it is the basis of trust on which science is built Shapin, If a scientist's good reputation is a valuable asset, then it is to be expected that reputations can be targets for attack, for a variety of reasons: undermining the reputation of other scientists can be a means of discrediting their work or getting ahead of them in competition for a job or award.
When a scientist does something wrong - for example, scientific fraud - and deserves to be exposed and reprimanded, then a formal procedure for dealing with the infraction may operate as a degradation ceremony.
But even in these cases, there are different ways of proceeding, only some of which involve shaming as a central element. It is these cases that we examine using the concept of degradation rituals. A critical aspect of the enormous power of degradation rituals, involving feelings of shame and humiliation, lies in tapping emotions.
Emotions are important in the operation of science but have not been studied nearly so much as cognitive aspects of the enterprise Mahoney, , ; Mitroff, In the next section, we explain our approach to ritual as a particular kind of human activity and provide an overview of degradation rituals as studied in various fields.
We then introduce several classifications of features pertaining to degradation rituals. In the following section, we provide several cases of degradation rituals in science, assessing them in terms of our classifications. In the conclusion we sum up the importance of this concept. Degradation rituals serve to control people's behaviour. As such, they can play a role in restricting incentives for innovation, for example by humiliating those who challenge established ways of doing things.
More generally, degradation rituals, by inducing shame, discourage the sort of free and open discussion and inquiry in which innovation thrives. Formal and informal rituals that humiliate or shame a person, degrade their status or expel them from group membership appear to be universal features of societies, whether subsistence-based or industrial.
Informal social rituals of degradation may involve shunning, ignoring or excluding individuals from participation in everyday social interaction or berating subordinates about their performance.
As more formal and stylised events they can appear as ceremonies where the ritual subject is literally and symbolically expelled from the social group in front of a representative audience Carey, In tribal contexts, degradation ceremonies, such as rituals of punishment, have been particularly studied by anthropologists Bilmes and Howard, ; Gould, ; McDonald et al.
In contrast to rites of passage van Gennep, that, say, transform a boy into a man, two individuals into a married couple or an outsider into a member of a secret society, a degradation ritual aims not to incorporate the individual into an esteemed social category but either to lower that person's categorical status or to exclude or expel them from the group entirely.
There may be different types of degradation rituals depending on the outcome they are geared to achieve. In sociology, Garfinkel defined a degradation ceremony as any communicative work that lowers a person's status within a group context. Successful degradation ceremonies, as outlined by Garfinkel, include a denouncing agent , usually an institutionally sanctioned or authoritative figure; a denounced agent , the person targeted for punishment, demotion or excommunication; and an assembled audience.
In this view, degradation ceremonies are rituals with clear beginning and end points, undertaken by individuals recognised as authoritative who devalue the status of the target into a stranger or outsider to the group, in front of an audience representative of the social group in question.
The presence of an audience for the degradation ceremony is seen as critical by Garfinkel to ensure witnesses and to invoke shame, humiliation and passive acceptance in the ritual subject. The degradation ceremony can be seen as a particular kind of institutionalised discipline and punishment that Michel Foucault would distinguish from pre-modern forms of discipline and punishment involving extreme physical consequences, such as public displays of torture or execution.
As examples, we can contrast the degradation ceremony suffered by the key figure in the Dreyfus Affair - a traditional army degradation where epaulettes are ripped off uniforms and swords are broken in front of other officers - versus the dire consequences of rituals where individuals are executed by the state Beschle, ; Smith, However, we will argue that degradation rituals need not always take the form of explicitly formalised and highly ceremonial events which occur, in the first instance, in front of audiences, nor do they always succeed in achieving a clear cut degradation of the target or repudiation by others who may come to know about the degradation at a later time.
The traditional anthropological approach to ritual is that it ensures social integration, namely, builds cohesion within a group. Radcliffe-Brown Alexander, , p. Although we agree that rituals express Geertz, or are performances of Turner, , core values of the social systems in which they occur, we are particularly concerned with the notion of ritual as social action as well as the political dimensions of ritual practices, whether they result in cultures being maintained called cultural reproduction or transformed.
Our preferred approach to ritual focuses on the political or power effects of what has been called ritualisation : strategic and distinctive human activities or practices geared to produce particular social effects Bell, , ; Bloch, ; Bourdieu, ; Couldry, ; Lukes, ; Rappaport, Building on the work of Max Gluckman , , the notion of ritualisation has been advanced especially by Catherine Bell , :.
As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the 'sacred' and the 'profane', and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors. Bell, , p. As Bell notes, ritualisation as a strategy of power is effective in certain contexts, places and times but may prove useless or counterproductive in others, a perspective that proves particularly fruitful to the analysis of degradation rituals and their intended versus actual effects.
Therefore it is critical to analyse the power relationships constructed through ritualisation as well as the contexts in which ritualised action occurs to discern how effective or fruitless such forms of social action are Bell, , p. Attacks occasionally lead to enhanced support for targets and the undermining of attackers themselves Martin, The concepts of degradation ritual and ceremony have been employed to analyse social situations and settings across diverse fields of scholarship, including: the treatment of inmates as they enter 'total institutions' such as prisons, psychiatric wards or army camps Goffman, ; legal and courtroom proceedings Antonio, ; punitive management practices and organisational rites Moch and Huff, ; Trice and Beyer, ; corporate crime and punishment Levi, ; educational contexts Hull, ; Westhues, , pp.
The concept of degradation rituals in scientific contexts and domains, however, remains largely unexplored in any explicit sense. It could be argued that the notion of degradation rituals has been implied in studies of scientific boundary work Gieryn, , , that analyse social practices delineating what is science from what is not, as well as practices making value distinctions within science Swedlow, Explicit analysis of demarcation battles in science as degradation rituals, however, including their various features, participants, and intended versus actual effects, appears not to have been pursued.
Applying the concept of degradation rituals to the analysis of suppression in science and beyond allows for judicious use of anthropological insights regarding the range of cultural responses to persons or practices perceived as dangerous, anomalous or polluting within particular cultural contexts Douglas, Analytically, discerning features of degradation rituals allows insights into how social agents, by intention or default, protect existing practices, power arrangements and categories of thought by marking off certain things, activities or people as polluted, polluting and, therefore, dangerous to core cultural values and practices.
In this paper we use the term degradation ritual to refer to particular practices - forms of ritualisation - that work to transform the status and identity of the ritual target into a devalued category within a group or to expel them from the group entirely.
We follow Goffman in making a distinction between 'social status' which includes formal and structural attributes, such as a person's occupation, and 'social identity' which includes personal attributes such as perceived moral character, abilities or reputation. As discussed below, degradation rituals may be overtly conscious strategies or relatively unconscious, habitual strategies which attempt to undermine individuals or their work, but they do not necessarily succeed.
Some rituals may be less ceremonial, formal, patterned and public than others, as we discuss in more detail below. There has been little in the way of systematic categorisation of types of degradation rituals by considering various features of these social practices.
Although the concept of degradation ceremonies or rituals is used in quite a number of disciplines and scholarly areas of research, we could locate no schema of their various features and effects, whether in the context of science or other institutional domains - so we developed our own set of categories.
The schema we present here is illustrative rather than exhaustive. We delineate features of degradation practices in terms of degrading agents who enact them, such as those with formal authority over the target or those who are potential equals; contexts in which they occur, specifically public or private and formal or informal; the means by which ritualised degradation is enacted, for instance through symbolic representations such as texts and images or embodied acts; and the severity of a degradation ritual, including effects on the formal status, identity, emotions and behaviour of the target as well as effects on other audiences who may witness the event or come to know about it.
Degrading agents The person or group that administers a degradation ritual can be an immediate superior e. The implications of degradation rituals, such as their emotional or behavioural impacts, can vary with the nature of the degrading agent. Rituals enacted by those in a position of structural power over the subject are likely to be more serious in their effects than those enacted by co-workers.
Degradation rituals can occur by intent but also by default, when the putative degrading agent does not intend to degrade. It is usually easier to find data on the emotional, behavioural and social effects of degradation rituals than to establish the original intent of the perpetrator. Public or private The usual idea of degradation rituals is that they are necessarily public: an audience apart from the target should be involved.
For social effects of degradation to occur, the three distinct types of parties to degradation rituals degrader, target and other audiences do not all have to be present at the same time and in the same space. We therefore introduce the idea of private degradation rituals, namely those without an audience apart from the target, as when a superior, in the confines of an office, admonishes, demotes or fires an individual or severely criticises their work.
Between the two poles of public and private are semi-public degradation rituals, for example verbal abuse or other degrading speech acts in front of a small number of work colleagues. Even without an audience, the effects of degradation rituals on targets may involve a perception of oneself as diminished within the group context in addition to other negative emotional and behavioural impacts.
As pointed out by Goffman in his study of stigma, people degraded in private are faced with task of information management to prevent knowledge of their stigma and their subsequent transformation into publicly discredited individuals Goffman, , p.
A variety of communicative means can be used for degradation, such as defamatory or insulting texts, pictorial representations, gestures or the refusal to acknowledge someone's presence or respond to verbal or written communication. Hence, an assembled audience may not be necessary to achieve degradation.
Indeed, the target of the degradation need not be physically present. Defamatory texts or images or other representations of degradation may be circulated through diverse media and to a range of audiences. Whether the ritualised degradation is successful greatly depends upon the interpretation and subsequent emotional and behavioural responses of the target and any other audiences. Formal or informal Acts of degradation can range from sporadic and spontaneous social practices including ostracism, verbal abuse, abusive gesturing and gossip to more formal, stylised, rehearsed and pre-planned institutional ceremonies at special places and times.
While formalisation is a highly common feature of ritualisation which aims to differentiate the specialness of ritualised behaviours from everyday, quotidian acts, Bell suggests that formality is not required for something to be a ritual.
She notes, for example, that some ritualised acts set themselves off as special precisely through their self-conscious informality 'usually in contrast to a known tradition or style of ritualization.
While ostracism or abuse may appear spontaneous, unlike the traditional view of ritual as highly standardised and ceremonial, we argue that the significance of these actions as ritualised practices is found in their echoing of more formalised degradation ceremonies, in their allusion to the stigmatised nature of the target and the core values that the target is deemed to have breached, and in their making clear to the target and any audience present that the target is being denied acceptable social status within the group.
Textual or embodied Textual acts of degradation are ritualised through the creation and circulation of texts or signs - for example, dismissal notices, demeaning pictorial representations or television programmes - that denounce or degrade the ritual target. Embodied degradation acts may involve group members usually but not always in positions of authority being physically present and either speaking or making facial or bodily gestures geared to stigmatise, downgrade or expel the targeted person, who may or may not be present.
Some embodied performances involve an audience at the site of degradation or connected to events through live or delayed distribution including print, broadcast transmission or conversation gossip Cox, Some embodied degradation rituals are carried out in stylised media settings such as morality attacks on talk shows Shattuc, where the target is not necessarily aware they are about to be degraded, or, indeed, may be a willing participant, such as overweight contestants on The Biggest Loser.
Severity The severity of any individual case of ritualised degradation can range from mild to extreme and can be usefully viewed as an emergent property of the complex combination of features of the case. We distinguish three facets here although more are possible : change in formal status, change in reputation and emotional impacts on targets.
Change in formal status may include demotion, removal of previous responsibilities, assigning trivial or stultifying duties, transfer to a less desirable location, loss of workspace and resources, and salary reductions. An extreme type of formal status degradation is dismissal, a clear form of expulsion from a person's previous role and institutional or group membership.
Change in formal status is usually enacted by a degrading agent who has sanctioned structural power over the target within that group context. Change in reputation or social identity - as distinct from formal status - can occur through circulation of demeaning and derogatory gossip, texts or other representations of degradation. It may be reflected in shunning or exclusion from everyday social communication, or by a more critical or sceptical attitude towards comments and performance.
Emotional and behavioural impacts on a target can range from extreme humiliation - sometimes leading to suicide - to enhanced commitment and resistance. Some targets seemingly accept a degraded status, taking on the shame that degradation rituals are geared to produce and exhibiting docile behaviour.
Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username.
Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Related Content Related Overviews symbolic interactionism stigma labelling theory status See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ».
She was a reasonable woman and didn't want to bankrupt the charity, she just wanted her right to light and legal right of way restored which she got, but they did have legal fee's to pay which they passed on to the charity and the charity is struggling to pay the loans back for the legal fee's. The trustees were booted out of the museum but remained on the council but kept there heads down so to speak. Two weeks ago however, the council made the decision to select the ring leader of those terrible events to be the Mayor of our town.
To me this is just another degradation ceremony against the justice that was finally found. Not that the old lady really benefited, her health was affected so much she was put on antidepressants had huge anxiety issues and eventually had to remain in the nursing home her twilight years robbed robbed from her. What I find worse is that the people of the town still accept these terrible decisions. Bystander apathy at its worst.
A petition was started and basically all it was about was asking the council to make a public record of the fact that we disagreed with their selection of mayor as it was seen as an honourable position and this man had behaved dishonourably. Trying to get people to sign it has proved slow. Despite the townsfolk never hearing the full facts as the local newspaper doesn't like to get involved politically, a stand in the town for 6 months that regularly showed 3rd party independent evidence of facts had been well visited so people did know the truth.
Why would they want to honour him. I see it as a smack in the face to just and the old lady. I cannot find how to edit my post, the last line was meant to read ' I see it as a smack in the face of justice and the old lady.
See my blog for further details. Interesting post. What you describe as a "degradation ceremony" seems to me to be the human moral system in action.
I see this from a very different perspective then you or most of your readers because I'm interested in the origins and foundation of morality in humans. Being empathetic to the victim, and living in modern society we tend to see this exclusion and stereotyping as a negative phenomenon. Now we have many social institutions to deal with these issues to protect people from the negative effects of these degradations, such as psychotherapy. Originally this might have been what made us human - the ability to collectively punish and isolate wrong-doers.
Because, if we didn't have some way to temporarily or permanently exclude wrong-doers, society would not have been viable. All the rest that came with it - the loss of social status, the damage to one's identity, the psychological breakdown, and the powerful motivation not to commit wrongs - are all part of the original moral system package.
I think that this part of our social nature goes back a long way, meaning millions of years. A person will not choose less behavior potential over more. Peter G. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. Bob Dylan. Instead, they look like how we treat people as not one of us , how we deliberately or inadvertently assign the status that someone is not in good standing with what we believe we represent.
Social interactions are framed by status assignments that address the place we have in each other's worlds. Are you good enough, are you worthy of being one of us? What counts as a degradation ceremony? How do they vary? PCFs provide a method for capturing a wide range of related content in situations where simple definitions might prove inadequate.
A PCF consists of a description that all competent judges would agree contains all the necessary elements that mark the case in question. The goal is to provide a starting point of agreement. Generally it should consist of the most complex case, an indubitable case, or a primary or archetypal case. When less than the full case is employed, the outcome is less clear. I think the less than full case informs everyday engagement.
While moving though the day with a welcome greeting or a dismissive glance, we let each other know where we stand. Whether obvious, subtle, intended or not, our stances and actions can degrade or accredit those we encounter. The full PCF identifies the "official" degradation ceremony. Altering the paradigm helps us understand other more mundane degradations as well. Here's the full paradigm:.
Notice that degradations are social practices that involve a community's shared values. To be one of us in a particular role carries the expectation that we value certain states of affairs in a similar way. As fathers, we value our children; as police, we respect and enforce the law; as friends, we trust and go out of our way to engage and play with our buddies; as Boy Scouts, we are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
And so on. We all have varied roles and are members of multiple communities. I have a friend who was once a scout and is now a father and a cop.
Some roles comfortably coexist and some do not. Conflict is more or less inevitable. Life is complicated this way. I may feel degraded in some roles but not others. We play our roles and demonstrate our values through our actions. We take it that true membership requires more than lip service to these values.
We walk the talk.
0コメント