Abstract
Robert Walker’s book is part of a project highlighting shame as a missing consideration in explanations of poverty and in the design of policy. This project also has the more ambitious aim of demonstrating that shame is a concomitant of poverty, and it addresses this through drawing on evidence from seven different countries. The book is a companion volume to a second book, Chase and Bantebya-Kyomuhendo (2014) Poverty and Shame: Global Experiences. The study is underpinned by sociological and psychological theory, seeing shame as both externally imposed by society and social institutions and internalised as a powerful negative emotion.
In a wide-ranging and eclectic but highly readable analysis, Walker first deals with the ideas of shame and stigma in the context of poverty, by covering history, definitions, measurement and rights approaches. Walker identifies two sociological traditions as explaining why shame exists; structuralism in explaining how shame is shaped by people being embedded in structures of power and prestige; and symbolic interactionism in focussing on how people react to these influences. Shame is seen as associated with the individual experiencing disappointment with self and with enabling the collective community to exert pressure on the individual to conform to social expectations. This leads to a discussion on how shame can impose or threaten pain on individuals, making them adopt exemplary behaviour to address their shame. There can be negative impacts, resulting in low self-esteem, anger, depression and trauma.
Shame has not received much attention from sociologists until recently, and there is little empirical research evidence on how people in poverty in the UK experience or define shame: Walker recognises that stigma rather than shame has been an abiding concern. He does suggest initially that shame and stigma are interconnected to the point where they are synonymous although Goffman, in his seminal sociological treatment of stigma, only mentions shame twice, in passing. However, the discussion in the book is generally rather uncertain about any divergence in meaning. Studies of stigma suggest more of a focus on structural causation, with a stigmatised person or group not accepted as a member of society. Walker suggests that a recipient of shame or target of stigma experiences the same feelings, and asks if poverty is a special case uniting stigma and shame. He sees shaming as backed by the state as a form of stigmatisation.
This discussion may underestimate the differences in that shame is more individualised and does not entail exclusion from the group. A difference may be that stigma is imposed on people or a group rather than being an internalised emotion. Those stigmatised may interpret it as a form of discrimination or unjust treatment of a group of which they are members or perceive themselves as victims. There are issues not really dealt with in the book about whether people in poverty really perceive stigmatisation or in what circumstances. Stigmatisation of certain groups can be more readily identified, for example people with mental illness. Stigmatisation related to poverty is more difficult to identify, but may exist in such examples as children who are eligible for free school meals. Such a consideration raises an issue addressed, if briefly, of the relationship between experience of shame or stigma and whether the services to mitigate poverty are delivered on a universal or selective basis. Walker does accept that the old, the sick, the disabled and children may escape stigma.
The book sets out its position, following Amartya Sen, that people in poverty generally feel ashamed at having failed to live up to society’s expectation, are shamed by those around them and suffer stigma often reinforced by discriminatory action. The rest of the study turns to put the hypothesis to the test that public discourses associate poverty with personal failings and thereby create the possibilities for shame and shaming. The wider study examines fieldwork from contrasting settings in seven countries: rural Uganda, India, Pakistan, metropolitan China and South Korea, urban Britain and small town Norway. Much of the analysis involves cultural understandings of poverty through literature, film and media. Shame associated with poverty appears to be similarly portrayed across the cultures. Accounts of responses to shame vary between anger and blaming others; passivity and resignation; withdrawal, concealment and despair; resisting shame and keeping up appearances; or behaving shamelessly. The investigation included the use of interviews and ethnographic methods to show that shame is associated with poverty and has consequences for well being. Few correspondents said that they had never been shamed or felt ashamed. There was a common view that poverty was an absence of resources restricting people from achieving what was expected of them or what they expected. Walker reports that in Britain respondents in the survey said they gained much of their knowledge about poor people from the media. Dominant frames in the media reinforced shaming of people in poverty in some countries. There is also evidence of different degrees of shame, of the historic distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and of bureaucratic stigmatisation.
The main message is that shaming people in poverty is counter-productive and that inadequate attention has been paid to the negative consequences of anxiety and loss of self-confidence as manifestations of shame. Thus this book delivers some significant lessons for the study of poverty. Firstly, that academics and policy makers have been slow to embrace psychosocial aspects of poverty and accept that people in poverty are experts in their own condition. By contrast, attention is increasingly being given to service users in health and social care and outcome evaluations based on their views as experts by experience. Secondly, that shaming and stigmatisation of people in poverty, whether as individuals or groups, can be self-perpetuating and seen as a violation of human rights. Thirdly, that shame is a tool whereby the powerful can exert control over the less powerful to promote self-interest. The book provides a well-presented case for qualitative and comparative studies in promoting a new sociology of shaming and poverty.