Finns and the culture of shame
Finnish shame derives from poverty, corporal punishment, war and hard economic times
|
|
|
By Jaana Mirjam Mustavuori
Finns do not speak about shame in public very often. Shame is private and subliminal. At worst it nevertheless restricts people’s entire lives.
Let us imagine a familiar situation for many. In a school class everyone knows that Erkki’s mother is an alcoholic, but Erkki is always as if nothing had ever happened. Once a classmate says that he saw Erkki’s mother in the village as she was shouting, red-faced with a bottle of spirits in her hand. Everyone was staring at Erkki, who remains silent and feels shame deep inside.
People are exposed to shame already as young children. Linked with it is an early experience of inferiority and inadequacy.
According to theologian Ben Malinen, humiliations and failures do not inflict the same emotional scars on adults as it does on children and young people.
If you break a friend’s wine glass during a visit, you might become embarrassed, but the feeling goes away when the situation eases. Guilt is associated with an action, while shame involves a person’s entire personality.
American cultural anthropologist Richard A. Shweder says that people all over the world feel shame, but there is variation in what people are ashamed of, and what kind of form it takes. A Tanzanian acquaintance does not understand homes for the elderly, because he feels that it would be shameful for a child not to care for his or her parents all the way to their death.
“Shame is not a consequence only of an individual’s personal experiences. It is affected by the country’s history, culture, the values of families, traditions, and practices”, Ben Malinen says. Recently a book of his was published under the title Elämää kahlitseva häpeä (“Shame that Shackles Life”).
“There are differences between families. Something that is seen as shameful by one family may not be so in another.”
In many countries, the reputation and honour of a family or tribe go ahead of the interests of the individual.
“The Finnish concept of humanity and shame centre around the individual. In Asia, meanwhile, it is important that the individual should not distinguish him, or herself form the group”, says cultural anthropologist Minna Ruckenstein.
“Losing face is linked with shame in Asia. People can lose face when they display anger, for instance.
“Once in Bangkok I became angry, justifiably so in my opinion. I shouted and made noise. The local people looked at me with pity. I had lost face in their eyes”, Ruckenstein says.
“Everything that differentiates a person from others can cause shame. For instance, a person’s gender, ethnic origin, state of health, appearance, profession, wealth, or position in the community.
The boundaries of shame are changing all the time. For instance, the attitude toward revealing clothing varies between old and young, between religious communities and the population at large, and among various ethnic groups in Finland.
“In Finland it is possible to alter the boundaries of shame with alcohol. Someone who behaves badly while intoxicated can later write everything off by attributing it to being drunk.” The same does not work in the United States, where an intoxicated woman, in particular, is easily labelled a bad person.
Different generations have different experiences of shame. In the old days, poverty in a family was apparent in the clothing that a person wore. Many were ashamed to go around in the old hand-me-down clothes of their older siblings.
In the 1940s, -50s and -60s the mothers of children born out of wedlock had to bear a great deal of shame.
Corporal punishment has also aroused plenty of shame in previous decades. Sensitive children felt that it was an abandonment and rejection. “Today’s young people, for their part, might experience shame linked to their appearance and their pressures to succeed”, says Ben Malinen.
Children who grew up during wartime, and their children as well, have suffered from trauma caused by the war. Malinen, who lived his childhood in Kainuu in the 1960s, recalls how adults at the time emphasised the courageous battle of the Finns against an overwhelming adversary.
“Was the shame caused by the war, loss, and defeat easier to deal with through the help of hero stories?” Malinen ponders.
During the time of the recession of the 1990s Professor Matti Kortteinen studied the life stories of the Finnish jobless. Shame came up often.
Unemployment brought back to the surface experiences of shame from people’s childhood, and got people to feel depressed or to go into an angry frenzy stemming from shame. The sense of shame was especially strong among those who had been abandoned as children, and who had lost their trust in people.
“The unemployment brought about by the latest recession has not yet lasted for a long time. Its serious psycho-social consequences will not emerge for a couple of years”, Kortteinen says.
Women in Finland talk about shame more than men do. It has been more appropriate for women to feel inadequacy, weakness, and inferiority than the achievement-oriented and competitive men. For that reason, shame can be a more destructive emotion for men than it is for women.
According to Malinen, a special characteristic of Finnish shame is that people here try to control their emotional reactions, thinking that they can hide and cover up their own their own affairs.
“Keeping things hidden and covering things up add to shame, and get people to isolate themselves. In many other cultures people show emotions more readily than we do, and there is more willingness to share personal matters, even difficult ones, with each other.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.5.2010
Helsingin Sanomat
|
| 18.5.2010 - THIS WEEK |
 Finns and the culture of shame |
|
