Shame, Knowing, and

Anthropology: On Robert I. Levy and

the Study of Emotion
GREGORY M. SIMON

ABSTRACT Robert I. Levy’s ethnographic and theoretical work

has offered complex ways to consider emotions as neither uni-
versal and invariant nor purely constructs of culture. Shame
emotions, which seem to fit uncomfortably into our own concepts
of personhood, have offered puzzles for ethnographers to which
Levy’s insights can be fruitfully applied. [emotion, hypocogni-
tion, knowing, Levy, shame]

N
ot long ago, I was struck by the word a friend used to de-
scribe how a potentially awkward social situation made her
feel. The word she used was “weird.” She was explaining to
me that at her workplace they were temporarily without the
use of their lunchroom. The president of the organization—
a man of considerable distinction—offered the meeting table in his office
as a substitute eating area, since he was normally out of his office during
the afternoon. But no one, my friend told me, went into his office to eat.
Instead, they all huddled uncomfortably around their desks, eating alone
or in pairs. So, my friend, too, ate at her desk, where she had been working
all day, rather than enjoying the relative comfort and change of scenery
offered by the president’s office. The point of her story seemed to be that
she had been uncomfortable eating at her desk, and had really wanted to
be able to use that office. She had found it frustrating and odd that no one
was doing so.
Teasingly, I asked my friend, who was only a temporary employee in
this office, why she didn’t just take the initiative and go into the president’s

ETHOS, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 493–498, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352.
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494 ● ETHOS

office to eat, but she told me that she just couldn’t do that. I was working
on a project concerning shame at the time, and I immediately recognized
the story as falling into the shame genre: a family of emotional experiences
that we might refer to as “shame,” but that is also divided into terms such
as “embarrassment” and “shyness.” It is a group that Robert Levy (1983)
has noted are lexically unified in many languages. These experiences all
seem related to a deference of the self in relation to the presence of others.
I had spoken to my friend about my project, so she should not have
been caught off guard when I suggested that shame had something to
do with her reluctance to go into the president’s office to eat. Shame, it
seemed to me—or more accurately, a feeling of “shame-anxiety,” a sense
of the looming threat of shame—is what kept her and the others from
taking the initiative and using that office. However, she rejected this ex-
planation, saying that it really wasn’t a matter of shame —she just would
have felt . . . “weird.” She struggled to elaborate on this vague term, so I
asked her a leading question, ducking my head as if trying to hide: “Weird
like you didn’t want anyone to see you, and you needed to eat as quickly
as possible, and get out of the office before anyone really noticed?” She
agreed that this was a pretty good description of her weird feeling.
“Shame” does seem to imply a moral weight that is absent from this
situation. She could easily have said that she would have felt “embar-
rassed” to be seen eating alone in the president’s office, and that this was
what worried her. “Embarrassed” seems fairly successful at communi-
cating the uncomfortable self-consciousness that she appeared to have in
mind. But she did not use this word either, and she was reluctant to accept
it, even after she had accepted my general interpretation of her “weird”
feeling. It appeared that even a worry over “embarrassment” hinted at
a failure or incompetence that seemed out of place in the situation at
hand. In short, there seemed to be no reason for her to feel the threat of
shame or embarrassment. The situation involved doing nothing that any-
one would identify as wrong. Why would she feel this kind of “deference
to the presence of others” when she had broken no rules and caused harm
to no one? Yet her feelings seemed to know something that her analysis
could not quite fathom.
The concept of “knowing” is one that Levy (e.g., 1984) has employed
often in his pioneering work on emotions. Anthropologists have long been
interested in what different people know: about how the world works,
how to live in it, what is right and wrong, and so on. This is prototyp-
ical culture, and much of this can be gleaned directly from informants’
statements. Levy’s insight, likely sharpened by his intellectual history,
allowed him to appreciate emotions as ways of “knowing” the world as
well. That is, knowledge of our own relationship to the world manifests
itself in our emotions: a feeling of fear embodies knowledge of danger
 Shame: On Robert I. Levy and the Study of Emotion ● 495

to ourselves, for example. Clearly, in the psychiatrist’s world, the knowl-

edge we have at one level of consciousness is not always the same as the
knowledge we have at other levels. For example, someone may “know,”
on a pre-conscious level, desires that drive their own behavior, and yet
be consciously unknowledgeable of those desires. Levy has shown us that
cultural knowledge learned through social experience, much like an indi-
vidual’s conscious knowledge of their own motivations, can be misleading
and incomplete. Our emotions may contain knowledge that is culturally
unavailable for analysis or explanation, or knowledge that we tend to dis-
place from consciousness when the cultural schemas we employ don’t
offer a place for it. The knowledge of the emotion may end up seeming out
of place, and “weird.” But the emotion and its effects do not disappear.
Levy (1973) taught us this beautifully through an unforgettable anec-
dote in his book, Tahitians. A man came to Levy looking for medical help.
He complained about a lack of energy, and generally feeling “not good.” He
also mentioned to Levy that, aside from these symptoms, he had noticed
that lately his thoughts kept returning to his wife and child, who were
currently living on another island a good distance away from him. For the
man, this was a strange and uncomfortable experience, which he inter-
preted “as some sort of vague sickness.” Levy had little trouble diagnosing
the man as suffering from a case of sadness. But Levy noted that Tahitians
did not generally have a ready way to conceptualize such feelings—their
cultural world was notably empty of organized concepts about loss, sep-
aration, and the resulting feelings. This was reflected most strikingly in
the lack of a vocabulary that could be used to discuss these feelings. On
one level, Levy’s Tahitian respondents did not “know” any such thing as
sadness—could not identify it, elaborate on it, communicate it, discuss
how to deal with it, and so on. This is true even if, on another level, that
man clearly knew about and was affected by his loss in a way that we can
recognize. This process, by which a certain kind of experience finds no
coherent place within cultural knowledge, Levy named “hypocognition.”
The lunchroom story I told earlier is not exactly a story of hypocog-
nition. My friend’s cultural world does contain many terms for shame
experiences, and many ideas about those experiences, as well as a general
tradition of examining and classifying internal states that makes hypocog-
nition less likely. As Levy noted, hypocognition may be much more com-
mon in smaller-scale, more coherent cultural worlds, like the Tahiti of his
fieldwork, which he has suggested tend to act somewhat like Goffman’s
“total institutions.” But I think my story is an example of the kinds of pro-
cesses that Levy recognized, in which culture plays a role in, but never
determines emotional life. Instead, human emotions mobilize cultural
schemas that may then fine-tune, or expand on, or even obfuscate the
kind of knowledge contained in the underlying feeling. (Of course, culture
496 ● ETHOS

is also involved at other levels. For example, it is involved in interpreting

the situation—a “first order” interpretation—which then gives rise to the
feeling. There are then “second order” interpretations which include the
extra information about that feeling and how it relates to and changes
the present circumstances.)
In the story I told, I believe that the role of shame in my friend’s
reaction was obfuscated by cultural schemas—part of our well-known
ideology of individualism—in which deferential feelings are generally a
sign of defect and weakness of character. They are also completely with-
out function—unless, of course, one has committed a significant offense
against another. This is why, I think, guilt does find a place within these
schemas fairly easily. It is knowledge of wrongdoing—harming others in
particular—and it feels bad enough to punish us and prevent us from act-
ing improperly. Guilt is thus about the wrong done or the harm caused,
which seems a legitimate concept—no one should cause harm. But shame,
as a deference of the self, seems to violate our basic sense of human equal-
ity, and the idea that our actions should be based on our own knowledge
of morality—the status of our selves should not be at issue. If you cause
harm, sure, feel bad—but if you do not cause harm, stand proud. In this
cultural frame, shame has no real role, except perhaps when it acts as syn-
onym for guilt. A colleague of mine unintentionally illustrated this well.
After explaining that she was feeling guilty and ashamed about not be-
ing a diligent student over the weekend, I asked her how she could tell
the two emotions apart. She replied, “Guilt is what you feel when you
do something wrong,” and then hesitated before continuing uncertainly,
“and shame is for no reason . . . ?”
Levy in fact suggested that societies like our own were likely to have
this ideological attitude towards shame. As opposed to Tahiti, where he
found his attempts to discuss local understandings of guilt generally ended
up as discussions of shame—that is, of being observed or caught doing
wrong, and then feeling bad—Levy wrote that, “In change-oriented soci-
eties [like our own] one must overcome the constrictions of embarrass-
ment and shame; one must question the validity of clues for immediately
adjustive behavior; one must be rebellious; one must do harm in relation
to some aspects of the traditional system” (1973:353). The lunchroom
story reminds us that one must do these things, but one still might not
help but feel a bit “weird” sometimes when one tries, even if the rebellion
is an extremely minor one.
The strangeness of shame in our cultural world may have something
to do with its long history and relatively high profile in the cross-cultural
world of anthropology. Long before emotions became a common topic
of anthropological analysis, Ruth Benedict (1946) was already using the
role of shame to distinguish “us” from “them.” Since that time, some of
 Shame: On Robert I. Levy and the Study of Emotion ● 497

our most powerful writers of culture have touched on shame. Again, our
own cultural discomfort with shame may not be incidental to the fact that
many ethnographic studies of shame-like emotions make the argument
that the emotion in question is in fact not shame, but something else: I
am thinking of Clifford Geertz (1973) writing about the “stage fright” of
Balinese lek; of Michelle Rosaldo (1983) describing the kind of “shame”
that mature Illongots “choose” for the sake of smooth social relations—
different, she argues, from our shame, which forces itself upon us to keep
our selfish desires at bay; or, of Richard Shweder (1993) explaining that in
South Asia, the emotion of lajya, often mislabeled as “shame,” is anything
but a feeling of ego-deflating failure, but more like an ego-building feeling
of moral fulfillment that comes in behaving properly, in knowing one’s
place.
Whatever has motivated the rich literature on shame-like emotions,
the happy result is a body of work offering compelling looks at emotional
life as cultural life. An emotional experience like shame, or like lek or la-
jya, can be fruitfully examined in these terms. We may find it useful to see
the cultural specificity of each of these emotional experiences as consti-
tuting a separate emotion. We may also define what “an emotion” is more
broadly, seeing the human universals that tie a number of emotional ex-
periences together as constituting “the emotion,” as Daniel Fessler (1995)
has recently done in his broader analysis of shame as a human universal.
Levy’s work is so important, I think, because it will not let us per-
manently remove the universal level from the particular, or the culturally
specific from the human. Instead, it looks to see how these pieces can
be put back together, to see how cultural meanings shape emotional ex-
perience and how they do not. Processes such as hypocognition—only
one example of Levy’s thinking in this direction—address the dynam-
ics between cultural meanings and human minds. We should not forget
to take this step. We should be careful to guard against the possibility
that cultural analyses of emotions will drift into their own world, per-
manently treating the universal nature of emotion as little more than an
indistinct arousal which is transformed into meaning—that is, turned into
“knowledge”—only through cultural meaning systems, which dictate their
form and function. We should be careful that psychobiological analyses of
emotion do not drift into a world that treats culture merely and forever as
epiphenomenal clothing.
Why is this so important? Why do we need to keep such warnings in
mind? There is always a risk in extremes, for they contain within them
a powerful temptation. They offer a kind of satisfaction in telling a more
coherent story than that told by Levy, where the still sketchy interactions
between the universal and the particular make the narrative less certain.
But there is an advantage in facing this uncertainty. Ideological coherence
498 ● ETHOS

forces us to set aside pieces of knowledge: how can the family of shame
emotions, for example, manifest itself so differently in different cultural
contexts, and yet at the same time be so recognizable as a family? Pure
cultural constructionism or biological determinism will mean that such
observations simply do not fit—they will be forced aside, or perhaps ob-
scured by our thinking. They may even seem “weird.” As Levy’s work
has shown us, this sense of the “weird” is probably a sign that ideological
coherence leaves some of our knowledge unaccounted for. It would be a
shame to let it pass unexamined.

GREGORY M. SIMON is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.

REFERENCES CITED
Benedict, Ruth
1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Fessler, Daniel
1995 A Small Field with a Lot of Hornets. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San
Diego.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Levy, Robert
1973 Tahitians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1983 Introduction: Self and Emotion. Ethos 11:128–134.
1984 Emotion, Knowing, and Culture. In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and
Emotion. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 214–237. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle
1983 The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of Self. Ethos 11:135–151.
Shweder, Richard
1993 The Cultural Psychology of the Emotions. In The Handbook of Emotions. Michael
Lewis and Jeannette Haviland, eds. Pp. 417–433. New York: Guilford Press.