Shame and the Experience of Ambivalence on the Margins of the Global: Pathologizing the
Past and Present in Romania's Industrial Wastelands
Author(s): Jack R. Friedman
Source: Ethos, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 235-264
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 235
Shame and the Experience of
Ambivalence on the Margins of
the Global: Pathologizing the
Past and Present in Romania's
Industrial Wastelands
Jack R. Friedman
Abstract This article examines shame in a context of political-economic decline (Jiu
Valley, Romania). I argue that shame, which is traditionally associated with a "shrinking"
feeling and social control, can take on a dual resonance for people situated in socioeconomic
conditions of moral disorder. Shame can act as both a personal experience of
self-defeat as well as acting as a medium for critiquing the very system of socioeconomic
norms and cultural values that work to make one feel ashamed. Using data drawn from
research among coal miners in post-state socialist Romania, this article illustrates how discourses
associated with shame can be viewed as a critical understanding of the
culturally meaningful experience of marginalization from and the ambivalence of global
processes. [shame, culture critique, ambivalence, Romania, Jiu Valley]
Wrestling with the meaning of Communism and timpul lui Ceauzescu-the "time
of Ceaugescu"-can be a shame-inducing part of post-1989 life in Romania.
When people see images of pensioners hovered over the grave of communist dictator
Nicolae Ceaugescu in Bucharest, when statistics suggest that up to 40
percent of Romanians, over a decade after the fall of communism, think that life
is worse than it was during the harsh conditions under Ceaugescu, it gives
reformers, intellectuals, urbanites, and cosmopolitans in this northern Balkan
country pause and a certain embarrassment. Still, many people who have suffered
a declining life and the experience of downward mobility since the fall of state
socialism view current conditions in Romania in terms that recall comparisons
and contrasts with the dark days of Communist Party rule (cf. Boym 2001).
ETHOS Vol. 35, Issue 2, pp. 235-264, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. @ 2007 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website,
http://vww.ucpressiournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10. 1525/ETH.2007.35.2 .235.
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236 ETHOS
However, no one, not even the most rabidly nostalgic, can look back on th
socialist period with unmitigated delight. It is, instead, the mixture of amb
and ambivalence toward the past, the present, and the future (cf. Hump
2001; Volkan 1997) that colors much of the talk I encountered in the res
that I conducted in the economically declining coal-mining regions of Rom
Jiu Valley.1 In particular, much of this ambiguity and ambivalence was fra
what I call "shame talk," expressing the shame of having to send one's child
school with threadbare clothes or being unable to attend to the expectat
Romanian hospitality for a visiting guest.
Regardless, the shame I observed during my fieldwork failed to unprobl
cally take on the characteristic feature that has become a central theme
literature on shame: the shrinking into the self caused by, at its very cor
Richard Shweder calls "the deeply felt and highly motivating experience
fear of being judged defective" (2003:1115). To say that the shame that I
in the Jiu Valley bears on a global vision of the "whole self," something
some have argued is the core feature that distinguishes "shame" from "g
(Baumli 1995; Gilbert 2003; Ikonen et al. 1993; Lynd 1958; Pines 1987
not seem to hold up. Rather than being "paralyzed" or "muted" (Mac
1998) by shame or shamed into "sinking" away (Tomkins 1987)-com
metaphors for the experience of shame-my interviewees seemed cap
both feeling shame (as a defective self) and simultaneously framing that
as a critique of contemporary political, economic, and social forces a
against them (seeing the world as a profoundly flawed moral [dis]order).
Shame has tended to be viewed as a form of social control in psycho
anthropology (Epstein 1984; Nachman 1984). In these functional m
shame emerges from the Durkheimian (1964) tradition that emphasiz
social facts work to constrain the individual to maintain order in the so
(e.g., Fajans 1983). These constraints are embodied either through the
nalization of a self-regulating emotion (guilt) or a self-regulating emotio
emerges from fear of social repercussions for deviant acts (shame) (Bene
1934, 1946; Levy 1973; Spiro 1987:135-139). Shame, however, is also
quently viewed as a social fact that does more than provide a series of n
sanctions and constraints, but also functions as a positive motivation for
viduals (Fajans 1983). In this regard, shame is frequently bound to literat
honor, taking form as a virtue (Levy 1983) that protects people from bein
as "shameless" (Abu-Lughod 1985, 1986). Michelle Rosaldo challenge
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 237
received wisdom regarding the social control function of shame among
Ilongot, although, by arguing that shame does not so much rest in a "m
affect" (1983:136) but, rather, is associated with a more global understandin
the self in society. In each case, shame reflects deeply held cultural values a
can, in this sense, be seen as regulating behavior through "moral anxie
(Spiro 1965:399-422).
In Romanian, the word ru ine is traditionally translated into the Engl
"shame."2 Ru ine takes two constructions. In the nominative case-este/
ru?ine, "it is shameful"-it carries a significantly reduced emotional wei
because it is associated with general propriety, social, and ethical norms. W
it is in the dative case-imi/4ti/ii este/e/i ru ine, "it shames me/you/one"-ru
carries a greater and more self-directed emotional weight since it is an exp
expression of one's personal position within the world of cultural norms. At
same time, shame-talk in Romanian shares many qualities with the use of t
word in English (Cohen 2003). The strong psychocultural threat to the
that occurs with the expression of shame tempts people to use the weaker no
inative form of ruiine rather than the dative form. As in English, admitting
strong sense of personal shame is avoided because it also can evoke sham
the listener. In conversational Romanian it is more frequent, then, to find p
ple talking about a shameful situation (nominative) than about being shame
(dative).
While not as well developed and hypercognized (Levy 1973) as in some other cultures
(e.g., Abu-Lughod 1986), shame is reinforced by accusations of
"shamelessness." Accusations of shamelessness-neruinare/nerauinat ("shamelessness")
orfd~ia ruine (lit. "without shame")-can be found in many contexts where
moral norms are important, especially norms of propriety, respect, and hierarchy.
It is not uncommon to hear people who violate these norms referred to as obraznic
(lit. "cheeky") and, even more strongly, neobraznare/neobrazat (lit. "without cheek"
and implying someone who is shameless, lacking honor, and untrustworthy). A
related term, nmecher(a), is similar to the American English ideas of a "player" or a
"cool operator," someone who gets over on the system, who can flout traditional
cultural norms frequently to get something accomplished in the face of social,
legal, or bureaucratic constraints. $Fmecher(a), however, is problematic because it is
going through semantic change or what Geoffrey Hughes calls "amelioration"
(1989). For older Romanians, being a pnecher(a) is generally derogatory, suggesting
a strong sense of deviance from moral norms and shamelessness. For younger
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238 ETHOS
Romanians who view "bucking the system" as the only way of succeeding, bein
~necher(a) tends to imply a respectful, often playful sense of a person's resist
to and capacity to excel at the margins of the hostile and highly corrupt Roma
economy and bureaucracy. Regardless, given certain contexts, any of these w
can function to shame a person.
As in many societies, the Romanian concept of "rugine" works to exert soci
control. However, as some anthropologists have suggested, there are also soc
spaces and cultural mediums in which normally shameful behavior or feelin
can be expressed in a socially sanctioned manner and that they can function
form of resistance to the moral order. Abu-Lughod's (1985, 1986) discussion
the ways in which Bedouin poetic expression in circumscribed spaces can gi
voice to personal feelings that might otherwise deviate from moral norms
gendered propriety can be seen as a type of "discourse of antistructure
"antimorality," giving shape to opposition and defiance emerging from ambiv
lence toward the macronarratives of honor that define much of Bedouin
society. Similarly, Steven Parish (1996), without explicitly using the language of
emotions, illustrates the ways in which lower-caste Newars express resistance
to higher-caste members through stories involving acts of shaming. The
morality tales that Newars tell reveal the ways in which high caste members are
shamed into recognizing the common humanity and, frequently, the moral
superiority of lower-caste people. Parish views this critical, "antihierarchical"
function of shame as a sign of a deeper ambivalence toward caste that works to
show that the "conditions of life, practices, and ideology that create and sustain
caste hierarchy are locked in perpetual conflict with the impulse to escape and
alter that hierarchy" (Parish 1996:135).
Steven Nachman illustrates a different way in which shame functions as resistance
on the Nissan Atoll, pointing out how some members of the community
will publicly perform their shame as an act of indirect "moral aggression" to
shame those who have shamed them (1984:352-354). Geoffrey White similarly
shows how the rhetoric of shame in conflict resolution rituals of "disentanglement"
among the A'ara can be used to recontextualize acts of "anger" to
rationalize personal acts of conflict in ways that "mend minor tears in the social
fabric before relations unravel further," working to "bring conditions of divisiveness
and individuated 'anger' more in line with models of solidarity"
(1990:63). In this vein, I will argue that Romanian rumine can work as a tool for
social justice.
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 239
Here, I insist on a way of reading shame as an analytic for understanding the
closely entwined nature of both the personal and the political. Shame has been
treated as a monolithic system that provides a frame for the judgment of the
(defective) self. What has been central and unchallenged in this view of shame,
though, is the assumption that the individual subject treats the moral order as
unproblematic, given, or unchallengeable. Instead, what I will emphasize is the need
to see shame in certain contexts-especially contexts of profound cultural
change and contexts of dramatic political economic upheaval-as dually marked
both (1) by a social-personal experience of a defective self and (2) as a reflection
of a critical political understanding (Jameson 1981; Parish 1996) of problems,
contradictions, inconsistencies, and tensions in the moral (dis)order-a world
experienced as turned upside down. The personal experience of shame-the
personal feeling of a defective self-is marked by the predictable feelings of
"shrinking into the self" and a desire to disappear, to melt away in the face of the
recognition that the self is profoundly out-of-sorts with a set of expected cultural
norms. The critical function of shame is marked by feelings of profound
anger and righteous indignation in response to a perceived world-out-of-sorts.
This dual nature of the experience of shame is, in short, the experience of
ambivalence in the face of a moral order in upheaval-a moral order that is
changing, but about which there is little consensus or agreement.
Here, I briefly illustrate the contrast that I am making between different "classic"
personal experiences of shame and critical functions of shame in the
Romanian context. Problems with alcohol and the culture of alcohol are intimately
woven into daily life in the Jiu Valley. Drinking at a birt-a lower-class
pub--was a central part of the miners' lives until economic conditions made it
prohibitively expensive starting in the late 1990s (Kideckel 2004). Public drinking,
while generally discouraged, was a fact of life and it was socially normalized
when it occurred among groups of miners. Miners insisted that, given the horrifying
conditions in which they spent their working hours, they deserved to
drink. In most cases the wives and families of these miners tolerated this drinking
using the same tropes of deservedness. However, when drink led to public
displays of deviance and neglect of the family, tropes of deservedness transformed
into shame that reflected not only the weakness of the miner but also
shamed the honor of the family.
One miner who I met while conducting interviews in a psychiatric ward in the Jiu
Valley illustrated this decline from social drinking into the shame of alcoholism.
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240 ETHOS
Petru had been hospitalized for treatment for alcohol dependency
explained that he had started drinking too much when he worked at the
because there had been a series of accidents at his mine that had shaken
This was not unusual since miners frequently brought small bottles of t
plum brandy-down into the mines with them because it gave them "stre
to get through the difficult work. In Petru's case, though, his drinking e
to the point where he lost his job. Eventually, his wife and daughter lef
and he fell into poverty. Petru described the shame he felt in the face of
events:
it destroyed me, because my wife left me when. ... You know how, wh
you have a need, and there is someone close to you, and you need her
I was depressed then, I didn't know anything. You are alone, because y
can no longer go to your father and mother to cry [complain], becau
you are older, it shames you [l'-e rqine], you have your pride [ai mandrt]
a man and. ... So I didn't go [to them] and then I left and drank and dran
and drank and drank.4
Petru went on to say,
My wife was, she didn't ever understand why I drank, never. So she didn
communicate, didn't communicate with me, and I, as a man, would cur
at her ... the pride of a man [msnndria de bdrbat] ... and it would shame
[mi-era ?i ruqine] to speak like this to her, and maybe she didn't understa
me, maybe she laughed at me. [2005]
In the process of telling me his stories about the consequences of his al
dependency Petru showed classic bodily signs of shame. He averted
and he seemed to bodily "sink into himself." From a sociological sta
Petru expressed an understanding of the cultural norms of drinking in R
ian society as well as how he had deviated from these norms. In additio
understood the social proscriptions-the judgments of deficiency related
failures as an adult, a man, a husband-as well as the sociological mec
of public chastisement and mockery that enforced these proscriptions. In
Petru's narrative of alcoholism seemed to show all of the classic signs of
One can contrast Petru's experience of shame with another momen
fieldwork in which shame takes on a very different valence. A littl
month into my stay in the Jiu Valley city of Lupeni, my neighbors invit
visit. The husband, Pavel, was a miner in the neighboring city of Vulca
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 241
his wife worked during the nightshift at the coal processing plant in Lupeni.
During the day she was part of a network of women who looked after each
other's children while the parents worked the odd, and sometimes changing,
shifts during the round-the-clock running of the mines. As we talked and ate
we also drank copious quantities of tuica and beer and Pavel's questions about
life in America became increasingly pointed. We ended up comparing household
expenses and incomes and he insisted that his wife bring us copies of old
bills to prove his point: Pavel needed to "perform" the ways in which life in the
Jiu Valley was becoming miserable and why it was the fault of those "bastards"
who wanted to close the mines. Pavel sat there and bared his soul, exposing
himself to the judgment of being defective as a poor provider for his family. As
a father and husband he could not pay the bills, he could not have a beer at the
bar with his co-workers (cf. Kideckel 2004), he could not afford basic amenities
in the apartment without risking a total slide into poverty. I had been in situations
like this before during my research in Romania-listening to this
shameful unburdening of the self through the litanies of personal hardship and
failures-but one thing made this experience more powerful than others I had
been in. The thing that I clearly remember was this strong man insisting, over
and over as we drank more and more, "Nu-i ru ine! Nu-i ruine! Nu-i ruine!"
(It's not shameful! It's not shameful! It's not shameful!)
The remainder of this article is divided into three parts. In the first I will
explore the historical and social foundations of life in the Jiu Valley. In the
second part, drawing on psychoanalytic literature, I will examine some of
the theoretical foundations and implications for thinking about shame as a
component in the critique of a political-economic and moral order that is
perceived to be unjust. In the third part I will consider three different examples
of the complexity of shame in the Jiu Valley drawn from interviews and
participant-observation in the region. The three examples-gender and
childrearing, the home and the social obligation of hospitality, and working
conditions-are not meant to be comprehensive but, rather, illustrative of
the dual nature of shame in the Jiu Valley. These domains were chosen
because each was once taken for granted and experienced as stable and
hopeful. As such, they provide examples of highly charged emotional experiences
that work well to illustrate the dual nature of contemporary shame in
the Jiu Valley.
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242 ETHOS
Workers in a Postworker State: Romanian
Industrialism-From Pride to Pariah
The Jiu Valley, with a population of about 200,000, is a narrow, 40-kilometer
long strip of land that cuts east to west through the southern Carpathian
Mountains on the border that separates Transylvania from the southern,
agricultural regions of Romania. Before the mid-19th century the population
in the region was sparse because there was almost no arable land
because of the harsh mountainous terrain. Beginning in the 1860s, however,
industrialists from Austria discovered the rich coal reserves of the region.
Within a few decades, the population had grown by almost 400 percent as
the landscape was transformed into a series of coal-mining towns. With the
growth of the coal-mining industry in the region also came the costs of early
industry-terrible living conditions for workers and their families, exploitative
labor practices, dangerous working conditions, and an ever-growing
police and military presence to quell the growing labor unrest. Throughout
the 1920s and 1930s, this labor unrest spilled over into a series of spectacular
and bloody strikes that seemed to cement the unity of the miners of the
region.
After World War II and the rise of the party-state in 1947 (see Tismaneanu
2003), the Romanian Workers' Party (later Romanian Communist Party)
hoped to use the Jiu Valley to build support for the party since the region was
seen as one of the few pockets of genuine proletarian consciousness in a nation
that was primarily made up of a peasantry that was proving resistant to the state
socialist project of collectivization (Verdery 2003). Unfortunately for the party,
the Jiu Valley's militant resistance to anything that would lead to costly and
painful exploitation of workers proved to be a thorn in its side (Friedman
2005). By 1977, labor resistance spilled over into the first major public struggle
against the dictator Nicolae Ceauyescu (who ruled Romania from 1965 until
his execution in 1989) when a general strike was called throughout the Jiu Valley.
While a truce was reached between the party and the miners, it was one
that was shot through with distrust on both sides. Regardless, the centrality of
Jiu Valley coal to the goals of the party-the need for coal in their plans to go
forward with massive, heavy industrial development (see Jowitt 1971; Montias
1967; Tsantis and Pepper 1979)-meant that the party-state was forced to
negotiate with the miners rather than impose its will on them as it did in most
sectors of Romanian society.
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 243
Under state socialism, coal mining had two very appealing benefits that dre
many people to the Jiu Valley, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Fi
while miners were paid better than workers in almost any other industry in
country under state socialism, the really significant boon to being a miner
that mining regions tended to have better access to consumer goods th
almost any other part of the country. To get a job in the Jiu Valley before 1
meant being able to provide for one's family in a way that was almost impo
ble anywhere else in Romania. The second benefit to working in the mines
that being a coal miner was seen as a patriotic and highly respected job und
state socialism. Symbolic capital attached to the class identity of being a mi
was invaluable in securing intergenerational upward mobility, especially
assuring the miners' children opportunities for better employment and edu
tion. All of this began to change in the years after 1989.
While most of Central Europe benefited from political support and cap
influx in the first several years after 1989, Romania suffered what might
called the "delayed shock therapy" of economic reform in the late 19
(Ibrahim and Galt 2002). Romania remained burdened with a political lea
ship mostly made up of former party apparatchiks between 1990 and 1
This meant that Romania lagged behind the rest of Central Europe in terms
real economic reforms, making it a pariah in the eyes of many sources of glo
capital. It was also during this early period after 1989 that the Jiu Valley c
miners came into public consciousness. In 1990 they were enticed to Buchar
to violently break-up a massive student protest in the heart of the city. Th
events-known in Romanian as mineriade-lead to many deaths, shuttin
down the city for several days, and sending cultural shockwaves through t
urban elite and landscape that can still be felt today (Gledhill 2005; Granqvi
1999; Vasi 2004). In the 1991 mineriadd, the miners came back to the ca
under the direction of their union leader, Miron Cozma, and, after another v
lent strike, succeeded in bringing down then-Prime Minister, Petre Rom
who, it was rumored, was planning to close down the mines in his attempt
reform the economy. Following these events, the socialists were able to con
idate their power by appealing to the mass of the population that still relie
communist-era heavy industry for their livelihoods, emphasizing the disma
future that rapid privatization and unchecked capitalism would engender fo
them. And at the forefront of the popular support for the socialists were
miners of the Jiu Valley.
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244 ETHOS
In the 1996 national elections a center-right coalition called the Dem
Convention (DC) was formed on the promise of moving beyond what
Romanians saw as the stagnation into which the country was sinking
dreams behind these reforms began to unravel almost immediately, thoug
reform coalition was under pressure from three different directions: a po
that had unrealistic expectations for rapid and dramatic improvements i
dard of living; a bureaucracy that remained entrenched and resistant to re
and pressures from international lending organizations-the IMF an
World Bank-which demanded structural changes in the economy that
mean massive unemployment and the closure or selling off of formerly
protected heavy industries. The DC ultimately chose to align its policies
the demands of the international lending organizations at all costs. Forem
their reforms, the DC worked to close and privatize many of the formerl
tected state-owned industries that had remained a massive drain on the na
economy because of inefficient production, the loss of markets, and the a
complete lack of capital investment to maintain or modernize industry.
Pivotal to these reforms was key legislation meant to soften the impact o
closures and downsizing on unemployment. Tens of thousands of miners
to sign-up for severance pay programs and "voluntary redundancy." By 19
before these reforms took place, there were over 42,000 people still work
mining. By 2000, this number had dwindled to just over 17,000 workers (b
this stood at 10,000). Those who did not choose these "voluntary redunda
measures" hoped that this would be the end of the reforms; however, thes
were dashed late in 1998 when the first mine closures were announced. By J
1999, the rage in the Jiu Valley spilled over into another mineriada: a ma
Bucharest, some 350 kilometers away, marked by running battles between
security forces and over 10,000 miners. The mineriada was resolved befo
miners reached Bucharest, but the violence made the message clear: The
would not sit back and accept their fate without resistance.
The threat to one's employment and the economic base of the communit
profound implications for both families who did and did not leave the i
try. Many people who had left the coal mines had hoped to transition in
jobs or start their own small businesses. However, few who found them
out of work made the leap into new employment. Investing capital
region was prohibitive because the region is physically isolated and d
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 245
have the kind of infrastructure that is easily converted to new production. Forei
investors remained wary of going to the region because of the militant labo
history of the coal miners and the region's poor infrastructure. Small busin
opportunities were limited since few people left in the region would have t
money necessary to buy anything, a fact confirmed by the World Bank in
community-wide "livability" study published in 2004 (World Bank 2004
"return to the land" was out of the question because there was little or
arable land and agricultural land was highly contested elsewhere in the coun
try (Verdery 2003). In fact, during the late 1990s there were frequent stories
miners who had tried to return to farming areas where they had either be
born or where they had extended family only to be beaten up and driven o
of town by local farmers. Other stories were about miners being offered p
of essentially worthless land-lacking irrigation or in areas prone to floodin
or in areas that were contaminated by toxic waste-in an attempt to bilk th
out of their severance pay money.
In addition to the economic upheaval, people in the Jiu Valley felt a pr
found blow to their self-esteem. Under state socialism they had been m
to feel important and they were treated with enough privilege and dignity
despite the dehumanizing horrors of the working conditions in the min
industry-that they developed a core sense of identity around their wo
(Kideckel et al. 2000). Even those not directly working in the mining indust
children (Friedman 2003), the elderly, and most women (although wom
did frequently work in other industries in the Jiu Valley and many wo
worked in the coal industry in jobs above ground) (Friedman 2003; Kide
2004)-felt their identities and futures tied to the mines and mini
Despite all of the changes in the postsocialist symbolic economy of Rom
after 1989-especially the backlash against labor-many in the Jiu Vall
continued to feel important and valuable to the national patrimony eve
the face of the threats that they perceived from Bucharest-based politician
and ideologues. While many reformers and liberalizers demonized the
miners for the mineriade in 1990 and 1991, few would have said that the J
Valley did not provide a valuable commodity for the betterment of t
Romanian people. It was for this reason that a grudging recognition alw
accompanied any condemnation of the Jiu Valley miners. The miners h
felt that, even when they seemed to be resisting popular sentiments du
their strikes in 1990 and 1991, they were still doing work that was essentia
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246 ETHOS
and highly valued by the nation. With the announcement of the clo
mines in 1998, they were confronted with a changing reality and a chan
sense of values, a profound disruption of the moral order, and a feeling
they were being cast out of their privileged place in the Romanian n
ideology.
What has emerged from this shift is the creation of a new, increasingly
marginalized social identity. Those Romanians, like the Jiu Valley miners
who have remained fixated on an older, more narrowly defined understanding
of Romanian national identity grounded in the pursuit of the
independent modernist ideals of industrial might, are increasingly characterized
as obsolete by those who have strived to bind the new Romania to
an increasingly global vision. As a result of this new identity politics, they
have been met with ambivalence by those both within Romania's national
politics and in the international community, an ambivalence that is experienced
as a lack of recognition of their concerns. The concerns of the people
of the Jiu Valley are now seen to be the concerns of a past best discarded
and demoted in the rush to move Romania into a new world order. It is
from this background and the recognition of the historically and culturally
situated nature of the experience of this ambivalent gaze that one can see
how powerful feelings of personal shame also function to map the fault
lines of the pathological nature of Romania's struggle with the demands of
the new global (dis)order.
Personal and Critical Functions of Shame
I follow Melvin Lansky and Andrew Morrison's (1997) discussion of shame as
"signal anxiety," seeing the critical form of shame as a kind of "signal shame."
The shame that many of the people I interviewed in the Jiu Valley articulated is
one that is both experienced as "internal," self-referential shame (a "sinking into
the self") as well as situated outside the self in an unjust relation with the
world-a relation of nonrecognition of an increasingly obsolete moral order
that has marginalized and, ultimately, "abjected" (Ferguson 1999) the selfin-conditions-of-decline
from a productive place in an otherwise idealized
global economy.7 What this means is that the critical power of shame among an
abject population like that in the Jiu Valley can be seen as an in-the-world
struggle to challenge a perceived-as-unjust moral (dis)order. This critique is
not simply a deflection of and projection of the negative affects connected to
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 247
the experience of shame. Indeed, I would argue that the critical consciousness
associated with shame in my fieldwork was rarely a "defensive script"
(Nathanson 1992) at all. Rather, shame is a signal anxiety that is understood by
many in the Jiu Valley as a response to profound injustice in the world and the
ambivalence of national policy-makers and international financial organizations
to their plight. The people of the Jiu Valley feel both personal shame in
their increasing sense that they are out-of-sorts within their own cultural
norms as well as feeling anger toward a world-out-of-sorts in which the moral
order of the political economy is perceived to have collapsed.
Heinz Kohut (1996) argues, in a psychodynamic developmental context, that
the holistic sense of the self is deeply implicated in feelings of shame. For
Kohut it is when the self is projected into the world but fails to be recognized
that shame is felt. Shame, for Kohut, "means that the external surroundings of
the child . . do not respond" (1996:250). The Scandinavian psychoanalysts
Pentti Ikonen et al. put it in even stronger terms when they discuss the need for
"reciprocity" between self and other: "When the expressing of aspirations of
reciprocity collides with a lack of reciprocity on the part of the other, the consequence
is an immediate collapse" (1993:106-107). I show that, akin to
Kohut's work (1996), it is in the moment of experiencing the nonrecognition of
the other that one can see a different kind of shame in the Jiu Valley, shame as a
marker of broader political economic disruptions and the experience of the
clash between and erosion of moral orders. This is the shame felt when the
world changes, making what had once been central to one's sense of self, selfesteem,
and personal power and agency obsolete. This is a terrifying moment,
the feeling of obsolescence and the sense that one no longer fits into the world
in which one was a privileged and special member in the recent past. Helen
Lynd sees shame as the
sudden awareness of incongruity between oneself and the social situation,
of exposure, in which an unexpected light is thrown on who one is....
Values, ways of life that one has accepted without question may appear in
this new light to be cruel, hypocritical, destructive of the individual freedoms
and possibilities they proclaim. If this is my society, my country,
then the world is not good, I do not belong here, I want none of it-this,
as well as self-insight may be the revelation of shame. ... The questioning
of certain dominant values presented by society can for some people be
more disquieting than the questioning of one's own adequacy in living up
to these values. [1958:215]
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248 ETHOS
For each of these authors, then, shame is less a function of failing to mee
standard set by the superego (Freud 1961) or society but, rather, emerges
the feeling of a loss of agency in the world and a nonrecognition by the w
precisely the feelings of many who experience decline.
How to make sense of this distinction between different emphases in the
ture on shame, though? Pavel, in the example above, declares "I
shameful!" Despite this, he spoke with embarrassment and humiliation w
talked about his growing list of expenses and how this made it impossib
him to perform his role as a good husband and father. At the same time, t
his declaration-"It's not shameful!"-reflected his growing understa
that, although the moral order in which he understood his self might jud
defective, he was no longer able to perform these expected roles as a coal
As the political-economic processes abjected the coal miners of the Jiu V
Pavel's shame at failing to meet the expected norms of a husband and fath
out of his control for reasons that he could not control. In this vein, I wil
similar to Carl Ratner (2000, 2001), for not merely a culturally informed
standing of shame in Romania's Jiu Valley but one that intimately binds p
economic conditions and social structure to the workings of the mind.
Unlike Nancy Scheper-Hughes's (1992) work on human suffering in B
do not stress the emergence of a normalized "culture of shame" in the J
ley but, rather, the ambivalent nature of shame associated with the dra
upheavals that took place in the region during the late 1990s. While Sche
Hughes sees the responses of the Brazilian women of the Alto do Cruzeir
emerging from "the violence of everyday life in Brazil," the people of Ro
Jiu Valley during this period had not yet accepted the profound decline
were seeing and experiencing around them as a function of the "ever
They had not accepted their decline in terms of a new moral order or se
cultural norms through which to view their lives. What I am suggesting
is that there is something about the experience of decline-the experi
"falling from grace" (Newman 1999)-that marks out a special relatio
between the self and the political economy that is, in turn, marked out by
cial experience and phenomenology of shame. At its most fundament
experience of the ambivalence of national and global decision makers tow
people in decline leads us to an understanding of how political economic
tice can frame the subjective experience of shame. Ambivalence in the f
clashing moral orders can allow shame to take on dual roles, functioning t
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 249
reveal the personal anxiety emerging from the fear of being judged defectiv
well as functioning as a "signal anxiety" (Freud 1959, 1964; Lansky and Morri
1997:26-27). In this function as a "signal anxiety," shame is a reaction mean
both avoid and reveal something about conflict and disequilibrium in both t
self and the broader sociocultural context.
Interview Data
The core interviews for this paper are drawn from 58 recorded person-centered
interviews and almost 100 less-formal interviews conducted between
1998-2005 in the city of Lupeni (population approximately 32,000 in 1999).
The primary data that I will use in this article emerge from a 1999 recorded
interview with the Popescu family-husband Ion and wife Mariana-and one
other mine worker, Andrei, who was a workmate of Ion's. I supplement the
themes that emerged in the discussion at the Popescus' home with observations
and interviews done with others with whom I talked during my fieldwork. Ion,
Mariana, and Andrei were in their mid-thirties at the time of this interview. I
met Ion during a focus group discussion at the Lupeni mining complex the
week before. After chatting with him following the group discussion, I asked if
I could conduct a more formal, recorded interview with him and he agreed,
inviting me to his home that weekend.
While shame ran through any number of themes and discussions in this interview
setting, I will limit my discussion here to three themes: (1) gender and
childrearing, (2) sociality and the home, and (3) working conditions. Each of
these themes framed moments of "shame talk" within a broader network of
cultural and personal understandings, bringing contemporary and historical
experiences to bear on making sense of shame within and for the self.
Case 1: Shame, Gender, and the Care of Children
During my conversations at the Popescus' home they discussed the many ways
in which life was becoming "impossible" in the Jiu Valley. Among these topics
they mentioned a common concern echoed by many other people: the difficulty
of young people starting a family given the impact of economic
constraints and the vanishing future of the region. However, whenever this
lament emerged it inevitably and immediately shifted to a discussion of the
challenges involved in raising a child in the current economic climate.
When this topic came up in my conversation at the Popescus' home, the men
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250 ETHOS
seemed to take the lead in decrying the impossibility of "getting by" when
had to support a child. Ion said that getting married would "finish you off" a
Andrei responded:
Andrei: And even more so if you have a child, more so if you have a chi
because, it's said, if he does something you don't want him to d
you're ashamed [i'i e ru-ine] to go out on the street with him and .
[he tells you to] go to hell, man! You offer him this and that and
everything that he needs, you send him to school, you buy him
sweet, something, you need money, [everything] costs and you
can't do it! Rather than having a child to ...
Ion: You're so shamed [/i e ru'ine] by him, it's better not to [have
child]. I have the one and he is always crying to us to have another
child, but no more, we don't need more, because it's difficult, it'
very difficult. The school year starts for a child, a salary is small,
one salary, so, in September when school starts you have what
money you can and you say that you couldn't get [everything]. You
need to get a uniform, books, notebook, shoes, gym clothes, and
this and that, [everything that is] needed.
Andrei: Notebooks...
Ion: You can't send the child to school like ... well, really it's
tute in which ... there are 40 children in a class [and] if all
are unwashed or ... it's not clean ... you have illness and t
that. No, it's not worth it to you ... for you to better groun
family today it is difficult, difficult for everyone. [1999]
Andrei and Ion's concerns here illustrate the levels of disruption th
are experiencing in the Jiu Valley. Their discussion of the everyday
ties of providing "correctly" for the needs of their children is an in
cultural norms and person-centered positions within these norms. A
the quote above, stresses the impact of privation on a child but
framing of this concern by mentioning the shame that it brings o
ized "you." Indeed, the unfolding of this conversation-the specif
story of the child who tells "you" to "go to hell, man!"-suggest
generalized "you" is probably a reference to an experience-near
However, Ion's comments about the difficulties of caring for
framed, after an initial agreement with Andrei about the potential
"shamed" by a child, in terms of the needs of the child rather than
rebelliousness.
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 251
Here one can see two distinct, but complementary, ways in which Ion
Andrei framed their own anxiety over the difficulties of caring for childre
For Andrei, a child's "complaints" are framed as a discourse that challen
the traditional masculinity of the miner-provider. Andrei is ashamed by no
being able to provide for his child. At the same time, he frames this shame
antagonism, "[he tells you to] go to hell, man!" He feels this antagoni
because he senses that the threat to his own role as provider is also a threat
his role as a man. "Shame," in this case, is marked as an assault on a gendere
self, a moment in which Andrei seems to have projected his own feeling
shame, converting it into an angry attack against his disrespectful child.
One can contrast Andrei's response to shame with Ion's "shame talk." Althou
Ion initially frames his difficulty to provide for his child as something tha
shames him, one does not get the sense of a deeper antagonism or threa
Ion's gendered self. Rather, Ion is deeply empathic when he discusses his ch
needs, so much so that he seems to run together and confuse the agents and
objects of desire when he goes from saying that his son is "always crying t
to have another child" to saying that it is hard to face up to your child and t
him that you cannot buy him everything that he needs for school. H
empathic understanding of the experience of his child's privation becomes e
more profoundly felt in his concerns about matters of health. In framing h
concerns for the cleanliness of his son's fellow students, Ion runs his empat
feelings for his son together with both his own feelings of anxiety over his s
privation and his feelings of anxiety about the impact of economic collapse
the broader community. Illness born of poverty threatens the very institutio
education-that is hoped will pull the children of the miners out of the blea
future that is imagined for the Jiu Valley. And, that his concerns about his ch
eventually circle back to the difficulty of the "ground[ing of] your fam
today"-providing for the family-suggests that Ion is deeply impacted in
thinking and in his self-understanding by a view of the gendered self as in
mately tied to an empathic (rather than antagonistic) relationship to
domestic sphere.
These concerns and sentiments were echoed in many other interviews th
conducted during my fieldwork, including Anca, a woman who works with
husband in the coal processing plant at the Lupeni mine. Anca described
concerns for the declining economy like this:
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252 ETHOS
Anca: It's very difficult. I don't know how people with 4 or 5 children c
make ends meet. Because they are ... they were the majority wh
can no longer send their children to school, to attend school,
because one doesn't have the basic living conditions, doesn't hav
heat, doesn't have clothes or the possibility of buying them a book
or notebook. I don't think that any of us will have much soon
More of them will leave and be without a job, how will it [?] or ge
by on unemployment ... what future can you offer a child? And, a
the parent, when one asks you "Give me [some money], please
because I need to buy myself a book, it costs 30,000 [lei (about $
at the time)]" or "I need to buy who knows what for school" and I,
as the parent, knowing how much salary I've received and knowing
the things that I have [say:] "Heah, child, I would offer you my lif
if... but I can't, I don't have anything [to give you]." As the parent
this hurts you, no? It hurts you to the soul to say something lik
that. And [during] the time when we were children, the parents
only my father, because my mother was a housewife-they raised
us, three children, they also built a house from the ground up,
new house, with a single salary. And now we get two salaries an
we've got to the point where we can't [make it and] you work only
to put food on the table for the children. Because, you can't do any
thing other than that. It's shameful [e rune] [when] you say in
rich country that we are poor, it is very shameful [e rupine]! [1999]
Anca, like Ion and Andrei, intertwines levels of concern, critique, and anxiet
this discursive fragment. She begins by discussing her concerns about carin
for children in the region through the distancing comment about other pe
"with 4 or 5 children." She expresses the incomprehensibility of how t
families can make ends meet. In doing so, she both distances herself from
immediacy of her concerns for her own child and creates a discursive solidar
with these experience-near others. However, this positioning of her self in li
of this distant discourse of solidarity soon shows the cracks of Anca's own an
eties. She is drawn to her own feelings and experiences, giving voice to the
personal anxieties through the reported voice of a child's pleas to the paren
She expresses her own pain at not being able to care for her child's needs. A
the same time, though, she is also commenting on her perceived rolegendered
role-as mother in her comparison and contrast with her ow
mother. Her parents, even during the years of state socialism, were able to r
a happy, healthy family. Her mother was able to play the role of the devot
housewife. Now, Anca cannot reconcile her own situation-two salaries rathe
than just one still are not enough-with her own experiences in childhood an
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 253
her empathic feelings for the needs of her child. The shame, here, is not only a
personalized shame-a shame about how the raising of her child reflects on
her-but is a condemnation of the circumstances. Anca realizes that her child's
unhappiness is not really the fault of her and her husband but, rather, that of
the government that has thrust her into this shameful, tenuous position. While
she is ashamed of her self, she also deflects this shame back onto the "country"
that caused her to feel this way.
Unlike Andrei, who seems most deeply impacted by his shame at the level of
the self, both Ion and Anca recognize that their own shame is really a reflection
of the political-economic conditions foisted on them by forces beyond their
control, but not beyond their capacity to imagine and critique. The shame
expressed by Ion and Anca carries a dual resonance, working to both express a
personal feeling state as well as critique the conditions that brought this sense
of shame into being. This critique, moreover, is not the complaint of someone
who feels merely treated unfairly, but rather a more profound critique of an
entire life world, a critique of a world that seems to have gone off the tracks of
an established moral order. It is not only that Ion and Anca feel that the state
should be ashamed of itself, but it is that the state should feel ashamed of itself
because it has made them feel such deep, personal shame.
Case 2: Shame and the Home as a Social Space
In the Jiu Valley, the home occupied an important place as a stage for creating
social bonds within and outside of the family as well as being a space for acting
out the markers of reputation and prestige (Drazin 2002; Kideckel 2004).
Indeed, the domestic space was one of the most immediate objects of concern
during my visit to the Popescus' home. Concern for their presentation to me
prompted them to consider some of the changes that had taken place over the
previous decade. In this fragment of our discussion, they had been comparing
the way that life had seemed to decline for them in the years after 1989. These
kinds of comparisons with timpul lui Ceaugescu were always spaces of danger
in one's self-presentation. The state socialist period was viewed as deeply problematic
and was something that people in the Jiu Valley were happy to see end
because they thought that life would get better afterward. Instead, life became,
for many, significantly worse, leaving them to ponder their ambivalent relationship
to the CeauSescu regime. At the same time, though, they explicitly
worked to avoid idealizing the state socialist period. They were forced to walk a
fine line between these rhetorical pitfalls. Ultimately, there was a sense of
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254 ETHOS
imagined nostalgia for a time when things were more domestically ideal
time when the home was a place for both the pursuit of security as well
space for social-public play through the extension of the hospitality
home to others in the community.
Ion: I don't know, and there were also holidays and who knows w
it was different, a different life, it was . . . I don't know, w
Christmas came and ... and other.., .holidays, Easter was com
pletely different compared to now. Now, when Easter comes
some other holiday you need money to buy something, you n
to... it is to you, how should I say this? [It] disgusts [y
[Lehamite]. It disgusts me [Mi-e scirbal that you need to spend
much money and you know that others will come to your hou
because you need to prepare yourself because if someone els
comes to your house, you need to serve him with somethin
that ... [stated with sarcasm] it makes you laugh.
Andrei: It's always been that way for the Romanian-hospitality.
Ion: That's the way it was, things were all like that before, it didn't
ter that 50 people came or 30 people were in your house, it wa
each week some festivity would be done like that and now ... ever
body has ... its like its suffocating you, no, you have to just get
to [... ]. [stated with resignation and embarrassment] Many, m
cry out for Ceaugescu, many people. [1999]
In talking about the domestic sphere it was not uncommon for people in t
Valley to look unfavorably on the current situation and, at the same tim
reluctantly admit that things might have been better for them under s
socialism. The shameful struggle with the ambivalence toward the pa
present frames much of the discussion around their self-consciousness a
their sense of collapsing norms in the domestic sphere.
And, yet, as one can see from this discussion, it would be highly problem
reduce their discussion of the domestic sphere to some sort of private, pe
shame. Rather, the domestic sphere also played host-both during and
state socialism-to the broader social community as miners and their fam
would entertain each other in rotating parties and dinners. Now, as Ion n
people are constantly worried that they cannot provide for guests who m
drop by during the holidays. He is "disgusted" by this worry, since, as A
insists, "hospitality" is an essential feature of being Romanian. But now, t
nomic conditions have trapped people in their homes and barred the doors
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 255 )
guests-"it's like its suffocating you"-isolating families from one another,
severing the domestic sphere from wider social ties by making the obligations of
festivities-the food and the alcohol-unachievable. Ion concludes by returning
to the trope that he started with and brings the implicitly comparative discourse
to the surface: "Many, many cry out for Ceaugescu, many people."8
The failure to maintain social networks and the collapse of the domestic sphere
framed the shame evoked by this decline as an issue of memory, evoking feelings
of ambivalence toward the Communist past. Unlike Jennifer Cole's
accounts of Betsimisaraka performances of "a kind of mnemonic manipulation
or strategic remembering" (2001:277) to "produce a quasi suppression of colonial
memories" (2001:281) when making sense of French colonial legacies in
Madagascar, Ion and Andrei express a deep ambivalence toward the time of
Ceaugescu: Life was more social at the same time as it was deeply implicated
in the atrocities of the party. In having to look back on that period with fondness
they (as well as many others with whom I spoke) express both shame
through their association with that past as well as a critique of the current conditions
that have forced that comparison.
Case 3: Shame and the Misrecognition of the Self:
The Bestial in the Mine
There was also a deeper sense in which the coal miners felt like something
more than their income and jobs and family security had been lost. The people
of the Jiu Valley with whom I talked also sensed that with the coming decline
they would slip back into what they characterized as a savage and primitive earlier
stage of existence, a return to the worst animal existence of the premodern
industrial age, a slippage out of civilization entirely. Consider this exchange at
the Popescus' home:
Ion: During the time of Ceaugescu, I mean, about this I tell you [the
interviewer] that I'm not nostalgic, there is nobody who is ...
nothing pleases me about communism, nothing, well, nothing
about communism. Nowadays, everybody wanted it when it was
over ... we will get better, when he [Ceaugescu] died, so, when
communism ended it was said that things would get better ... but
[it's gone] to hell! [Things now are] Worse!
Mariana: Bit by bit more difficult.
Ion: Bit by bit worse. Because before it was mechanized, it was complex,
you had everything that you needed, well, everything, it was...
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256 ETHOS
Now we go there [to the mine] with a wooden shovel, exactly as i
was when ... if the person who started the mine [in the 19th cen
tury] could see us, I think he would laugh at us. It's worse than
then, much, much worse.
Andrei: They get rid of the horses and wagons in the mine and with th
we were ... we have a job. We have got back to the way exploration
was done before, in the past. There were horses in the
mines, the stables, and the horses did the hauling, the coal car
[wagon] was pulled by the horse. It's all disappearing for us now
and we're heading toward an epoch ...
Ion: A primitive epoch.
Andrei: Like [when] it was first begun. [1999]
On the surface, this fragment from our conversation can be seen as a continuation
of their concerns about how things have gone bad since the "time of
Ceaugescu." A caveat I got used to hearing marks the opening of the frame of
this conversational fragment: Things are worse now than during state socialism,
but I do not long to go back to the time of Ceau?escu. This is a terrible
recognition for them. Ceaugescu represented the problems of the past: the
political and economic symptoms of modernity gone wrong. People like Ion
and Andrei and Mariana had instead hoped that they could continue to pursue
the modernist path in the years after 1989 without having to carry along the
weight of the gulag and the blood soaked wings of the Angel of History that
marked the state socialist industrialization of Romania. Instead what they saw
in the mines was a return to an even worse state of shameful abjection that they
characterized as a misrecognition of the self-as-bestial.
In the popular imaginings of the miners, their bestial nature comes through in
the frequent images of the half-naked, coal dust and muck encrusted miner seen
on television news reports and in the print media. Even more explicit is the image
put forth in Lucian Pintilie's 1996 film Prea 77rziu (Too Late). The film follows a
murder investigation in the Jiu Valley in which the murderer is revealed to be a
miner who has become feral, living deep in the mines. The murderer has been
transformed by the conditions underground into a shambling mockery of a man,
a green moss-coated creature who preys on the workers in the mines for their
food. Pintilie's (and Razvan Popescu's, whose book [1996] the movie is based on)
message is not hard to understand: "See," they seem to proclaim, "Here are the
monsters created by Ceaugescu and the folly of communism!"
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 257
I almost expected this characterization of the miners from the urban elites
because the miners are blamed for supporting the questionable political legitimacy
of the former Communists who seized power in Romania after the
execution of the Ceaugescus. What was less predictable was the way in which
the miners themselves seemed to recognize their slip back into a kind of precivilization,
a slide back into the "bad old days" of inhuman working conditions
and terrible exploitation by mine owners. Other miners frequently mentioned
their fear of dying alone in the mines because of the reductions in the overall
work force as well as the erosion of the older work-team organization of labor
but some were more profoundly ashamed of their increasingly bestial state in
relation to the rest of the nation and the world.
Ion and Andrei stress the regressive state of the working conditions in the
mine, a kind of return to the primitive, dark days of the 19th and early 20th
centuries before extensive mechanization in the mines, when the line between
man and beast was blurred in the space for work. Indeed, Laszlo, another
miner I knew drew the comparison between the declining life in the Jiu Valley
and the bestial in more explicit terms when he noted that "here [in the Jiu Valley
it is at the stage of the animal, yeah, enough time has passed so that you can't
pull me [up] from the level of the animal, you can no longer claim that I have
control over myself/my life." Later in our discussion, he went on and insisted
that "nothing can be done ... yeah, we no longer move here, no ... [now] we
go about on four legs" (2000).
This sense of regressing in one's life-as-a-miner must be juxtaposed with the
feeling of progress that most miners had experienced and expected to continue
in their life course. The background of most of these miners could be traced to
peasant or abjectly poor proletarian workers. They or their parents had been
given the chance to embrace the state socialist project of industrial development
in Romania. They imagined that their lives and their children's live
could only improve. It was a profound shock to them, then, when they were
faced with the dramatic collapse or attenuation of their imagined life course.
What made this even more terrifying was that the narrativity of life was not
merely frozen in time but seemed to be running backward as they saw their fortunes
eroded: the technology of the workplace rusting and broken; the
household reduced to penny-pinching; the dreams of a comfortable retirement
and a promising future for their children buried in the dark recesses of some
now-abandoned mineshaft. The trope of the bestial nature of their lives was
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258 ETHOS
shot through with the personal feelings of shameful loss as well as the sens
that time itself had reversed course.
For over a century, the miners of the Jiu Valley had fought against exploitat
conditions-first under the bourgeois mine owners then, later, under
party-state. With every victory they felt like they had assured another step f
ward, away from a "primitive" past and into a bright, modern future.
shame of the bestial regression that they now felt was as much connected to
decline in life as it was to the fact that the miners were becoming aware th
there simply was no interest in exploiting them, that there was no interest
investing in the mines, and that they were actually facing a deeply disturb
experience of nonrecognition. As their work was no longer recognized, so t
did many feel that their selves were no longer recognized. They could not act
alize themselves through the recognition of their work and they could
project a sense of self-esteem into their self-presentations. Nonrecognition
experienced as a shameful misrecognition of the self-a culturally mark
transformation of the self-in which the self was no longer perceived
entirely human, no longer entirely separate from the self of one's children,
longer part of the nation and the people and the community. The self was m
recognized as bestial and shamefully cast out of Romania's future, cast out o
modernity, cast down from humanity.
Conclusion
While Freud (1961) argued that the overly harsh internalized superego could
be viewed as a cause for the rise of guilt-based psychopathologies ("discontents")
in late-19th- and early-20th-century Western "civilization," I am
arguing that the emergence of new configurations of identity politics and "life
politics" (Giddens 1991) that trap people between conflicting moral and
socio-economic worlds have meant that contemporary late modernity is
increasingly marked by pathologies of shame rather than guilt.
One is reminded of the "mundane trauma" described by Luhrmann (1996,
2000) in her writings on the Parsi communities in India. Luhrmann argues that
Parsis feel deeply traumatized and humiliated by what they perceive as a "fall
from grace" associated with the transition from their privileged place in India
under British colonialism to a state of decline in the postcolonial world associated
with feelings of both the loss of past glory and the taint of having been
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SHAME AND AMBIVALENCE ON THE GLOBAL MARGINS 259
complicit with the colonial system. Like the Parsis described by Luhrmann,
coal miners of Romania's Jiu Valley are conflicted over the meaning of the
past. Sorin Antohi (2002) has suggested that it is in the nature of Romanian c
ture to maintain ambivalence in the face of its dual affiliation with the West
the Orient, with the Balkans and Europe. For Antohi, this ambivalence lead
swings between self-denigration-self-victimization and self-aggrandizement
the Jiu Valley, these themes can be seen playing themselves out around sha
as well as many other tropes. People in the Jiu Valley are proud of their role
Romania's march toward modernity and industrialism, yet they are ashame
the close association of this modernist project with the atrocities of the sta
socialist period. To hearken back to their recent days of glory-a period
created a deeply entrenched feeling of value that was erased in less th
decade-also means being tainted by "the time of Ceaugescu." The amb
lence expressed in this "shame" signifies, then, something more than a new
of unmet idealized global norms and values. Instead, that shame is also func
tioning as a critique of the pathological nature of the global, as an in-the-wo
struggle to challenge a perceived-as-unjust moral (dis)order. This is a return
what I have suggested throughout: that shame can be seen as both a subject
experience of decline from the global and as a political critique of the fund
mental problems of the global.
JACK R. FRIEDMAN is a Research Affiliate in the Department of Comparative
Human Development at the University of Chicago
Notes
1. This research was conducted during 1997-2000 and 2005 with the support of the American
bright Program and U.S. Title 8 funding provided through IREX, ACLS, and the Woodr
Wilson Center. I wish to thank Nadina Vigan, Anca Sevceno, Ruxandra Vigan, Bambi Cha
Katherine Frank, Tanya Luhrmann, Heather McCarthy, the University of Chicago's "Clin
Ethnography" workshop, and the two sets of anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuab
feedback.
2. The related wordjena is a weaker form of ruqine in the way that embarrassment is a weaker f
of shame. In this article, every use of the word shame will be a translation of rnqine.
3. All interviewees' names have been changed in this article.
4. All translations are my own from the original Romanian.
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260 ETHOS
5. There is a structural similarity of these litanies to the linguistic form that Nancy Ries (1
cusses in her work on perestroika era Soviet life in that they function to critique the power
the standpoint of the powerless through the language of the moral order.
6. See overviews of the run-up to and ultimate failures of the 1996-2000 period in
Tismaneanu and Gail Kligman (2001), Alina Murgiu-Pippidi and Sorin Ionita (2001),
Aligica (2001).
7. See also Veena Das's (1997) work on the role of recognition-nonrecognition of suffering.
8. The added strain of my visit and the fact that this interview occurred close to Easter certainly
made many of these issues .about the household even more immediate to the Popescus.
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