About-face transformation: Learning to embrace honor,shame,and face

The current situation

Many are aware of how recent theology, biblical studies, and missiology have increasingly focused discussions around issues involving honor, face, and shame (Kärkkäinen, 2020). These studies often highlight how traditional Minority World perspectives on the self, social honor, and emotions of self-assessment (i.e., pride, guilt, shame) vary with those in the cultures of the Majority World. A common assumption among much of this literature is that an analytic distinction exists between so-called “guilt culture” or “guilt–innocence cultures,” on the one hand, and “honor–shame cultures,” on the other hand. Recognizing how cultures differentially practice honor, shame, or face is essential to avoid two deleterious stances many have taken regarding such cultural issues. These are a type of oblivion (we simply do not recognize these dynamics) or a kind of aversion (we recognize these but find them distasteful or, in some cases, abhorrent or sub-Christian) (Flanders, 2011). Distinguishing such cultural differences is a critical step both for missionary practice and for the ongoing decolonization project in theology. Yet, effective missiological engagement with such issues must involve not only awareness of how specific modes of honor, shame, and face differ from culture to culture. It must also include an awareness of how all human cultures involve and rely on the cultural dynamics of honor, shame, and face. An authentic grappling with honor, shame, and face will require all of us to not only see the differences that such might exhibit but also accept the significance that these cultural dynamics play in every culture, including our own.

My personal story

To demonstrate how this is the case, I wish to recount briefly my experiences with these significant issues and how this journey constituted for me something I can only describe as a type of “honor–shame conversion.” This type of “conversion” falls in line with what Lian Xi notes in his work on the conversion of the missionary (Lian, 1996), something more like what many of us intend when speaking of the “conversion” of Peter in Acts 10. This, of course, falls short of what we typically mean when we use the term conversion in a religious sense. The most straightforward way to understand this type of about-face reorientation is as “transformation.” This process of transformative reorientation—or “conversion”—is dynamic and malleable (Rambo and Farhadian, 2014). Marc Baer (2008: 13) considers such a transformation as “a decision or experience followed by a gradually unfolding, dynamic process through which an individual embarks on . . . transformation . . . leading to the creation of a new self-identity and new way of life.” This experience, a personal transformation and significant change of perspective, was for me quite gradual. It still seems a work in progress as I continue to find this reorientation partial and incomplete. Discovering new ways these commitments cause me to readjust my theological and missiological frameworks has now become an expected part of my ongoing journey.

Perhaps like many others, I had assumed we “moderns” had transcended outdated shame and honor social codes of earlier times and now lived in a more “advanced” stage of human society, functioning with guilt and justice as primary social pillars. We lived, I had thought, like the frequently referenced John Adams’ (1851: 106) quip, in “a government of laws and not of men”, not one that heeded aristocratic status, social honor, reputation, or face. In ways consistent with the well-known distinction Ruth Benedict (1946) made between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures,” it seemed to me self-evident that societies should function based on a developed moral conscience and internalized conviction of sin (Benedict’s way of conceiving “guilt cultures”) and not sensitivity to external sanctions, public opinion, or the glancing eyes of others (Benedict’s way of conceiving “shame cultures”). I simply assumed that our modern US society had outgrown such ways and had become a guilt-oriented meritocratic society that was unconcerned with social escutcheons and games of public distinction. This set of cultural assumptions was reaffirmed when I became a Christian. The churches I knew emphasized in various ways that the Christian message and proper theology relied upon biblical notions of guilt and a particular legal understanding of the work of Christ. There was little if any discussion of the issues of honor, shame, or face except perhaps to criticize and warn believers of the danger of such for discipleship and spirituality. Ironically, as it turns out, my own experience, particularly that of my conversion to the Christian faith in my mid-teens revealed how shame and honor attachments functioned powerfully in my own life. I was driven to give up a partying lifestyle as a teenager primarily because I could not accept the shame that I would surely bear in disappointing my two grandmothers had they ever discovered my habits. Subsequently, my initial move toward God was precipitated by a vivid dream in which my primary experience was of an overwhelming sense of shame (à la Isaiah 6) from being existentially defective before Jesus. My conversion to missiologically relevant honor–shame awareness came later and gradually. It is this gradual unfolding into a radically new perspective that I now discuss.

The first major marker of this transformation came as I worked as a missionary intern for two years in Bangkok, Thailand. There I encountered for the first time significant cultural differences through learning the Thai language, living and interacting with Thai people, and working with Thai churches. I became more aware of how honorifics (particularly face-related experiences) were lexicalized into the Thai language (one cannot speak Thai well without developing a robust and sophisticated facility with honorifics and face-related terminology) and how such was critical for effective ministry. There were multiple ways that I grew to understand how Thais paid attention to social honor (in ways that were similar yet quite distinct from my own personal experience) and various forms of shame-related behavior. I realized that developing an informed understanding of social honor and both potential face-threatening and face-affirming behavior represented a sine qua non for sensitive, incarnational ministry in the Thai context. This was my first significant step toward a change in my perspectives. In multiple ways, I experienced a kind of disjuncture with my own supposed “guilt–justice” orientation and struggled mightily to make sense of these differences I was learning. I was beginning to understand more deeply the cultural logic of this “honor–shame culture” of contemporary Thailand. One key effect my time in Thailand and language learning had upon me was how such began to challenge my readings of scripture through the lenses of honor and shame, something that was new to me. That is, my personal experiences with Thai culture were providing new opportunities to see parts of scripture in new ways. This new window on scripture was quite disjunctive from the previous cultural and biblical/theological understandings I had gained from my biblical training as an undergraduate and life in contemporary churches.

After my two-year internship in Thailand, another experience constituted what would be the next pivotal moment in my unfolding about-face transformation. In graduate school, a theology professor who knew my goal of returning to Thailand recommended I read the book Jesus Christ Our Lord: Christology from a Disciple’s Perspective, by C. Norman Kraus. Kraus’ personal intercultural experiences, struggles to evangelize effectively, and attempts to communicate theological truths to a Japanese audience resonated deeply with my own similar disjunctive experience that I had in Thailand. This book constituted Kraus’ reworking of a theological response to the major cultural differences in communication styles, personal motivation, and cultural forms of epideixis (praise and blame), especially as it related to evangelism and discipleship among the Japanese.

Simply put, Kraus rocked my biblical, theological, and missiological world. He gave me new language and new categories to consider what had been to this point a growing, though still nascent set of intuitions and understandings. His book immediately led me into a deeper re-examination of scripture. Kraus pointed out many places in the Bible, a book I was convinced I knew and understood well, where honor and shame meanings existed but had fallen under my own biblical and theological radar. Indeed, many terms in both Hebrew and Greek carry strong honor or shame connotations and denotations, yet for various reasons, English translations often fail to render them appropriately. These include but are certainly not limited to doxa (honor, reputation), makarios (how honorable), ouai (how shameful), philotimos (ambitious love of honor), kalos (noble, honorable), and the elengchos semantic domain (bring to conviction through shame) (deSilva, 2009; Flanders, 2020; Hanson, 1994). Though a person who was an avid reader of the Bible and equipped with a degree in biblical studies, these connotations, which had for the most part simply escaped me, now began to become clearer.

This re-reading of scripture with an honor–shame interpretive lens led me soon to the writings of the so-called Context Group, an international team of biblical scholars that merged historical exegesis and the social sciences to interpret the Bible with attention to its ancient cultural contexts. Notable among the early leaders of the Context Group were John Elliot, Bruce Malina, and Jerome Neyrey (Esler, 2004). I also became familiar with the important work of Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar who also had years of personal experience in Lebanon, and whose work highlighted cultural dimensions in the Bible that readers would often miss (for a comprehensive listing of his books, see https://www.kennethbailey.net).

The cumulative effect of Kraus and these other scholars continued to fuel my gradual transformation. It now became clear to me how critical it was to understand honor and shame in the context of my ministry (Thailand) and the cultures in which biblical authors had written. I was a convinced convert and recalibrated my own biblical, theological, and cultural orientations. This was later augmented by the indispensable work of New Testament scholar David deSilva (1995, 1999, 2009), which continued to deepen and extend this missiological transformation. Honor and shame were clearly critical to understanding “honor–shame cultures,” whether that of contemporary Thailand or the ancient cultures of the biblical authors. I carried this new perspective with me during the following season of ministry and church planting in northern Thailand. There I attempted to read the Bible, practice evangelism and discipleship, and communicate with special attention to the issues of honor, shame, and face. I had been converted to embrace honor, shame, and face in the Thai context.

Current scholarly critique of the term “honor–shame cultures”

But there was more. A post-transformational “second blessing,” if you will, came at the beginning of my doctoral studies. It was in my first year at Fuller Theological Seminary that I discovered the interdisciplinary area of face and facework theory. Face, I soon discovered, was more than what some naively assume, merely a “mask” that people use to hide their true selves. Face “involves the claimed sense of self-respect or self-dignity in an interactive situation” (Ting-Toomey, 1994: 3). These scholars highlighted how face was an “intoxicating metaphor that connects communication with social life. It is a multifaceted construct that takes on dimensions of identity issues, social cognitive issues, affective issues, and communication issues” (Ting-Toomey and Cocroft, 1994: 307). Facework was simply the various communicative strategies that extend our face identities in social interaction. This burgeoning academic area of research had much to say about face and face dynamics, social honor, and shame.

The unexpected discovery, however, was that most of the early literature in this field was not the result of research on Southern European, Mediterranean, or East Asian cultures, stereotypical “honor–shame cultures.” Rather, this facework theory research came mostly out of and was significantly grounded in the North American English-speaking context—my own culture! Yet, we represented a society I thought no longer played that outdated honor and shame game and who certainly did not do face. Researchers such as Erving Goffman (1955), Stella Ting-Toomey (1994), and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) convincingly argued that face and facework were not just the activity of certain cultures but rather universal phenomena. Different cultures framed the situated meaning of face and enacted facework differently, yet what these scholars demonstrated convincingly was that face concerns and facework strategies were essential to all human communication. I was stunned.

In addition to modern facework theory, my doctoral research provided me the opportunity to become more conversant with the ancient discussions in both philosophy and theology about honor and shame (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Elizabethan scholar Robert Ashley, the first to write about honor systematically in English) as well as the more recent anthropological discussions. These recent anthropological studies challenged and rejected many fundamental assumptions of the earlier stereotyped models of honor and shame that relied on the stereotyped and incorrect definitions of anthropologist Ruth Benedict. This critique of the so-called “anthropology of honor and shame” from the 1960s and 1970s, mostly focused on the study of the Mediterranean, southern Europe, and northern Asia. These anthropological studies moved away from the earlier notions of this anthropology of honor and shame (Flanders, 2019). What was true about the universality of face and facework seemed also to be true regarding both social honor and shame. Both these ancient and recent resources helped me grasp a critical truth—there could be no such thing as what we could call a culture or society without the essential dynamics brought about by honor, shame, and facework.

This was as significant of a personal eureka as was my initial reorientation to how these issues were important to understand the supposed “honor–shame cultures”—stated plainly, there is no such thing as honor, or shame, or face. There are only, to quote anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, “honors,” and “shames,” and various ways to engage in face and facework. Such happens in all cultures, all the time. What I came to see was that this entire conversation, which, especially in missiology, had taken place concerning only certain cultures of the world, was in actuality a conversation for the entire world. I came to understand that all human cultures engaged in all these dynamics. The analytic distinctions between the so-called “honor–shame” cultures and the “guilt–justice” cultures—these researchers demonstrated how that analytic distinction was nothing but a chimera, an illusion promulgated by the earlier and now discredited theoretical ideas of Benedict and her followers. To say it another way, to be human was to be homo honorificus and homo verecundia. These categories I had come to embrace for Thailand and the ancient cultures of the Bible were no longer only the possession of the exotic “other.” These were as salient to my own North American culture and context as they were to that of ostensible “honor–shame cultures.” What I quickly came to realize was how the modern English-speaking world tends to avoid the use of the term “face” and rather collapses face and face-related behavior into other categories, such as politeness, image, identity, or various extensions of personal dignity and esteem. As Goffman (1955: 217) notes in his seminal essay on face, “the members of every social circle may be expected to have some knowledge of face-work and some experience in its use. In our society, this kind of capacity is sometimes called tact, savoir-faire, diplomacy, or social skill.” Yet, all such activity is “modified, prescriptively or proscriptively, by considerations of face” (Goffman, 1955: 217). What this meant was that the difference between cultures was not that of being “honor–shame” versus some other type. It was in how each culture practiced and valued these dynamics. I now saw how the convention of essentializing and then labeling cultures as “honor cultures,” “shame cultures,” or “face cultures” was myopic.

Implications of this transformation

As a result of this decades-long transformation process, I now view all cultures and social dynamics through these multiplex cultural frames. My life experiences, my social relationships, and indeed all cultural analysis I interpret through the mutual lenses of honor, shame, and face. I do this as much in my current context of North American academic culture as when I am relating to northern Thai rice farmers. To ask whether a given culture is an honor or shame or face culture is simply a category mistake. Rather, I now realize the question is how honor, shame, and face dynamics are differentially working out in each specific cultural context. My about-face transformation to honor–shame now had an addendum, one that helped me fill in a significant lacuna about which I had been unaware.

This is a point I wish to emphasize. Despite the growing attention and vigorous missiological conversation about such issues, what I hear and read often continues to trade on the fundamental error of the grand stereotypes of “honor–shame cultures.” Though contemporary North Americans might no longer consider “pistols at dawn, 20 paces” the proper response to being insulted, we continue in complex and powerful ways to stake honor claims, negotiate status and prestige, and address perceived insults, even if all the while we claim we do not represent an honor culture. We recognize that preoccupation with social honor and avoiding stigma in certain sub-cultures, such as the military, athletics, and certain forms of masculine identity (Gilmore, 1990; Nisbett and Cohen, 1996). Yet, it would be a mistake to think that honor, shame, and face concerns only persist within those narrow sub-cultures. Such changes in surface-level instantiations of honor and shame mask a more fundamental truth—we all do honor, shame, and face, and we do these all the time. Simply think of all these honor-laden experiences, typical to modern life—appreciation, congratulations, awards, reputation, shout-outs, commendation, applause, recognition, status, titles, cred, esteem (public and self), appreciation, Facebook “likes,” glory, respect, praise, exalt, esteem, worth, renown, fame. Then, consider these common shame-laden experiences—embarrassment, stigma, exposed, being punked, being faced, a sense of shame, to be shameless, humiliation, feeling unworthy or inadequate, falling short, being excluded, outcast, outsider, dishonor, disgrace, defame, defile, reproach, ill-repute, rejected, and scorn.

Finally, consider the following face-laden experiences—manners, politeness, civility, courtesy, charm, refinement, deference, decency, decorum, identity presentation, self-presentation, posturing, losing face, image, propriety, and terms of address. The commonality of such experiences testifies to how honor, shame, and face undergird the daily cultural practices of contemporary North American cultures. What this suggests is that the difference between, for example, my modern North American Anglo culture and putative “honor–shame” cultures is a difference not in kind, but in emphasis and degree. These real cultural distinctions seem to be where those who use the traditional designations of honor-cultures or honor–shame cultures find their definitional justification. But, to label a culture leads people to associate those particular dynamics with that culture, while assuming that other cultures either lack or do not experience such often leads missionaries and researchers to devalue one or more of these cultural dynamics (e.g., neglecting to pay attention to shame experiences in putative “guilt–justice” cultures or to assume that ostensible “honor–shame” cultures do not experience guilt). It can and often does result in people assuming cultures lack one or more of these dynamics (e.g., “Oh, we don’t have face in our culture”). This can result in a type of misleading cultural blindness, directing our attention away from the diversity of honor, shame, and face. Such distinctions can also result in a homogenizing of these experiences, leading many to consider the experiences of honor, shame, and face as univocal rather than diverse and multivalent. This reductionistic approach can lead to approaches that do not recognize cultural differences among these experiences, how diverse cultures differentially experience these in ways that this type of guilt will differ from other types of guilt, and a certain cultural configuration of shame varies from another cultural instantiation of shame. Dividing the world into realms of “honor–shame” and “guilt–justice” ultimately proves to be an unfortunate type of Saidian Orientalism, a sophisticated and exoticized form of “othering.” What is necessary is to dispose of such labeling and instead focus on the unique, culturally shaped configurations of honor, shame, face, and guilt in each cultural context. We must move from inaccurate typologies and create more robust forms of designation.

Conclusion

Without such a “conversion” that recognizes the universality of honor, shame, and face, two unfortunate outcomes are likely. First, when we hold to the false dichotomies created by the notion of “honor–shame cultures” we perpetuate caricatures that can often distort and demean. Such is apparent in a conversation I had with a veteran Anglo missionary to Hong Kong who was pursuing an advanced degree in missiology. When I asked him about his experience with issues involving face, he reacted passionately. “For me,” he exclaimed, “face is simply a lie!” He proceeded to illustrate what he termed a “black” area of Chinese culture though eventually admitted that at a certain level, he had acquiesced to the issue of face (and associated issues such as honor and shame). Such a begrudging acceptance, he concluded, was necessary since he otherwise could not carry out ministry in the Chinese context. Ministry pragmatics kept him in the face “game,” but it was clear that he did not want to play that game nor thought it consistent with Christian faith. Similarly, a missionary colleague learned about the focus of my doctoral research and spoke to me of her hope that I could help the Thai church “fix the problem of face.” That is, she assumed there was a way to eliminate what she perceived to be a negative force in the life of the Thai church. Though there is typically a negative dimension to cultural practices regarding face, here totalizing, negative evaluation and attempt to eliminate face would prove impossible, since to rid a culture of honor and shame would be to eliminate all notions of virtue and excellence and evaluations of those who fail to attain those standards of excellence, and to rid a culture of face would be to eliminate identity and self-other social interactions. None of these are possible or desirable.

Second, without this type of transformative shift I suggest, we can easily overlook honor, shame, and face dynamics operating in our own lives, misleading us into thinking we represent a qualitatively different culture type. This can often fuel the negative stereotypes I mention above (thinking our way is superior). Just as destructive, however, is simply that uncategorized and therefore unexamined aspects of our own cultural practices set us up for all kinds of problems. To deny or fail to see our own honor, shame, and face practices keeps us from both effectively addressing unhealthy aspects of such practices and from doing creative and constructive theological work with honor, shame, and face.

Here is not the place to discuss the specifics of how honor (and shame and face) can differ in form, motivation, and dynamics in various cultural contexts (external–internal, honor based on external achievements versus virtue/character, vertical respect norms versus horizontal acceptance norms, etc.). Nor is it within the purview of this brief account to discuss why and how guilt experiences are often more prevalent in certain modern Northern European and North American contexts. Though shame is currently a topic of research in many quarters and often highlights the negative consequences of so-called toxic shame in contemporary society, such still often carries a strong modern bias that categorically condemns all forms of shame as destructive. This is evident in the very popular work of Brené Brown. To see how much appetite there is for this perspective, simply note how Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk video, “The Price of Shame,” has over 12 million views. Yet, such approaches as Brown’s typically overlook the extensive philosophical, theological, and biblical resources that authorize distinct types of constructive shame and ways that moral commitments push against shamelessness. Kristanto (2019) and Lau (2020) are excellent examples of theological approaches that accent the positive role of shame. Again, this important conversation is outside the purview of this article.

What I wish to convey to a missiologically astute audience is quite simply this—we should all give ourselves to the continuing renewing of our minds as it relates to these important issues! I want to make the case that honor, shame, and face issues must become a more central and basic component of modern missiology, and this should occur in ways that avoid the inaccurate and unhelpful mislabeling that I have described. Such must not be simply a missiological sidebar or a perspective that only obtains in certain cultural contexts. I want to enjoin all of us that it is time to dispense with the inaccurate and ultimately unhelpful labels of “honor–shame culture” “guilt–innocence culture,” or “face cultures.” Indeed, it seems to me that one proper way to accomplish this goal is for the missiological community to mutually share our own diverse experiences of these universal cultural dynamics. This will involve a larger project to critically investigate how such do indeed involve culturally distinctive shapes. All human cultures are honor, shame, and face cultures. It is incumbent upon us to investigate with proper awareness and sophistication the missiological significance of honor, shame, and face in every cultural context.

Such an about-face transformation syncs well with the ongoing decolonization project and can function as a key ingredient in helping the global church claim a theology and gospel that fit organically within culturally specific identities. As one piece of a postcolonial corrective to dominant modes of theological and biblical understandings, a missiology that makes space for honor, shame, and face as basic categories will also cooperate more naturally with all local community attempts to read the Bible and gain their own authentic theological voice.

Our constructive task is to create frameworks that, with cultural specificity, clarify how we are all homo honorificus and homo verecundia. That is, we must not simply underwrite our culturally specific honor, shame, and face practices any more than we would encourage others to simply adopt the codes their dominant culture presses upon them. Early Christian communities, including Jesus in his ministry, adopted, refined, inverted, and rejected many of the dominant cultural models of honor, shame, and face (Levasheff, 2013).

Like the early church, we will almost assuredly need to reframe, reorient, and at times, reject the prevailing modes of honor, shame, and face that our cultures provide for us. Our task then is to rethink in light of our faith the honor codes, amount of honor/face attachment, and various strategies we engage. We must leave behind the land of “honor–shame cultures,” opting instead for the world of honor, shame, and face, listening, and discerning how humans do honor, do shame, and do face in diverse global cultures. We should encourage local voices to investigate with greater focus how their own honor, shame, and face experiences lead them to adopt, adjust, subvert, or reject these dominant cultural dynamics. And we should do the very same thing for ourselves.

My goal for this personal account is to stimulate all of us to consider important questions like those that Kwok Pui-lan and Gina A. Zurlo (2021: 82) pose—is our missiology and engagement with world Christian expressions “emerging as a distinctive Western initiative in terms of centers and discipline and is it therefore preoccupied with questions of the Western academy? How can we go beyond asking questions in an American way, shaped by the priorities and interests of our own training?” and “What are the priorities of Christians in other parts of the world?” Embracing honor, shame, and face, particularly with a more sophisticated and multivalent understanding, will enable us to respond faithfully to these critical questions. When we take the time to listen, we will discover how such cultural dynamics are basic to human experience throughout global cultures. Yet, since the same cultural dynamics are operating in those cultures not traditionally considered “honor–shame cultures,” this reorientation can also help those of us in the cultures of the North Atlantic and the Minority World. A rehabilitation of honor, shame, and face as operative notions in our lives can help us see ourselves in a new and more accurate light. This mutual sharing of our culturally formed honor, shame, and face experiences will assist us all in both appreciating the cultural diversity inherent in these experiences as well as helping create more faithful and responsible missiological engagement.

Though:

the topic of honor (and shame) has become du jour in missiological circles today [such] does not signal that it has established itself as a core component of the missiological syllabus. Whether this new interest becomes more than merely a passing trend will depend upon rigorous missiological engagement. (Flanders, 2019: 146)

That missiological engagement, in my opinion, will require the type of transformative about-face shift of the missionary that I have undergone.