Harkins, Jean (1996). Linguistic and cultural differences in concepts of shame. In David Parker, Rosamund Dalziell, & Iain Richard Wright (Eds.), Shame and the modern self (pp. 84-96). Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Shame is one of a set of ‘social emotions’ that have a strong influence upon the behaviour of individuals in relation to the society in which they live. Emotions of this kind, and related norms of behaviour, are socially constructed within a particular linguistic and cultural context. Serious cross-cultural misunderstanding can result from assuming that emotions, or the behaviour associated with them, will be the same for different cultural groups. For example, shame-like emotions in some contexts can strongly motivate people to conform, but in others they can increase a person’s alienation from and hostility to society. This essay examines shame-like concepts in some languages of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific, showing how the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of analysing emotion words and cultural rules can pinpoint the cognitive and emotive elements contained within culture-specific emotion concepts, and can make some predictions about ‘scripts’ for behaviour associated with these emotions.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
