It is important to stress that when it comes to theorising the problem of naked- ness, this book and my interest in nudity were inspired by Elias’s most famous work On the Process of Civilisation (2012a [1939]), where he advanced an ar- gument about changing standards of behaviour and feeling in western societies. He developed his theory on the basis of changes in manners which he observed in numerous etiquette books – and to a lesser extent in other literature and works of art – dating as far back as the Middle Ages. Elias detected changes of behav- iour across the timeline of several centuries, changes in standards of what he called ‘outward bodily propriety’, including those concerning manners in the bedroom, at the table, and topics such as defecation, urination, spitting or nose- blowing. He also discussed the handling of dressing and undressing, which sparked my interest and curiosity with regard to nakedness from a long-term perspective. This showed me how much we tend to overestimate how ‘natural’ are the standards of dealing with nudity and the associated feelings of shame and embarrassment. That is why I discovered that studying the most extreme form of nudity – naturism – would provide an insight into how we manage shameful and embarrassing feelings related to our bodies.
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2016 B. Górnicka, Nakedness, Shame, and Embarrassment,
Figurationen. Schriften zur Zivilisations- und Prozesstheorie 12, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-15984-9_6
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Elias’s theory of the civilising process encompasses the history of human emotions, and specifically those of shame and embarrassment. The astonishing thing is how he turns the most mundane and banal elements of human everyday life, which have frequently been either dismissed or taken for granted by both sociologists and historians, into a more universal theory of ‘the wiring’ behind how societies operate. Or, in other words, ‘in the jargon of the trade, it is at once and inseparably a microsociological and a macrosociological theory’ (Mennell, 1998: 94). Instead of following the general trend among sociologists towards studying humans and their social lives one fragment or piece of the puzzle at a time, which can result in a very narrow vision of the world, Elias provides a broad perspective on the human world. That is why, even though he began by identifying historical changes in people’s behaviour and their emotions, he relat- ed these to much broader processes of state formation, urbanisation and econom- ic development (Krieken, 1998).
Elias was certainly right that standards concerning the unclothed body are – along with eating, urination and defecation, nose-blowing, and spitting – central to matters of ‘outward bodily propriety’. He chose to study them because these were matters that had to be handled by all human beings at all times and places, and every known society has had some rules concerning them. The main differ- ences arise in the various levels of taboos about them. Whatever society a baby is born into, in whatever period of history, it has to attain the adult standard, to learn the rules then prevailing in its society; these prevailing standards may change from generation to generation. That was why Elias found ‘standards of outward bodily propriety’ to be especially good markers of social changes.
Although some human groups described by anthropologists in the past have gone unclothed or practically so, most have not. The open display of the genitals, in particular, is not unknown, but it is quite unusual especially in complex mod- ern societies. Where it happens, it happens in very specific contexts – sexual relations most obviously, but otherwise in very restricted groups. This was the case with the Dublin-based naturist swim club – Club Nautica, where I conduct- ed my fieldwork.
Elias was studying manners and changing patterns of behaviour only in Western Europe, but over a period of several centuries. Although his remarks are insightful and suggestive, they do not pretend to be an exhaustive, worldwide treatment of the subject and they raise many further questions of interest to the social scientist.
Some of the main difficulties in understanding societies and the individuals of which they are composed, and consequently in understanding Elias’s theory, arise from the way in which we habitually conceptualise our social world. Elias (2012b [1970]: 106–23) argues that the problem starts with the linguistic tenden- cies of our languages, which tend to relate and conceptualise the world surround-
ing us in static terms. He draws upon the ‘Sapir–Whorf hypothesis’ (Whorf, 1956) to illustrate the limitations of ‘Standard Average European’ traditions of speech and how they affect our understanding of reality.
Our languages are constructed in such a way that we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest, and then, almost as an afterthought, adding a verb which ex- presses the fact that the thing with this character is now changing. For example, standing by a river we see the perpetual flowing of the water. But to grasp it concep- tually, and to communicate it to others, we do not think and say, ‘Look at the per- petual flowing of the water’; we say, ‘Look how fast the river is flowing.’ We say, ‘the wind is blowing’, as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if the wind were separate from its blowing, as if a wind could exist which did not blow. This reduction of processes to static conditions, which we shall call ‘process-reduction’ for short, appears self- explanatory to people who have grown up with such languages. (2012b [1970]: 106– 7)
This line of thinking is directly related to the gap between the process sociology of Norbert Elias and all the sociological traditions that tend to separate structure from agency, ‘the actor’ and his ‘activity’, or, more importantly, the ‘individual’ from ‘society’, as if one could exist without the other (Elias, 2012b [1970]). Elias views this tendency to resist seeing the human individual as itself a process is directly connected to our fears of mortality (Dunning and Hughes (2013: 51). Taking all this into consideration from the point of view of this research, the only way to fully grasp the problem of nudity and the way we tend to conceptualise the embarrassment about it in western societies, is through the long-term analysis of the changes of attitudes that have taken place throughout the centuries.
Central to Elias’s theory are expanding ‘webs of interdependence’,35 which
continue to grow denser and larger depending on the size of the society in ques- tion, as part of an ongoing process. Elias observed these chains of interdepend- ence throughout the European history, and how the unconscious and unplanned ‘intermeshing’ of people’s actions through the interconnections in power strug- gles shapes the developing structures of societies as a whole. How it happens, Elias explains through describing processes of psychogenesis and sociogenesis.
35 Elias objected to and avoided the use of the term ‘interaction’, because it implies that people tend to act, behave and most importantly influence each other only when face-to-face (Men- nell, 1998: 94–5).
146 6 Nakedness as a theoretical problem