I'm not sure what you mean by "rise in pro-shame propaganda".
However, your point that shame has two potential meanings is a good
one. I think that both these meanings ("healthy" shame and "toxic"
shame) are available to the mothers in Connecticut and San Juan
that we interviewed, and I think it IS significant that the
middle-class mothers in Connecticut have trouble thinking of the
capacity to feel shame as anything but toxic and indicative of
damaged self-esteem, whereas the mothers in San Juan view it
as indicative of a healthy conscience. Our interviews with these
mothers were quite extensive, and without going into all the
details, I do think it's reasonable to conclude that their concepts
of shame and its relationship to other constructs (such
as respectfulness and/or self-confidence) are cultural, and not
simply a result of "applying different meanings".
>although ideas about shame *are* culturally specific, this fact does not
>follow from the observation that mothers in Latin America favor shame and
>mothers in Connecticut do not: they may have different meanings of the
As I intimated above, our data do not suggest that middle-class
mothers in San Juan "favor shame" whereas middle-class mothers in
Connecticut "do not." The picture is much more complicated than
that and has to do with the ways in which particular cultural
constructs seem to hang together. As far as whether they have "different
meanings"--this is a crucial question; can there ever be true
conceptual equivalence across any two groups (or any two individuals
for that matter)? The word respeto/respectfulness has similar
dictionary meanings in the two settings--but respeto and respectfulness
are complex cultural constructs which interrelate with other
important cultural constructs in different ways in the two settings.
The same is true of the concept "shame," or "independence" or
"self-esteem" or any other culturally salient construct. The
dictionary meanings are similar for the two groups, but the
way each of these relates to and fits with other important cultural
constructs differs. Thus, as far as I see it, "shame" carries the
connotation of toxicity in our culture because of the way in which
this concept interacts with the extremely important construct in
current middle-class U.S. culture of "self-esteem"; on the other
hand, "the capacity to feel shame" among our middle-class mothers
in San Juan has the connotation of "healthy conscience" because
of its relationship to the very important constructs of being
"a person of worth" who treats others with respect and knows
how to behave in contextually appropriate ways. In other words,
I think it IS culturally significant that these two groups of
mothers tend to give different meaning to the concept of shame.
Robin