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This book explores what we know about the history of shame, from early human societies onward, and explicitly links historical patterns and complexities to current issues surrounding shame. As both a personal and a social emotion – individuals experience shame, but societies or social groups variously rely on shaming –shame is a particularly interesting candidate for historical analysis. A related analytical focus emerges from the tension between current psychological views on shame, which emphasize the destructive results of the emotion, and the wide reliance on shame in many past and contemporary societies. The most obvious historical target on shame involves the attacks on the emotion – after virtually universal acceptance in agricultural societies – in Western culture from the late 18^th century onward. This book explores this change and its causes, tracing the impact but also the limitations of the shift, while also placing the new patterns in some comparative context regarding societies that remained less individualistic. Finally, the book picks up on several recent new developments, particularly in the United States, as shaming experiences a partial resurgence thanks to new partisan divides and the impact of social media. Shame, in some, offers a diverse and fascinating history, as part of the growing enthusiasm for exploring emotions in the past; and the history connects to a number of very real current issues about shame and shaming.

This book brings together ways of considering play to probe its essential relationship to work, ritual, and communitas. The book examines the causes, consequences, and contexts of play. Focusing on five contexts for play—the psyche, the human body, the environment, society, and culture—the book identifies conditions that instigate play, and comments on its implications for those settings. The book explores how we learn about ourselves and the world, and about the intersection of these two realms, through acts of play. Offering a general theory of play as behavior promoting self-realization, it articulates a conception of self that includes individual and social identity, particular and transcendent connection, and multiple fields of involvement. It also evaluates play styles from history and contemporary life to analyze the relationship between play and human freedom. The book shows how play allows us to learn about our qualities and those of the world around us—and in so doing make sense of ourselves.