WHO IS SHAMED BY SHAMEFUL SPEECH

The ritualised performances investigated in the previous chapter are characterised not only by a general association with the symbolic arousal of laughter, but also by a marked tendency towards the use of aischrologia, ‘shameful’ or offensive speech. In sacred contexts, such aischrology is a pointedly paradoxical transgression of the normal religious requirement of euphēmia (auspicious, pure speech, often equated with ‘silence’). But at the same time it is observably framed and protected by the ritual setting itself, and thereby converted into a function of the worship and celebration of a deity. However difficult it may be for us to recover the authentic mentality of those who participated in such events, we can see that ritual aischrology, together with the laughter which typically accompanies it, is controlled and made somehow acceptable by its inclusion within a culturally codified set of protocols. Outside such frameworks, by contrast, aischrologic behaviour takes on the appearance of an intrinsically shameful, aggressive and destabilising phenomenon, a threat to communal necessities of restraint, cooperation and order. In the common flow of social life, moreover, aischrology seems to possess a sort of doubleness in relation to the workings of shame.