On Being Degraded in Public Space: An Autoethnography

Introduction Several years ago my friend and I received a vicious beating in public. Our attackers made no attempt to take anything from us. The two men spoke no words while they administered the beating. We have no explanation of why they attacked us. Curled up on my couch for hours after the beating, I tried to make sense of my experience. As I replayed the incident in my head, a concept I had learned about in graduate school kept returning to my mind: degradation ceremony. I believed I had experienced my own degradation ceremony. Did the conditions for a successful degradation ceremony occur that evening? Or, did I experience something resembling a degradation ceremony? I explore these questions in the form of an autoethnography. I begin by explaining the degradation ceremony concept and offer cases in which the concept has been applied. Garfinkel (1956) offered the seminal description of degradation ceremony: Any communicative work between persons, whereby the public identity of an actor is transformed into something looked on as lower in the local scheme of social types, will be called a status degradation ceremony (p. 420). According to Garfinkel, a key feature of a degradation ceremony is that a transformation of identity occurs. The transformation does not involve the substitution of one identity for another. Rather, the person becomes a different and new person in the eyes of his condemners. Thus, degradation ceremonies are concerned with the alteration of total identities. Public denunciation is crucial to a successful degradation ceremony. Someone publicly announces that a person is in essence a lower species. In a degradation ceremony, the ritual destruction of a person is intended. In a degradation ceremony, the individual is called to account before the group, witnesses denounce him, the offender is pronounced guilty, and steps are taken to strip the individual of his identity as a group member. As Henslin (2003) points out, Hester Prynne serves as an example of someone who encountered a degradation ceremony. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, town officials forced Prynne to wear a scarlet "A" sewn on her dress to indicate that she was an adulteress. The scarlet "A" was essentially a badge of shame, and it branded Prynne as a moral outcast from the community. Ceremonial features are key to bringing about a successful degradation. For example, Emerson (1969) shows how juvenile courtroom proceedings are structured so that delinquents are degraded and given the status of wrongdoer. Another important feature of a successful degradation ceremony is the transformation of a person's total identity. For instance, in their analysis of the construction of Benedict Arnold's reputation as a traitor, Ducharme and Fine (1995) explain how Arnold was transformed from celebrated military hero to despised villain. A denouncer is crucial to the process of transforming someone's total identity during a degradation ceremony. For example, Richardson (1975) shows how a pastor played the role of denouncer in a process that transformed a man's identity from financial leader and long-time church member to that of troublemaker. Eventually, the man and his family were forced to leave the church they helped to create. Together these cases illustrate that a degradation ceremony is a formal, ceremonial process involving the denunciation of someone who ultimately suffers a transformation to his total identity. Having shown how the degradation ceremony concept has been applied, I will later explore whether my experience of being attacked in public met the required conditions of a successful degradation ceremony, as delineated by Garfinkel (1956). First, I discuss autoethnography and explain why I chose this method to analyze what happened to me. Methodology Autoethnography views the researcher's own experience as a topic of investigation in its own right (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). …