"The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Erving Goffman (1963), Stigma : Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity p. 1-2
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Badge_of_shame
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Badge of shame
6 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Badge of shame →
Related Quotes
"To be associated with industry no longer carries the stigma of profiteering, exploitation and of being uncaring as it…"
"Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact that these classes of a…"
"The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which a…"
"Racial discrimination a mark of shame on twentieth-century man, although intolerable to most humans can still be seen…"
"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind …"
"Ecotourism began to gain prominence in the late and exploded in the , due to several factors such as (i) being an alt…"
"Ecotourism arguably would not exist, and certainly would not exist in the form it is now, were it not for the active …"
"Between 1991 and 2001, the number of American adults who participated in hunting declined by 7 per cent whereas the a…"
"Adventure means different things to different people. For the past 5 or 10 years the tern 'adventure', and images of …"
"Aim To review infections associated with adventure travel. Methods The , and s were searched combining the words infe…"