miss. Provided that we can have the impres-sion that the third option was chosen, it is important to distinctly separate the parts from each other. I think that the author should provide an overview of the defi ni-tions of the term “social stigmatisation” and choose one that would become the superior defi nition for further analysis. Taking the suggested idea of sciences integration into consideration, I believe that it would be a good solution to proportionally involve all the sciences that deal with the subject in the discussed topic, e.g. by presenting their the-oretical propositions or research methods. In this case, I am of the opinion that it would be advisable to invite representatives of these sciences to present the issues charac-teristic for their disciplines. It would require a change of the form of the book into a col-lective work edited by one of the authors. Similarly, it would be an excellent idea to expand the theoretical off er with controver-sial images that function in the theoretical space, but have no possibility of institution-alising. It would attract the reader’s atten-tion to intellectual innovaatten-tions. I think that an important element could be a presenta-tion of the institua presenta-tional situaa presenta-tion of sciences or sub-disciplines that are preoccupied with this subject, by enumerating the main re-search centres, periodicals, institutes that conduct research on “social stigmatisation”. In my opinion, it would be helpful to present at least one example of cooperation of the enumerated sciences concerned with one problem, for others to picture what would constitute, following Weber, the ideal type of such a cooperation. Nowadays, it is said
that it should be so, but nobody knows what it should look like.
So… stand in front of a mirror. Look. Who can you see? Yourself… You are doing everything to hide what others consider im-perfect? Or maybe you expose some “little sins” on purpose, just to become a “SOME-BODY”. And if you thought someone would ever want to take it from you, maybe you would lose something that is very impor-tant for you, maybe someone else would lose something very important… Your and his own identity…
Dominika Łęcka
Elżbieta Czykwin, A Comment on the Re-view of the Book Stygmat społeczny [So-cial Stigma]
I would like to heartedly thank the author of the review of the book Social Stigma (PWN, Warsaw, 2007) written by me for an academ-ic, wide, and thorough analysis of this work. I would also like to encourage reviewers to be more daring in presenting critical re-marks in such reviews. All favourable and praising fragments increase the author’s strength and faith in the sense of his or her work, whereas critical remarks make it pos-sible to reconsider the substance of the pre-sented theses, and resultantly, to increase the quality of the content and form of the book. In science, political correctness should be avoided, and a defi nitely harsher tone should be allowed. Th e number of academic books on social subjects is so extensive, that is makes the interested people, e.g. teachers,
delimit their choice to the best ones. Harsh reviews can become here a sort of natural selection and may direct to what can be, what should be, and what must be read.
I am pleased to inform that the book has gained a considerable interest, therefore the PWN publishing house decided to reprint it in 2008. For an academic author, popularity is obviously not the most important crite-rion of evaluation, yet it should not be en-tirely neglected. Th e readability, however, is only a quantitative sign, and can have vari-ous causes.
I
Th e division into the stigmatised and, as the reviewer writes, the ones without a stigma, i.e. the “lucky ones”, does not entirely refl ect the idea of Erving Goff man, in which a stig-ma is presented as a general and quite meta-phorical perspective rather than a clear divi-sion. Taking this into consideration, every-one can be and will be stigmatised, e.g. be-cause of an old age, or owning other, contex-tually negatively evaluated attributes, such as smoking cigarettes. Everyone is also a poten-tial author of stigmas, e.g. when refusing a matrimonial proposal. Th erefore, the divi-sion into the stigmatised and the stigmatis-ing is blurred, changeable and contextual.
I agree with the author of the review that the book was technically not very well published. Of course, a hard-back cover would be much better, but for obvious rea-sons it is, as it is. I was worried by the au-thor’s feeling that the book is “monotonous” in reading as a result of the lack of empha-sised statements, of illustrations, of charts,
and of varied fonts. Perhaps, something could be improved here, nevertheless, the opinions of students claim that the book is “well readable” and that it is absorbing due to a considerable number of examples. Th e author mentions also numerous “trivia”. It was signifi cant for me to render the book communicative and its popularity seems to confi rm that I succeeded. I will certainly, though, pay attention to these formal as-pects in future works.
It is diffi cult for me to agree with the au-thor’s thesis that I marginalise the peda-gogical point of view, and emphasise the psychological and sociological one. I be-lieve, that the category of stigma itself con-tains an enormous pedagogical potential. A stigma is connected with unfair and un-reasonable repression of people and social categories by the public. Th e moral and con-testable character of a stigma refl ects the opposition of critical sociology to any vio-lence, including symbolic one, and to ine-quality that results from the stereotypical view of social reality. Nevertheless, the the-sis of neglecting pedagogics contains a pinch of truth: indeed, the category of a stigma was not enough incorporated into the area of this fi eld, at least not as much as into social psychology, sociology or anthro-pology. It should be remembered, though, that a stigma permanently entered the can-on of the terms of social sciences with the book by Goff man Stigma in 1963, and it has remained in the conceptual stage, which I will discuss later.
Th e question whether the book is practi-cal or theoretipracti-cal and the demand to clearly
specify this issue is in my opinion a misun-derstanding. In everyday language, theory is sharply separated from practice, yet as Kotarbiński claims, “Th ere is nothing more practical than a good theory”. Th e boundary between facts and theory is undefinable. Th eory is a generalisation of numerous in-dividual practical phenomena, and it serves practice, therefore it serves the explanation of the phenomena encountered in everyday praxis.
I must agree with the suggestion of the author that it would be reasonable to pro-vide the main centres of research, periodi-cals, or maybe even names of the research-ers concerned with the study of stigma. It would certainly be justifi ed and valuable. I imagined, perhaps falsely, that an inter-ested reader, referring to the given bibliog-raphy, will be able to reconstruct the names, periodicals, and centres, and if it is not clear enough, he or she will expand their knowl-edge using an Internet search engine.
II
Th e author is right in accusing me a few times of neglect in providing a clear defi ni-tion of a “stigma”. I would like to deal with this issue in more detail and to step away from the scheme of answering charges that prevailed in the previous part.
I would like to argue here with the close in meaning, yet not synonymous term of “a mark”1, which was used in the translation 1 Polish “piętno” can be translated as “a mark”
or “a scar”. Th e translator chose “a mark”, which contrary to “a scar” does not carry only a negati-ve connotation. (translator’s note)
of the fi rst book by Goff man Stigma. Th e Management of Spoiled Identity [transl. Piętno rozważania o zranionej tożsamości (GWP Gdańsk, 2007)]. Th e term “a mark” loses the whole signifi cant social and cul-tural burden connected with the term “stig-ma”. Th erefore, I would like to point at a few important diff erences between the similar terms:
• Connotation diff erences. Th e category of a mark can have positive connotations, e.g. in the statement, “Th e rise of »Solidari-ty« left an indelible mark on the later demo-cratic changes in the Middle Europe”. It can also be neutral, subjective in character, e.g. in the statement, “Th e mark of his relation with his father left an indelible mark on her later relations with men”. Whereas a stigma is always negative. As Goff man claims, “Stig-matised people are the ones who carry a so-cial attribute that deeply discredits them and who are perceived as disabled for this very reason” (this quote from Goff man is written on page 16 of the discussed book). In another fragment of the same work, Goff man adds a functional explanation of the term as one “made up to expose some-thing unusual and wrong, referring to the moral condition of the owner” (in the discussed book p. 18). I also quote from Goff -man (pp. 18–19) three kinds of stigma. Nev-ertheless, it seems that the issue is not en-tirely clear and for this reason appeared a chapter that discusses various applications of this term (“Usage of the term »stigmati-sation«”, pp. 21–30). However, I am still con-vinced of some ambiguity and lack of thor-ough understanding of what stigmatisation
is, so I allow a funny drawing, a quote (on page 29). I can see this problem also con-cerns the reviewer and this is why it is worth coming back to it in the context of the mark [piętno] term, which is treated in Poland as a synonym of a stigma [stygmat]. It points at the existent ambiguity of this term. I con-sider it a mistake and I want to present the signifi cant diff erences between the terms:
• Interaction and social diff erences. In the mark category of terminology, the eff ect of marking is emphasised. A mark is a kind of a stamp, a sign that a person or a social category receives. The marking person leaves the scope of interest, as well as the whole social context, which is the quantifi er of such an evaluation. When we talk, for ex-ample about the stigma of imprisonment, we mean the negative marking that society endows convicts with, but we also know that in some segments of society a stay in prison can be a kind of a positive attribute, an object of pride and life experience. More-over, a stigma has its temporal and cultural dimension. Homosexuality can be a stigma here, but not somewhere else; today, yet not necessarily tomorrow. It is proven by the obvious fact that a stigma is a social product and it is social public, here and now, that specifi es the level of disapproval for some attributes and it is the public that creates a stigma. It is worth noticing in this context that some attributes stop being stigmatising ones (a Jew, a left -handed person, a red-haired person), and others become stigmas (a tobacco smoker, a family with really a lot of children, the unemployed). A stigma can be visible or secret, which constitutes an
im-portant analytical dimension characteristic for a stigma, but not for a mark. Th erefore, the above social aspects are not parts of the term of a mark.
• A mark does not include the category of a stereotype. As Goff man claimed, “Stere-otyping is the heart of stigmatisation” - the above statement points at the close relation of stereotyping and stigmatisation. It leads to a general conclusion that a stigma is only a brand which covers complex social and mental content, which cannot be said about a mark.
• A stigma is (usually) unconscious. People are usually not conscious of the fact why they keep distance towards gays, obese people, gravediggers, or children from an orphanage. Also when the discrediting, shared attributes of these categories are not rational and from the functional point of view irrelevant. Th e case is diff erent with a mark. A mark is fully conscious. We also use the term to mark, which means that marking is intentional (comp. “Such dam-nable deeds must be publicly marked!”). For this reason, the verb form to stigmatise (someone) is not oft en used, whereas the verb stigmatised is popular. It is true that the stigmatised feel that their status is worse due to some attribute they own, and others are oppressive towards it. Th e above statement, resulting from such a herme-neutic analysis, leads to a conviction that a stigma, stigmatisation stronger empha-sise the situation of a stigmatised subject, whereas a mark, to mark emphasise the relations between the marked and the marking one.
Th ere is a valid argument for the use of the mark term instead of stigma. Th e cate-gory of a stigma carries, especially in Po-land, the later, Roman theological meaning of the term as the unhealing wounds of Christ and of Father Pio. Of course, this Ro-man meaning has nothing to do with the earlier, Greek one, where a stigma meant “a weakness, a defi ciency, or a handicap”. Th erefore, the category of a stigma is oft en specifi ed as social, and in our understand-ing it is an optimal solution. Th us, the title of the discussed book.
The author of the review also forms a charge that if a stigmatising approach is over-disciplinary in character, the term of stigma should be separately defi ned for soci-ologists, psychsoci-ologists, anthropsoci-ologists, etc.
Indeed, providing a precise universal defi nition seems diffi cult, and defi ning sep-arate, distinct defi nitions of a stigma for various sciences would mean rejecting their universal character. I mention it in a hu-morous way in the book, where I present the defi nition of a stigma in a drawing form (p. 29).
Moreover, the author of the review asks whether a stigma can be positive. A signifi -cant feature of a stigma (but not of a mark) is the multiplicity of meaning that can be ascribed to it both by the stigmatised and by society. A good illustration can be women with beards, lilliputians, extraordinarily tall or strong people, etc., who turned their sub-stantially discrediting attributes into life advantages. Th erefore, the stigma of disabil-ity can become a life chance, e.g. for the winner of the paraolimpics. Th is aspect of
a stigma renders a stigmatised person an ac-tive subject that can rework a discrediting attribute so that it becomes his or her life advantage. Th e example of Demosthenes is quite educational here.
The problem with the definition of a stigma, which is the key one for out study, becomes even more complex when we con-sider the issue from the point of view of the epigones of the pioneer approach suggested by Goff man. Th e author of Th e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life believed a stigma to be a distortion, a malfunction in interac-tion. Th at relentless researcher of direct in-ter-human relations saw a stigma fi rst of all as evidence for the existence of interaction order. As unquestionable evidence of the fact that such order must exist if people can unconsciously and instantly notice its dis-tortions or breakdowns. Th e basic issue has been and still is the question about the rules of the interaction order.
Th e search of the followers of Goff man’s idea concentrated in the eighties on the situation of a stigmatised person from the point of view of the cultural social discourse in its widest meaning. It can be well illus-trated by the important book of 1984 by Jones E.E., Farin A., Hastrof A.H., Markus H., Miller D.T., and Scott R.A., Th e Psychol-ogy of Marked Relationship (New York: W.H. Freeman). Th is work introduces an analysis of six key dimensions of a stigma (transpar-ency, conduct, destructiveness, aesthetics, origin and danger), which I present and de-velop in chapter III of the discussed book. Th ese aspects, which constitute the starting point for social analyses in the context of
a stigma undertaken by other authors, are an apparent sign of presenting the situation of people with a negatively perceived at-tribute from a social perspective, one that strongly emphasises the perspective of so-cial understanding and evaluating, yet that also accentuates the situation of the subject. It is clearly proven by the self-esteem per-spective which has been introduced in the famous article by Crocker J., Major, Social Stigma and Self-esteem: the Self-protective Properties of Stigma, “Psychological Review” 1989, vol. 96. In Poland, similar kind of epis-temological thinking can be found in the book by Zbyszko Melosik Tożsamość, ciało, władza. Teksty kulturowe (kon)teksty peda-gogiczne [Identity, Body, Power: Cultural Texts, Pedagogical (Con)Texts], Poznań– Toruń, Edytor, 1996; in which begins a dis-tinct dominance of the perspective of cul-tural context, but the psychological situation of a subject entwined in social contexts still remains in view.
In 2000, another important book preoc-cupied with stigma appeared – by Todd F. Hetherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hull Social Psychology of Stigma (The Guilford Press), which was published in Poland eight years later by PWN publishing house, entitled Społeczna psychologia piętna. In this book, which is to a considerable extent a continuation of the earlier Psychology of Marked Relationship, and which was in majority written by the same, outstanding authors. Th e book raises the question (comp. Chapter I): why people stigmatise the timidly opening biocultural approach.
It seems important to remark here (So-cial Psychology of Stigma, p. 26) that stigma-tisation is a reaction to unwanted attributes, whereas marginalisation and deviation con-cerns the owners of unusual features, yet not necessarily unwanted or evaluated neg-atively (e.g. extensive wealth). Stigma is also a more capacious term than prejudice (ibi-dem p. 26).
At the end of 2007, Stigmatization, Tol-erance and Repair was published by Cam-bridge University Press, by Anton J.M Du-jker and Willem Koomen. Th e authors of the book are not so famous and quoted as the authors of Social Psychology of Stigma, they are known only to few. Th e work opens a new, total vision of deviation, where three types of reaction to oddness (deviation) are specifi ed from the perspective of evolution-ary psychology: stigmatisation, tolerance, and repair of behaviour defi ned as a devia-tion from the standards obeyed in a par-ticular society.
Th e evolutionary and anthropological points of view became inspired twenty years ago with a new and an exceptionally pro-lifi c in research approach that explained the aversion towards Strangers, i.e. with the Ter-ror Management Th eory (TMT), which was initiated by the work of J. Greenberg, S. Solomon and T. Pyszczynski in the article Terror Management Th eory of Self-esteem and Cultural Worldviews: Empirical Assess-ments and Conceptual RefineAssess-ments, “Ad-vances in Experimental Social Psychology” 1994, no. 67(4). Th e Terror Management Th eory was perfectly presented in Poland by M. Rusaczyk (Teoria opanowywania
trwogi. Dyskurs w literaturze amerykańskiej, Scholar, 2008). According to this theory, in some simplifi cation, people’s own culture becomes a buff er that lessens the existential fear of death and passing away in everyone. Th erefore, strangers, especially when faced with death, become more hostile and strange to us. Th e natural experiment of two planes crashing against the WTC in New York il-lustrates the above thesis. A threat of death (“everyone could be there and then”) caused a spectacular feeling of unity among icans and not only them (“we are all Amer-icans”), as well as an outburst of hostility towards the Muslim world an block, support for President Bush, and fi nally the war in Iraq. Th e decrease of fear, in time, drasti-cally changed and weakened the unity of the world with the USA and of Americans with their president.
Th erefore, the aetiology of stigma gained a new, evolutionary perspective, which is the “last word” in the question of why peo-ple stigmatise Others. Anton J.M. Dujker and Willem Koomen want to see deviants, or perhaps it would be better to say others, as a sign that has always been present in so-cial life. How have the reactions to oddness in human and animal societies evolved? Th is perspective requires a redefi nition of the understanding of stigma and a specifi -cation of its evolutionary character. Marze-na Rusaczyk and I will come back to this approach in next articles and in a book that is in the process of writing.
Elżbieta Czykwin
Jacek Kurzępa (rev.): Marta Maria Urliń-ska, Szkoła polska na obczyźnie wobec
dylematów tożsamościowych [Polish
School Abroad Facing Identity Dilemmas], Toruń 2007, Wyd. Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika [Nicolaus Copernicus Publish-ings], pp. 439.
Th e Dissertation by Urlińska is a register of long research eff orts around a pedagogical experiment which was the foundation of a Polish school in Riga, Latvia, and the later teachings content supervision. Th e connec-tion of such elements as refl ecconnec-tion and ideas of the pedagogical experimentalists, peda-gogical practice and the specifi c location of the enterprise (a minority school in a coun-try that barely begins its independence) re-sults in the fact that the book arises interest. It is based on the personal experience of the author, who became a “researcher in action” (p. 23) as sometimes both the “creator and the material to create”. It can arise scepti-cism as to the research objectivity of the presented actions. It results in the fact that we deal here with a description of a diffi cult venture both in practice and in the neces-sity to report, describe it in a manner that would not decrease the objectivity neces-sary in a research process.
Th e discourse, which the author herself presents as an ethnography of a Polish school in Riga, consists of fi fe chapters and a conclu-sion, it is rich in a modern bibliography and numerous source and other annexes. From the editorial point of view, it is well published, correct in language, and the chapters are rea-sonable in their size (apart from the third
