Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament J. Wilce. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xv + 274 pp. , notes, figures, bibliog. , index. ISBN 978-1405169929. Price 120 (Hc. ) Crying Shame is James Wilce’s second book on lament, and it is an important book for its wide-reaching, comparative study of lament worldwide, as it exists in traditional and more recent genres of performance and as it has become both a trope for modernity in its nostalgic mood and stand-in as the antithesis of modernity, doomed to disappear—what Wilce calls the ‘metacultural politics underlying representations of lament’ (p. 32). His preface and introduction playfully frame the book in terms of three scenarios and a Walter Benjamin-inspired ‘myth’ of lament as dying tradition—a metalament for lament. A delight of the book is in its sheer range of examples of lament genres, ancient and contemporary, but Wilce’s contribution goes well beyond documenting the commonalities that indicate a cross-cultural phenomenon. He takes special care in defining his terms—lament, genre, modernity—and in doing so reminds us of the analytical utility of examining our labels and the cultural processes that produce ‘objects’ with these labels and imbue them with social value. To model these relationships between objects and interpretations he adapts Greg Urban’s notion of metaculture, defined as cultural practices that reflect upon and therefore affect the circulation of other cultural practices. In considering the metacultural framing of lament in a variety of settings, not least among scholars and in the media, Wilce has produced a study of ‘globalizing modernity (ies) ’ and its/their ‘metanarratives’ (pp. 97–98) whose implications will be relevant to cultural anthropology more generally. This book is representative of a maturing of the ‘writing culture’ reflexive turn, in which the ethnographer attends not just to his or her own subjectivity (as Wilce does in critically analyzing his own prior work on lament), but also to the metacultural environment of his or her very analysis—the ideologies of language and history and the ‘technologies’ of self, memory and modernity (pp. 98–99) that shape how his subject of study has been represented in the scholarly literature as well as by ‘the natives’ (to the extent that categories of ‘natives’ and ‘scholars’ can still be distinguished). Wilce maps out a semiotically sophisticated approach well beyond cardboard-cutout concepts of subjectivity, objectivity, relativity and standpoint. He does not succumb to navel-gazing, nor throw his hands up and declare that lament cannot be defined. Rather, he applies tools developed by linguistic anthropologists such as Hymes, Briggs and Bauman, Silverstein and Urban to trace the workings of that vast metacultural frame called modernity and its apparent destruction of lament traditions everywhere. After several chapters that lay out definitions and examine historical and contemporary ethnographic treatments of lament, the book’s centerpiece is its argument about lament’s special fate under modernity, and particularly that aspect of modernity he characterises as its newly important moral regimes of ‘respectability, ’ whose privileging of (masculinised) emotional self-control and sincerity make lament, the ‘tuneful, textful weeping’ of women (pp. 1–2), morally suspect—the ‘backward’ behaviour of ‘backward’ people. Modernity’s particular enforcement mechanism, Wilce argues, is shame. But in counterpoint to shame he posits another metacultural emotion, nostalgia, which traditionalises lament, much as furniture can be ‘distressed’ to give it an antique appearance. Present-day lament practices thus are denied ‘co-evalness’ with modernity: metaculturally, they are framed to be nothing more than relics of former times, albeit potentially disruptive and embarrassing relics. He makes this metacultural oscillation between orientations toward progress and nostalgia his very definition of modernity. What remains insufficiently explained is his stance on the question: ‘When is modernity? ’ This is an especially important question, given that Wilce wishes to argue that modernity’s distinctive and highly destructive treatment of lament has suppressed lament to a degree that ancient regimes never achieved. Lament, expressive of both grief and grievance, has always been a ‘weapon of the weak’ and thus come under repression, as illustrated by his fascinating discussion of efforts in antiquity to contain the gendered political resistance inherent in lament. In making this case, he also, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrates how difficult it is to move outside of the dominant metacultural framing of lament as primordial—what he calls the ‘antiquing’ of lament (p. 58) —giving it the patina of tradition and antiquity. Wilce argues that lament has come under special attack because its sensible qualities index emotion, both staged and raw, and thus convey a threat to social control, including the technologies of self-control expected of modern folk. As he points out, this analysis could equally be applied to other types of ‘out of control’ behaviour—spirit possession and other trance states, hysteria and madness—all of which, interestingly, are linked to one lament tradition or another. This observation suggests how the kind of analysis Wilce provides might give insight into other troubled intersections of modernity and its alters. What is groundbreaking about the book is its simultaneous attention to the various levels of ethnographic detail and theoretical framework to understand the relationship between lament-as-practice and lament as a readily entextualisable and label-able metacultural object of representation and reflection, one that has inspired everything from lament revival movements to grief poetry to metalaments about its supposed—perhaps exaggerated? —demise. Wilce shows how lament has become a trope for what modernity has cost us, and why lament’s indexical values—whether as the epitome of (feminine, natural) emotional expression or as a paid and thus insincere and manipulative simulacrum of raw emotion—have inspired (and provoked) such strong responses. Although the book will thus be of special interest to linguistic anthropologists, performance scholars, and those especially interested in lament or in the anthropology of emotion more generally, Wilce’s ruminations about the metaculture of modernity make this a worthwhile, even necessary read, for all anthropologists who find themselves confronting questions of cultural continuity and change in an age of globalisation.