by Cindy
Growing up in America with American parents means that Jeff and I grew up in a Guilt/Innocence culture. It is quite different than the Honor/Shame culture that we have in the UAE. The worst thing you can do here is shame someone or shame their family name. To shame someone into doing something is not to "guilt me into it" or "twist my arm" but something totally different. To shame someone is to insult their name and the name of their family. While you should never intentionally shame someone, the one thing about shaming is that it works. And works well.
It all is a bit hard to explain and hard to convey how it permeates everything we do and see but I'll give you two recent examples from our newspaper:
Growing up in America with American parents means that Jeff and I grew up in a Guilt/Innocence culture. It is quite different than the Honor/Shame culture that we have in the UAE. The worst thing you can do here is shame someone or shame their family name. To shame someone into doing something is not to "guilt me into it" or "twist my arm" but something totally different. To shame someone is to insult their name and the name of their family. While you should never intentionally shame someone, the one thing about shaming is that it works. And works well.
It all is a bit hard to explain and hard to convey how it permeates everything we do and see but I'll give you two recent examples from our newspaper:
This article talks about the people who have racked up the most traffic fines in the city. We are talking one person with 12,740 offences which totals to $2.56 M in fees. The government knows exactly who it is but it would be shameful to put their name or anything about them in the paper. The paper has simply stated that the person is a VIP. The other offenders are mentioned by the number of offenses and amount of their fines and specifically, "none of the people has been named." In addition, they were all said to be "high-profile" and included figures from government institutions." In America, someone from a government institution who had $2.56M in fines...their name and (a horrible) picture would be plastered across the front page and we would be expecting them to immediately pay up and step down from office. Here, that would never happen as listing a name in the paper would bring shame to their family and that's simply not acceptable.
With that said, if you really want to push people here, you can 'name and shame' them. If you take this approach, you had better do it very cautiously I can't stress this enough. While I personally support the notion, I was surprised to read this article in the paper where they threatened to 'name and shame.' Someone was savvy enough to include an intermediate step of only posting a license plate number before actually posting a name. The fact that no one has had a second offense shows just how bad it would be to bring shame to your name.
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