Hum Stud (2013) 36:153–157
DOI 10.1007/s10746-012-9254-9
BOOK REVIEW
Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Eds.): Facing Fear:
The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2012, 266 pp. + index
James Aho
Published online: 10 January 2013
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
In a classic experiment (Schacter and Singer 1962), investigators injected subjects
with adrenaline to excite them, then randomly assigned half to work with a ‘‘happy’’
confederate and half with one who feigned anger. Those in the first grouping
reported feeling gleeful, elated, or content; those in the second group characterized
themselves as being irritated, annoyed, or hostile. The conclusion: Emotions are not
just organic responses to stimuli. They are states of sensory arousal given meaning
and significance by the social/cultural contexts into which they are woven: the
expectations of friends, supervisors, and role-models; and by paintings, films,
poetry, music, dance, reliquary, novels, blogs, statistical reports, headlines,
memoirs, and video snippets.
Facing Fear illustrates this principle with ten ‘‘episodes’’ of fear. The first is
what David Lederer describes as ‘‘a complex of symbols crawling out from a
baroque casket of monstrosities’’ (p. 13) composed during the Thirty-years’ War
(1618–1648). This includes a figure of the Devil wearing a cardinal’s biretta,
consuming innocent citizens while exuding Catholic monks from his anus. Period
Catholic agitators return the compliment in another figure by picturing ‘‘portentious
misbirths,’’ dead fetuses, and misshapen toad-like babies, who are alleged to be
products of John Calvin’s fornication with the seven deadly sins.
Lederer’s selection is followed by a chapter by Ronald Schechter concerning
commentary about the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (1793–1794).
Here we learn, among other things, that la terreur was never denied by Robespierre
and his fellow executioners, but enthusiastically endorsed as ‘‘the great order of the
day’’ (p. 33), a secularized version of ‘‘the fear of God,’’ routinely used by priestly
authorities to compel obedience.
J. Aho (&)
Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, Idaho State University, Pocatello,
ID 83209, USA
e-mail: ahojame@isu.edu
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There are two pieces that trace native rebellions against Spanish colonial rule in
the new world; one by Charles Walker, another by Lisbeth Haas. These are the cases
of the Tupac Amaru in Peru (1780–1782, so named after ‘‘the last Inca’’) and the
revolt of the indigenous population of California in 1769.
Andreas Killen’s article analyzes public alarm over Schmuz und Schund (filth and
trash) movies produced in Weimer Germany (ca. 1920–1935). Allegations were that
Schundfilm incites crime, debauchery, and mass psychosis by offering a blueprint
for deviance and for being able to lock audiences into hypnotic trances. Nazi
propagandists eventually bought into this urban legend and, after ‘‘cleansing’’
cinema of its ‘‘non-Aryan’’ content, attempted to use it to ‘‘spiritually mobilize’’ the
Folk. Killen’s history reminds me of apprehensions voiced following Vance
Packard’s (1957) claim that Madison Avenue advertisers were using ‘‘subliminal
messaging’’ to promote mindless consumerism. Just as Schundfilm apprehensions
emerged out of the catastrophe of World War I, Packard’s now discredited exposé
also may have reflected post-war anxieties.
Marla Stone offers a study of anti-Communist oratory in fascist Italy
(1922–1943). She focuses not so much on the means by which public phobias are
generated, but on the content of the message conveyed. The anti-Communist lesson
plan, she relates, consisted of two points, both of which should be familiar to those
raised during the McCarthy era. One addressed the filthy, diseased, sexuallydepraved, dark-skinned (Slavic, Jewish) body of the Bolshevik. The second
emphasized the peril that I senza Dio (the Godless) Communist presented to
motherhood, maidenhood, the family, and the Church.
Melanie McAlister’s contribution describes the faith-renewing effect that
narratives of ‘‘suffering of the church’’ have had in recent times. Included in these
are tales of Christian persecution by Muslim fanatics in the Middle East and Africa,
who are attempting to impose shari’a on the world. A companion chapter by coeditor Laffan describes the nineteenth century dread of moral decay that female
‘‘white (hence, ghostly) hajjis’’ were said to pose to Dutch Indies colonial males;
this, through their physical wiles and magic spells, coupled with the innervating
tropical climate of the south Pacific (White is the color of the robes typically donned
by Muslim pilgrims on the Hadj to Mecca).
The anthology concludes with Ravi Sundaram’s and Alexander Etkind’s
discussions, respectively, of fears in contemporary India and post-Soviet Russia.
Sundaram describes the East Delhi Monkeyman contagion of 2001, which bears an
uncanny resemblance to rural America’s present-day obsession with Big Foot
(Sasquatch). Etkind details the theme of ‘‘memory-dread’’ in recent Russian
literature and film. These portray victims of Stalinist purges as ‘‘undead’’ zombies.
Having never been properly mourned (because no one truly knows their fates) they
reappear to haunt their still bereft families.
This is a formidable, mind-boggling sample that touches on a vast variety of
cultural settings over a period of many centuries, and readers might be forgiven
expressing doubts about the editors’ ability to fuse them into a cohesive whole. And
indeed, while all the episodes are superbly researched, the writing is uneven. Some
of the chapters seem unfocused, and one can lose themselves in a morass of detail.
Others plod along, offering turgid analyses of arcane texts that could only interest a
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handful of specialists in that particular field. But there are also pieces that seem to
sing. Among these is Sundaram’s breathless characterization of the destabilizing
pace of modern urban Indian life, and how it renders undefended Hindus available
to frightening visions. By means of his purposively frenetic style, Sundraram
induces in the reader the very anxiety he describes in his scenes.
Laffan’s and Weiss’s collection yields three noteworthy propositions. The most
telling of these, just alluded to, is that social scientists ‘‘should be careful not to
mistake… episodes [of specific emotions] for timeless and essential historical truths
or conditions’’ (p. 8). For example, Jean Delumeau (1990) has convincingly
demonstrated the enduringness of fear in the lived-experience of pre-modern and
modern Christians, especially fear turned inward into trepidation of the self
(sin-guilt). In her review of the resistance of indigenous peoples to Spanish
missionaries in California, however, Haas suggests that perhaps fear is not as
‘‘pervasive’’ as Delumeau supposes. True, she admits, the natives faced an ‘‘eroded
environment’’ and a ‘‘devastated’’ political order that practically enslaved them, to
say nothing of deadly ‘‘new diseases’’. Furthermore, the Spanish routinely attributed
fear to the natives, perhaps as a way to further ‘‘diminish’’ them by denying ‘‘any
semblance of political logic’’ to their rebellion. But in chronicles authored by the
natives themselves, ‘‘the word fear is virtually absent,’’ except, that is, ‘‘when it [is]
applied to the Spanish’’ (p. 75; my emphasis). In fact one native reporter uses
‘‘fearlessness’’ to characterize the actions of his own people. Evidently, the natives
balked at en-framing their experience with a label they viewed as unmanly and
demeaning. While Haas later seems to back away from her own conclusion, arguing
that the natives nonetheless ‘‘certainly’’ experienced fear (p. 90), she gives little
evidence to support her contention. The whole discussion reminds me of Max
Weber’s explanation for the failure by Western missionaries to convert Chinese
gentlemen to Christianity. The proselytes readily grasped the emotion of shame,
says Weber, but they could never quite understand the meaning of original sin:
absolute, unearned guilt. And insofar as guilt was judged ‘‘undignified’’ and beneath
them, the Chinese were blinded to the salience of Christ as Redeemer. The most that
a Confucian might aspire to was quiescent harmony. Salvation was deemed not only
unseemly; it was superfluous (Weber 1951: 228f.).
A second proposition deals with the ‘‘social function’’ of fear; particularly, how fear
of an enemy can promote in-group solidarity. Stone, for instance, shows how fascist
messaging subtly mutated over time as the focus of hostility shifted from domestic
anarchists to Spanish Republicans, and from these to ‘‘barbaric’’ Ethiopians, culminating
with the terrifying visage of the eastern European Communist. What remained constant
was the principle that there can be no cultural thema without anathema, internal and/or
external foes. Linking the two moments of this perverse dialectic, dread and unity, is the
‘‘wonderful spectacle’’ (as St. Augustine calls it) of broken bodies and blood. Only
through torture and killing can the We, the Patria, the faith, the nation, the race, the tribe,
live on. ‘‘Long live Christ, long live Spain!’’ (p. 120).
‘‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church’’ (p. 134), McAlister’s agrees.
In her social history of the Voice of the Martyrs, she shows how ‘‘performance of
the persecuted body’’ not only has resonated in the hearts of conservative Christians
(out of which has grown a veritable cottage industry of books, lecture tours,
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websites, videos, and fund-raising causes), but also in the souls of liberal Christians.
In a way perhaps not originally intended by their more exclusivist fellow believers,
liberals who view spectacles of mutilated flesh have been inspired to build a new,
planetary-wide community that transcends the boundaries of Christianity: humankind in general.
A third proposition, again amply documented in this book, is that, as sociologist
Zigmunt Bauman has theorized, fear is ‘‘liquid’’ (Bauman 2006). It is not only
amorphous and difficult to contain; through ‘‘psychic contagion’’ it can spread like
an epidemic through an entire society. Although, as Lederer argues, this has likely
been the case since the invention of the printing press, which made possible for the
first time the rapid dissemination of disinformation to the masses, it is even truer
today. With its mobile screens and audio devices, post-modern digitalized
technologies undermine and blur what were in an earlier age clearly-defined,
taken-for-granted boundaries separating workplace from home, private life from the
public realm, male from female, humankind from machine, and above all, the unreal
from the real. This is to say, it shatters the markers that once conferred cognitive
security. This aggravates our existential precariousness, creating space for specters
to emerge from ‘‘dark spaces,’’ the chthonic regions of the collective unconscious.
Thus today, added to perils and portents such as those mentioned above, are gigantic
‘‘gray’’ humanoids, ETs, international banking cabals, ‘‘homosexuals waiting in
their lusts to rape,’’ ‘‘Islamofascists,’’ and end-of-the-world prophecies.
This book breaks new ground for a discipline, history, not normally associated
with inquiries into the lived-body. Yet the ravenous reader is still not completely
satisfied. Left unanswered is the question, why? What is it that propels the social
construction of werewolves; fire-breathing beasts, of bloodied heads, angry eyes,
and razor teeth (p. 20); ‘‘cannibals [who] on babes will feede’’ (p. 18); necrophilics,
and tales of people who have had their ‘‘privy parts, with powder fil’d, and blown
up’’ (p. 18)? Sometimes, of course, the answer lies right before us, in the actions of
the evil-doers themselves, which are already at hand merely waiting to be named.
Consider the frightening ‘‘fairytale’’ of Hansel and Gretel, which appears to be a
stylized account of an actual event, witnessed in 1637.
In the county of Zweibrücken, there lived a woman who preyed on young
children. With promises of food, she lured a five-year-old boy into a wood, killed
him with an iron hook, and hacked up his body for food. When a young girl
knocked at her door late one night in search of shelter, she offered up her own
bed, only to slaughter and butcher the girl… and [then] devoured the flesh. (p. 28)
But sometimes fears do not simply reflect empirical realities. Instead, they are
generated out of our own imaginations. Thus, another possible explanation for fear,
implied in several of the selections but never fully developed, is that each object of
detestation is a product of collective transference. In other words, it is an unconscious
projection of our own inescapable vulnerability and contingency—or if one prefers,
our own dying and death—onto a thing or person ‘‘out there’’ independent of
ourselves. Once labeled a death-carrier, it or they can be symbolically treated,
controlled, or eliminated. In this way, as Ernest Becker has said, we can pretend, at
least for a moment, we have ‘‘escaped’’ our mortality and finitude (Becker 1975).
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By compiling episodes of imperiled bodies through history and across cultures,
the editors have performed an invaluable service, and blazed a new pathway through
the mysterious forest of human existence. Recommended for graduate libraries, and
for professionals and students of cultural history.
References
Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press.
Delumeau, J. (1990). Sin and fear: The emergence of a western guilt culture. Trans. E. Nicholson. New
York: Macmillan.
Packard, V. (1957). The Hidden Persuaders. New York: D. McKay Co.
Schacter, S., & Singer, D. (1962). Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional states.
Psychological Review, 69, 379–399.
Weber, M. (1951). The religion of China: Confucianism and taoism. Trans. H. Gerth. New York:
Macmillan.
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.