This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in [insert journal title XXX here]. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Schwarz, Ori (2013) 'Dead Honest Judgments: emotional expression, sonic styles and evaluating sounds of mourning in late modernity', American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1(2):153-185] is available online at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ajcs/journal/v1/n2/abs/ajcs20131a.html

Dead Honest Judgments: emotional expression, sonic styles and evaluating sounds of mourning in late modernity

Ori SchwarzTel Aviv University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, E-mail: ori.schwarz@gmail.com

Abstract: How do late-modern people morally evaluate behavior in emotionally-laden situations? To answer this question, a cultural sociology of morality should explore both cultural contents and social contexts that inform their employment. The article studies how Israelis ethically evaluate loud mourning performances. In line with 'moral polytheist' repertoire theories, it identifies three moral logics available to them, which are typical of late modern morality: the authenticity, self-control, and therapeutic ethics. I explain why some of these logics may be used flexibly to support contradictory claims while others prescribe their usage. I also explore what constrains choice within the repertoire. While moral judgment is internally structured by cultural structures (moral logics), its application is informed by social structure: since moral evaluation of others is always self-definitional, it is shaped in relation to self-identifications, boundary drawing and stereotype threats. Finally, contrary to On Justification, I suggest that people do not always strive to achieve virtuosity in any single moral world, but also to avoid moral worthlessness in all moral worlds simultaneously. Studying the interaction between cultural codes (the moral/discursive structures of critique and justification) and social structures (in relation to which identification claims are made) may enhance our understanding of lay morality.

Keywords: authenticity, emotions, ethnicity, identification, moral repertoire,

morality, mourning

"I think it [screaming in funerals] is a theater. I think it's not normal, when

someone does it, it’s for the public, not for oneself. You don't need it for

yourself. What one feels inside can be endured in silence." [f54, emigrated

from Ukraine, graphic designer]

Having one's beloved laid to eternal rest is an emotionally engaging and laden moment.

People's reactions differ widely, in terms of both subjective experience and emotional

expression. But idiosyncratic as individual grief may be, grief expressions are shaped by

culturally-specific norms, repertoires, scripts, and vocabularies that vary historically (Ariès,

1981; Gorer, 1965; Leming & Dickinson, 2010; Wouters, 2002) and across social groups

(Firth, 1993; McIlwain, 2003; Perry, 1993; Rosenblatt, 1997; Rosenblatt & Wallace, 2005;

Walter, 1997). Cultures and eras employ different "emotives" (Reddy, 2001), i.e. vocabularies

used to describe, explore, process and mold emotions of grief; and different "emotionologies"

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(Stearns & Stearns, 1985), that is, different attitudes or standards toward emotions and their

appropriate expression (e.g. Wikan, 1988).

This last point brings us to the domain of normativity. How should one react to the

sight of one's dear-ones being buried? Some reactions would be considered normal, while

others pathological;1 some healthy, and some harmful; some respectable and some

embarrassing. These acts of judgment (such as the one opening this paper, which contrasted

quiet, internalized mourning with illegitimate inauthentic, other-directed mourning) have been

documented (Gorer, 1965; Perry, 1993; Rosenblatt & Wallace, 2005; Sagiv, 2012; Walter,

1997:130; Wikan, 1988; Wilce, 2009), although not systematically analyzed. Judgment may

be influenced by the identities of both the evaluator (as evaluation criteria may change across

generations, ethnic and religious groups) and the evaluated person (different funeral

participants have distinct ritual roles and emotional scripts: men are expected to mourn

differently than women, mere acquaintances differently than bereaved mothers, etc., e.g.

Jonker, 1997).

The moral evaluation of mourning practices and performances2 has a special

sociological significance since death is often considered a moment of truth that reveals the

true self of the mourner (that is, a potentially true moral moment: Tavory, 2011); and since

death rituals are viewed as central to collective cultural identities. Different modes of

mourning are embedded in economies of worth and shame, as they are identified with

different social values organized in binary codes, such as modernity vs. traditionalism (Wilce,

2009); or self-control vs. self-expression (Wouters, 2002). When people ascribe each other

values they also attribute them social value (on the interrelation between values and value see

Graeber, 2001; Lamont, 2002; Sayer, 2005b; Skeggs, 2005; Stark, 2009). Thus, when people

judge mourning performances, they also evaluate the moral and social worth of the

performers. Perceived correlations between mourning styles and sociodemographic factors

(especially ethnicity: McIlwain, 2003; Rosenblatt & Wallace, 2005; Walter, 1997) give these

judgments further significance.

Below I explore normative judgment of mourning practices and performances in

Israel, while focusing on loud mourning. My aims are first to portray the available moral

1 Mourners are often concerned about the normality of their mourning, e.g. Walter, 1997:130.2 “Performance” is a highly polysemic term. I use “performances” to denote contextualized, improvised,

singular realizations of social scripts. While performance s in this sense are often “performative”—add practices an expressive edge, forming them in relation to audiences and the meanings they may ascribe them (Schieffelin, 1998; Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998)— performativity is not indispensable component of the definition.

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logics that Israelis may mobilize for this task. Studying this repertoire and the manner in

which actors actually use it may shed light on wider questions that bother the sociology of

morality and cultural sociology in general—questions regarding the flexibility of moral logics

(can they be used to justify multiple stances? And inasmuch they can, what makes them

flexible?), and regarding the influence of “external” factors (group membership, symbolic

interests, identity maintenance) on moral evaluation.

The choice to concentrate on the sonic dimension of mourning has several

justifications. First, sonic differences are highly conspicuous markers of difference between

mourning styles of different ethnic (and class) groups (both in funerals: McIlwain, 2003;

Perry, 1993, and immediately after death: Firth, 1993; Gunaratnam, 2009; Irish, 1993).

Secondly, the sonic dimension of social difference is usually neglected by ocularcentric social

sciences (Smith, 2000; Feld, 2005), despite its key role in identity- and boundary-work

(Oosterbaan, 2009; Schwarz, 2012). Thirdly, focusing on sound enabled me to interpret the

findings against the wider context of sonic styles in Israel and their association with ethnic

and class identities. Whereas some interviewees bracketed their moral judgment of mourning,

others applied the same logic they employed for evaluation and classification of sonic styles

and performances in other social sites.

The next section discusses developments in the cultural sociology of morality, which

serve as my point of departure, followed by a short literature review on the cultural meanings

attached to mourning styles. After presenting the methodology, I discuss three moral logics

used by interviewees for evaluation and critique of mourning practices and performances: the

ethics of authenticity, self-control, and psychological wellbeing. These logics, I suggest, are

central to late-modern3 evaluation of action in emotionally-laden situations. Finally, I discuss

the ways these logics are employed in concrete contexts. I contend that even when shared

moral logics are in principal available to all, actual evaluation is constrained by identification

claims of the evaluators. Studying judgments of loud mourning performances would thus (a.)

enhance our understanding of mourning practices (since normativity shapes practice and

serves as its point of reference); (b.) shed light on the ways actors negotiate social identities

and worth through employment of moral frameworks; (c.) identify general moral evaluation

criteria which are applied in emotionally-laden contexts and (d.) endow us with better

3 The term 'late modernity' is used below refer to our era and its unique cultural features. While doing so, I do not wish to embrace all the characteristics occasionally associated with the term (such as increased reflexivity or the risk society). However, as demonstrated below, contemporary moral and emotional repertoires can hardly be made comprehensible without referring to historical processes such as informalization processes or the popularization of psychotherapeutic notions.

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understanding of the interface of moral structures (moral logics, vocabularies or codes) and

social structure (in relation to which positioned actors make identification claims).

Autonomy and plurality: Repertoire theories of morality

Questions of morality and ethics—that were so central to the oeuvre of the discipline’s

founding fathers Weber and Durkheim and later marginalized for long decades—have lately

reclaimed their place at the heart of sociological thought. Sociologists now pay growing

attention to the role of lay moral judgments, justifications, and moral vocabularies,

acknowledging that morality is more than an epiphenomena of power relations, and

recognizing its contribution to the shaping of social action, social identities and boundaries,

and the negotiation of social worth (Alexander & Smith, 1993; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006;

Dromi & Illouz, 2010; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003; Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010; Kefalas, 2003;

Lamont, 1992, 2002; Lowe, 2002, 2006; Sanghera et al., 2011; Sayer, 2005a, 2005b; Tavory,

2011; Thévenot, 2002; Vaisey, 2009).

Two developments are of special significance and lay the foundations of my own

investigation. The first is the growing encroachment of cultural sociologists on the realm of

moral philosophy (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Sanghera et al., 2011; Sayer, 2005a;

Thévenot, 2002), and in particular the study of logics that guide moral judgment. This

encroachment relies on two basic assumptions which are formulated in explicit opposition to

Bourdieu's highly influential stance: (a) that everyday lay moral evaluation employs abstract

principles which are not essentially different from those studied by moral philosophers

(tearing down the wall erected by Bourdieu between scholastic and practical logics); and (b)

that moral logics considerably shape (constrain and enable) evaluation, and cannot be reduced

to a-moral factors such as interests, capitals or dispositions, as their development, choice and

usage are not guided only by struggles over external goods like status and power, but also by

desire for internal goods such as merit and intrinsic value (Sanghera et al., 2011; Sayer,

2005a). Moral logics and discourses turn into another kind of structure which—pace Bourdieu

—has some autonomy and is not subordinated to other structures (Lamont, 1992:184). Moral

structures inform social action, evaluation, and the distribution of social worth, and are hence

central to sociological analysis and deserve sociological research (Boltanski & Thévenot,

2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Thévenot, 2002; cf. Alexander & Smith, 1993). Thus,

the sociology of morality shifts from sociology of culture agenda toward a cultural sociology

agenda (in the terms of Alexander, 2003).

The second significant trend in the cultural sociology of morality may be described

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(following Weber's 'polytheism of values': Weber, 1946) as a shift from moral monotheism to

moral polytheism. Theories that ascribe each society (in a Parsonian manner) or each class

(Bourdieu, 1984) a monolithic set of shared values, or a hegemonic moral 'first language'

(Bellah et al., 1985) are replaced with repertoire theories that assume that individuals have

access to multiple moral resources or logics. Choice of logics within this repertoire is often

assumed to be guided by ad hoc evaluation, interests and (institutional) contexts, rather than

by the identity of the actor (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003;

Friedland & Alford, 1991). Repertoire theories of morality often assume that moral 'resources'

(Lowe, 2006) or “worlds of justification” (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) are in principle

equally accessible to all, that actors use them creatively (thus, the same element may be used

simultaneously by antithetical parties in the same political conflict: Lowe, 2006); and that

actors may shift between elements in the repertoire (even if this maneuver is costly and

strenuous: Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Lowe, 2006).

My research embraces both developments: my data supports the assumption that

multiple moral logics are available to actors (although not everyone employs them in the same

ways). I also analyze the structure of moral logics as an independent structure: I find this

analytical isolation necessary in order to explore its interrelations with other structures

(Archer, 1996; Kane, 1991). Below I explore the ideational contents that constitute this

structure, its internal power (flexibility levels), logics, inter-element (in)compatibilities, and

its undertheorized interrelations with other structures.

The repertoire literature tells us a lot about the structural langue of repertoires

(Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) and their transformation (Lowe, 2006), but only little about the

parole, the actual choices people do: if all ethical worlds/resources are available to all, what

principles guide people's choices which logic to employ in concrete cases of moral

evaluation? In Stephen Vaisey's words, “if, as Swidler rightly claims, people know more

culture than they use, why do they use what they do?” (Vaisey, 2009:1968). While we should

not expect a deterministic, all-embracing answer, it would be disappointing if sociology has

nothing to say about these choices. Vaisey's solution is distinguishing between a deterministic

model of moral motivation and a pluralist model of moral justification: people first have

'evaluative responses' determined by their unitary habitus, and then use available discourses

eclectically and incoherently (a la Swidler, 2001) for post-hoc justification of their evaluative

responses. Such a model, however, reintroduces monism and determinism and denies moral

logics and critique almost any impact on reality. Furthermore, people do not always justify

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their gut feelings: sometime they criticize them (as some of my interviewee did), even when

could easily find justifications in their repertoire.

An alternative, more realistic and modest account, would maintain that while

evaluative acts may be more instinctive or more reflexive, all evaluations are shaped to some

degree by both the available moral structures and by the embeddedness of actors in social

structures. Furthermore, while moral logics are often available across class boundaries (Sayer,

2005a), their usage may be influenced by group membership not through the habitus but

through the attempts of actors to claim certain social identities and kinds of worth and avoid

stigmatization or self-devaluation. Since moral evaluation of others usually reflect on the

identification and social valuation of the evaluator, and since risks of stigmatization and

devaluation are unequally distributed (members of low-status groups are at risk of confirming

negative stereotypes about their group, while members of high-status groups are at risk of

staining themselves with racism or classism), some moral moves are not really available to all.

My endorsement of moral polytheism should by no means be understood as implying an

instrumental account of morality, in which moral evaluation is determined by amoral

motivations. People may feel committed to moral logics and uncomfortable with bluntly

contradicting their past evaluations. They may seek internal goods no less than external ones.

While moral evaluation cannot be reduced to the interest of actors in supporting their

identifications and sense of worth, the commitment of actors to their self-identification

projects and their sense of worth is not instrumental, and it may constrain their use of moral

logics. Thus, in order to understand moral deliberation and evaluation we should analyze

separately moral and social structures, and explore their interrelation. This strategy is

employed below to study evaluation of mourning practices and performances.

Once the structure of moral logics and the social context that shape their actual

application are discussed separately, it becomes possible to further ask, whether some moral

logics lend themselves more easily to flexible application by conflicting parties while others

must be used in a more restricted manner, a question I address below.

Another direction in which I want to elaborate on the account of Boltanski and Thévenot

(2006[1991]) is the specificity of the moral resources. Whereas Boltanski and Thévenot offer

a highly abstract and a-historical typology of moral worlds, moral vocabularies are obviously

historically specific (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005[1999]; Lowe, 2006). The increasing

centrality of emotions in late modernity as an interpretive and moral framework (Furedi,

2004; Illouz, 2008; Nolan, 1998) raises the question, whether there is any unique repertoire of

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moral logics employed by late modern subjects to evaluate emotions and emotionally-

informed action,4 and if there is, what moral logics does it consist of? Empirically exploring

moral evaluations of sonic performances in funerals may draw a first sketch of this repertoire.

Mourning and modernity

What characterizes late-modern mourning? How have the past few decades reshaped

mourning practices? The literature offers two almost diametrically opposed accounts:

anthropologist Jim Wilce (working in Bangladesh and Finland and drawing on data from other

countries) tells the story of silencing traditional, loud, expressive mourning; whereas

sociologist Cas Wouters (2002) and historian Pat Jalland (2006), working in the Netherlands

and Australia respectively, tell the story of the revival of expressive grief.

According to the latter story, the norm of silent grief with minimal emotional

expression which prevailed until the 1960s has waned ever since. The old "regime of silence"

gave way to the "emancipation of emotions." Mourners are no longer expected to bear their

grief in a dignified way, be brave, and avoid expressions of emotions or weakness in order to

save face. Losing face is no longer a threat, as passing judgment on other mourners has lost

legitimacy, turning into a vice condemned by etiquette books (Wouters 2002:6). Fixed

customs that had blocked individual emotional expression gave way to diversity and self-

expression. This trend, which is part of a wider cultural informalization process (Wouters,

2002), has been promoted by psychologists who have professed the new therapeutic ethic of

emotional expression (Jalland, 2006).

According to Wilce, however, people have become much more judgmental about loud

and emotionally expressive mourning performances. "Shame over loud public wailing has

spread around the world, particularly in elite-aspiring classes" (Wilce, 2009:130), and quiet

crying has become the binding norm among these classes (2009:3). This collective shame has

a double source: on the one hand, it represents internalization of the colonial gaze which, by

applying cultural evolutionist notions, has constructed loud laments as backward, primitive,

animalistic and wild. On the other hand, it represents the globalization of a modern notion of

authenticity, according to which cultural regulation of emotional expression indicates lack of

4 It should be noticed that I include evaluation of the appropriateness of emotional reactions within the moral realm. Against the narrow lay notion of morality as not being evil to others, I use the term “moral judgment” in its wider sense, to connote the realm of normative evaluation of human conduct (how people ought to act or whether a certain path of action is virtuous). Feeling and demonstrating emotions are considered here kinds of "action" which may be normatively evaluated, hence "feeling rules" and "display rules" (Hochschild, 1979) are included within the definition of moral judgment or ethics. Whereas the complicated relations between action and emotion lie beyond the scope of this article, it should be noticed that people actually often use moral language to judge the appropriateness of felt and displayed emotions (Sayer, 2005a).

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genuine feelings. Either wailing is spontaneous, and hence shamefully animalistic and

uncivilized, lacking modern control; or it is "merely" conventional, hence meaningless and

lacking modern authenticity. Wilce suggests that whereas American "psychologized

individualism" rehabilitated verbal expression of emotions, bodily expressivity has been

banned by emerging global norms of middle-class respectability (2009:128-130).

These two antithetical historical narratives are important reference points for my

analysis. We shall return to them in the conclusion, and see that they are not as different as

they seem at first glance. In Israel, just as in Bangladesh, loud mourning practices (either

conventionalized or unconventionalized) are marked as both "Oriental" and "traditional," and

highly identified with Mizrahim—that is, Oriental Jews5 (Sagiv, 2012). This follows a general

pattern, almost consensual among Israelis, that identifies loudness with Mizrahim, Arabs and

people with lower-SES (Schwarz, 2012). Contrariwise, a strict ideal of "respectful" silence

has characterized funerals in the secular, Ashkenazi Kibbutzim (Kalekin-Fishman &

Klingman, 1988).

The significations attributed to loud mourning practices makes them highly sensitive,

since "Westernness" and modernity have been the core of the self-concept of Zionism and

Israel since their dawn; Westernization and modernization of Oriental Jews had been official

state policy goals; and Westernness and modernity have become major forms of cultural

capital in Israel that yield symbolic and material returns (Chinski, 2002; Khazzoom, 2008;

Shohat, 1988). Today Mizrahim are still underrepresented in the middle-classes and educated

elites, and ethnic arrogance against Mizrahim and practices associated with them is not

uncommon, although old policies are sometimes criticized as racist and new sensibilities have

emerged against overt ethnic intolerance (a duality studied by Sasson-Levy, 2008). Social

boundaries between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, which had never been as strong as racial

boundaries in the US, have gradually become even more permeable: ethnic boundaries are

being recasted as cultural boundaries based on stereotypic hexes, lifestyle, conduct and

cultural preferences (e.g. Sasson-Levy, 2008), including loudness (Schwarz, 2012).

Furthermore, despite having constructed Mizrahim as lacking in modernity and Westernness,

Zionist ideology also included them in the national collectivity through assimilation and de-

Arabization (Shenhav, 2006). Martial death in particular has become a symbol of national

unity of Israeli-Jews of all ethnicities, a dimension further discussed below. These axes of

5 Jews of North African or Middle-eastern descent, as contrasted to Ashkenazim, Jews of European descent. Although each of these categories is ethnically, culturally and economically diverse, this dichotomy is highly salient in the way Israelis understand ethnicity.

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class, national and ethnic symbolic hierarchies serve as background for the judgment of

mourning performances.

Methods

Moral judgments are often invisible or implicit: people rarely pronounce loud verbal

judgment over the mourning of others during funerals, and they avoid it for strong moral

reasons discussed below. This precluded participant observation as a viable method, and led

me to base my analysis on semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted with 61

Israelis (42 women, 19 men; age 20-80, median 34) over a 10-months period in 2010/2011 as

a part of a wider research project on sound and society. The sample is not representative

(hence no distributional claims are made), but is extremely diverse in terms of ethnicity,

status/occupation groups, education level, lifestyle, age, and geographic residence. To achieve

these high levels of diversity, interviewees were recruited from five designated groups:

affluent Ashkenazi retirees, subscribers of a classical orchestra; middle-class married

urbanites who moved to the countryside; residents of a nationally and ethnically-diverse

working-class town; university students; and librarians. They were asked about their attitudes

to sounds in different social context, including funerals. The large number and extreme

diversity of interviewees supplied me with a wide variety of moral logics and ways of using

them. Whenever quoted, interviewees are characterized in terms of gender, age and ethnicity,

and while discussing class—also class/occupation.

Interviewees were asked "what do you think of the habit of screaming and weeping

loudly at funerals?" The replies were usually not abstract musing or scholastic generalizations

that may be attributed to the interview situation alone. Instead, many interviewees referred to

actual cases of funerals in which they participated, recalling their actual emotional and moral

reactions to performances of concrete co-mourners. Interviewees did not limit their accounts

to sounds, but also gave detailed accounts of their judgments of (and emotional reactions to)

non-sonic components of mourning performances. Interviewees who did not refer to concrete

personal experiences were encouraged to do so with follow-up questions. Other follow-up

questions were aimed at obtaining thicker and more comprehensible accounts (“what do you

mean by 'hypocrisy'?,” “what indicates it was a 'show',” “why do you think they told her to be

quiet,” etc.). Some interviewees also spontaneously mentioned funerals in other parts of the

interview, e.g. as an example of intergroup differences in sonic styles.

This design relies on the assumption that people in different everyday arenas

(including funerals) are constantly engaged in monitoring the appropriateness of other

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people's conduct (Sayer, 2005a; Thévenot, 2002). Unlike the abstract evaluation of

hypothetical questions by philosophers, this monitoring is usually unconscious as long as the

conduct of others follows the expectations of the evaluator. However, once this conduct

departs from these expectations (for better or worse), it evokes judgmental reactions of praise,

rebuke, or ambivalence. Evaluators may follow their gut reaction (that is, their moral

emotions, which in themselves rely on cognition, evaluation and unreflexive application of

deeply inculcated cultural logics)6 or reflexively problematize and re-evaluate their gut

reactions through the application of culturally available moral logics. The interviews were

aimed at collecting data on both gut reactions and reflexive evaluation. First, asking a general

question that reifies the phenomena (loud mourning) encouraged interviewees to engage in

simulated evaluation of the practice, and thus expose the moral logics available to them.

However, the open, casual Hebrew wording ('ma da'atkha': 'what do you say about') did not

force interviewees to engage in abstract scholastic moral judgment: interviewees who had not

thought about lamenting in moral terms could have interpreted it as a question about their

subjective attitudes, experiences and feelings.

Secondly, following the abstract question interviewees were encouraged to reminisce

concrete, contextualized mourning performances, and elaborate on their interpretations and

evaluations of these performances and their emotional reactions. While moral simulations are

a legitimate methodological strategy for identifying the discursive repertoires available to

interviewees, this strategy has limited capabilities: it supplies us with knowledge of the

repertoire but not of its contextualized application; knowledge on how practices can be

judged, rather than how the particular interviewee did judge or would have judged any real

life performance; of honorable judgments rather than visceral ones (Pugh, 2012). By

encouraging interviewees to tell me stories about actual funerals in which they participated, I

could study not merely which logics exist, but also how particular interviewees used them

creatively in context toward particular others. Furthermore, by collecting data on both

concrete emotional experiences and abstract judgments, I could unveil the self-criticism

directed by some interviewees to their gut reactions. This “critique of critique” is important,

because it exposes intra-cultural tensions (cf. Pugh, 2012 on meta-feelings).

In some cases, while telling the story interviewees became highly involved

emotionally, as they seemed to re-live their emotional reactions to behaviors they considered

ethically flawed. My analysis of logics does not exclude these emotional reactions, but rather

6 These moral emotions are often believed to constitute the core of morality: Tavory, 2011; cf. Sayer, 2005a; Vaisey, 2009.

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treat them as data (cg. Pugh, 2012) and explores their internal moral logic.

Interviews were recorded, fully transcribed, and coded for different arguments. Then

these arguments were aggregated into wider categories of moral logics. The coding system

has been revised and re-applied until proved exhaustive and coherent.

Logics of moral judgment

Three main ethics or logics of moral evaluation could be discerned in the data. This

section will portray these logics in their archetypical form, accompanied by demonstrations

from the data. This will enable us to identify the cultural repertoire available to actors for

evaluating and justifying the appropriateness of mourning performances. Some interviewees

believed in a single right way to mourn, whereas others professed pluralism. Some celebrated

loud mourning and others denounced it. But all shared the same ethical repertoire:

diametrically opposed stances were often justified with the same tools (cf. Lowe, 2006:30).

These ethics represent three distinct criteria for evaluating performances: civilizedness/self-

control, where value lies in the power to restrain emotional expression and adhere to norms of

civility; authenticity, where people are valued for their loyalty to their genuine, unique and

spontaneous selves; and therapeutic care, where value lies in maximization of mental welfare

by supplying the psychological needs of self and others. This late-modern trinity of criteria is

not endemic to the evaluation of mourning: it may also be identified in the evaluation of

conduct in other settings in which emotions are assumed to inform action.

In its strongest form, the ethic of self-control celebrates the older ideal of bearing in

silence (Jalland, 2006; Wouters, 2002): "You shouldn't take things so hysterically. O.K., it's

the first boom, it's really, it's hard, you get bad news. Eh.. people should be strong and really

hold themselves back" (m36, Arab).7 Self-restraint is a marker of worth in hierarchies based

on distance from the "natural." This self-control ethic has often justified domination over

others perceived as less-cultured, more natural, and has been traditionally associated with

masculinity;8 Protestantism; Westernness; and the bourgeoisie (Bederman, 1996; Bourdieu,

1984).

According to different interviewees, the value of self-restraint lies in maintaining one's

honor and respectability; in maintaining the separation between the private (inner emotion)

and the public (display); in adherence to religious rules and ideals (two religious Jews and one

7 All quotes are excerpts from the interviews, unless stated otherwise.8 In some societies, gendered mourning roles are complementary, as men are expected to display self-control,

whereas women should display expressive grief: Jonker, 1997.

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Muslim maintained that loud, uncontrollable mourning is religiously inappropriate); or in

being considerate to others and their impression management (extremely intense

demonstrations of grief may make the mourning of others seem lukewarm and inadequate in

comparison, e.g. "You shouldn't wear your heart on your sleeve, like, we know, we all feel sad

now, and it's a bit.. awkward. There are people whose sadness is quieter, more internal": f26,

Mizrahi, criticizing the behavior of her cousin in their grandmother’s funeral).

While self-control ethic was explicitly used as a moral logic in verbal arguments, it

was also manifested implicitly through the body of the actors. Sentiments such as disgust and

contempt are "forms of emotional reason" (Sayer, 2005b:948; cf. Ignatow, 2009), embodied

and often pre-reflexive acts of moral judgment.9 Some of the interviewees who had

encountered loud mourning performances described emotional/bodily reactions such as

embarrassment (“It also embarrasses me, it embarrasses me very much, breaking-down”10

(f26, Mizrahi), aversion, reservedness, or ridicule (one interviewee even reported

uncontrollable laughter as her reaction to what she perceived to be highly ridiculous and

embarrassing a performance). Others simply said it "rubs [them] the wrong way" (f71,

Ashkenazi). These reactions are key components of symbolic boundaries, group membership

and group habitus (cf. Lawler, 2005 on the disgusted middle-class subjectivity).

The authenticity ethic is the very opposite of the self-control ethic. This ethic

assumes that people may choose between "authentic" and "inauthentic" behaviors and should

prefer the former. For modern people, self-authenticity has become warrant for self-claims to

moral life, and the will to live authentically became a master motive that shapes modes of

action and self-evaluation (Weigert, 2009).11 Since claims to authenticity are often claims to

value, people want to be considered authentic, and the production of authenticity has become

part of impression management [for both people (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009) and objects

(Peterson, 1997)]. Sociologists have shown how the rise of the authenticity ethic shaped ways

of action in various sites (e.g. Bernasconi, 2010 on sexuality; Vannini & Burgess, 2009 on

academic life), and explored the complex challenges it poses to those who wish to live

9 For Rozin et al., 1999, contempt and disgust are embodied reactions to moral breaches of the ethics of community and divinity, respectively.

10 hitparkut, here referring to a co-mourner who publically lost emotional control.11 In this sense, authenticity is only one among many moral logics, not a universal meta-criterion for the

evaluation of all performances as in Alexander (2004). Indeed, any performance should convince, but this does not necessarily amount to a demand for the complete erasure of the gap between interiority and exteriority. Furthermore, performances of self-control should convince that they do not erase this gap, that is, that they represent the strenuous restraining of authentic grief rather than mere emotional indifference. The English norm that demands the bereaved to control their emotions, yet performatively hint that their emotions are so strong and deep they can hardly be controlled (Walter, 1994) may well be interpreted as a response to this challenge. Yet, these convincing performances do not follow the authenticity ethic as defined above.

12

authentically (Petersen, 2011). But what "authenticity" actually means?

For Boltanski and Thévenot (2006[1991]), authenticity belongs to the "inspired

world," one of six worlds available for actors for justification and critique. Within this world,

the value of an individual derives from her uniqueness; hence people should reject social

dramaturgy, established norms and traditions, and embrace spontaneous action based on inner

conviction. Whereas their account is a-historic, the authenticity ethic is highly modern. Taylor

(1989) traced the sources of authenticity and self-expression ethics in the enlightenment and

romanticism. Nolan (1998) claims that only once the authority of external moral points-of-

reference had dramatically waned (following social rationalization processes) have people

turned to subjective emotions for moral orientation, decision making and self-understanding.

The authenticity ethic relies on the highly modern assumption that emotions derive from the

core of the self and define the true identity of individuals (McCarthy, 2009). Boltanski and

Chiapello [2005(1999)] differentiated between three kinds of authenticity, which they

identified with three stages in the history of capitalism: first—authenticity as emotional

sincerity, the 19th century critique of the bourgeois preference of "good manners" (i.e.

emotional reservedness) over emotional "sincerity" in relationships. Later came the notion of

authenticity as uniqueness: the 20th century critique of Fordist mass production and the

ensuing standardization and massification of subjectivity. Finally came authenticity as

autotelicity: the critique of the colonization of ever more life-spheres by strategic

"promotionalism" (Wernick, 1991) and capitalist rationalism. Here, an action is authentic only

if not directed at anything beyond itself (such as fame or profit): the pure, spontaneous

expressiveness (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).

All three authenticities were employed by my interviewees: the preferences of

emotional sincerity over good manners; of uniqueness over uniformity; and of autotelicity

over strategizing are all valid moral imperatives. The authenticity ethic has been employed by

both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, younger and older interviewees, and for opposite reasons—

to discredit loud performances as "a show," a mere convention, a mask of uniformity covering

the differences between unique individual emotions; but also to laud loud mourning

performances for their emotional authenticity; and to criticize silent mourning performances

as inauthentic. A total of 18 interviewees have used at least one version of the authenticity

ethic.

The first authenticity critique (of restraining "good manners") reflects in critiques such

as "when you see Christian funerals on TV you're shocked from the restraint. And I don't think

13

of it positively. Rather negatively. I believe they feel (…) People should discharge what they

have on their hearts" (f76, Ashkenazi), or in defenses of loud Mizrahi mourning such as "it

comes from within, it is not superficial" (f80, Ashkenazi)

The second authenticity critique, focused on the precedence of individual self-

expression over compliance with cultural scripts, may be demonstrated with a 25-year-old

female university student of a Bukharan descent, who said: "when I die, let's not wail over

me. Let's be quiet." To her, the loud lamentation common among her older co-ethnics "seems

rather like a show, not like sadness," an impression created "simply, since everyone does it.

After all, it isn't reasonable that all the women at a certain funeral felt just the same and

hence behave the same.. For me, real sadness is individual. I mean, I wouldn't have a problem

with a lamenting woman who does it individually, not because that’s how it's being done."12

Ashkenazi interviewees expressed similar critique, e.g. "it's not about emotions, it's a culture

of an ethnic group (…) I don't know what it gives them"; or "[crying is] understood, and

acceptable, on condition that it is sincere, [because in some funerals] the bereaved and those

around him are expected to demonstrate their grief in.. a fashion that may be exaggerated"

(m34, Ashkenazi).13

The third authenticity critique construes loud, conspicuous mourning performances as

inappropriately instrumental or communicative (rather than spontaneous), motivated by desire

to attract attention; to "artificially" augment the impression that one feels sadness or empathy;

or even to competitively show that one is more bereaved than others. Thus, one interviewee

criticized loud mourning by saying: "I don't like it. It's no good. Sometimes it's a show (…) I

don't believe it." After criticizing her uncle who "whined like a baby" in her father's funeral

although he didn't love him, she explained that such loud mourning performances are not

expressive, but rather instrumental, a way of communicating a message: "You want to cheer

them up, to say 'oh dear, it hurts me so much that your father passed away,' that stuff" (f51,

Mizrahi). Whereas this behavior could be praised as a demonstration of altruistic care, it is

denounced for staining emotional expression with goal-oriented action, as noble as it may be.

Other interviewees believed that loud performances may be either expressive/authentic

12 Collier (1997) documented the same critique in a Spanish village, where younger women declined traditional strict mourning customs: for them, wearing black for years after loss was not only meaningless (“one doesn't feel a death any less deeply if one wears black or not”: p.186), but also an hypocritical act, since virtuous conduct should be guided by authentic feelings and desires, not by custom or will to honor the dead.

13 Social scientists often assume that emotional experience and expression are necessarily socially/culturally constructed, hence they see no contradiction between emotional authenticity and cultural regulation or uniformity. However, lay people do often assume such a contradiction. For them, uniformity indicates social, external regulation of emotional display, rather than cultural construction of authentic interiority/subjectivity.

14

or instrumental/inauthentic, allowing the circumstances guide their judgment. Thus, one

interviewee criticized the conduct of a schoolmate at the funeral of a common friend: "She lay

down on the floor in his funeral, 'N-O!!,' started screaming and everything, like. She made a

completely unnecessary drama. Now, try telling her.. It's her pain, can you tell her anything?

You can't. But in my opinion it was pure attention [seeking]. Now, if it were his mother, I

could have completely understood it" (f25, Mizrahi). Here judgment is based on prior

acquaintance with the performer’s character (described as “needy” and attention-seeking) and

on her role (a mere acquaintance rather than a close relative). Another interviewee (f34,

immigrant from Belarus) said she considers women's loud mourning a mere show, but would

believe the authenticity of a man, who would have to violate gender norms to do the same.

Finally, the therapeutic ethic offers a different, utilitarian criterion of evaluation: a

good performance is one that has the best impact on the mental wellbeing of the bereaved.

Once psychological wellbeing has gained recognition as one of the most important social

goods, thanks to the popularization of psychological world-views by experts (Illouz, 2008;

Nolan, 1998), it is no surprise that utilitarian morality has been expanded to recognize the

maximization of psychological wellbeing as an ethical principal.

Emotional expression is justified since it is considered "healthier" to let the pain out:

the bereaved have the privilege to ignore the sensibilities of others and do whatever serves

their psychological cause, regardless of impression management considerations (which are

construed as mental health threats): "I think anything that helps you release the grief at that

moment is good (...) whether [the bereaved] feels he needs to shout, whether he feels he needs

to sing, whether he feels he needs to.. even laugh, for me it's legitimate" (f41, Ashkenazi).14

One interviewee felt sorry for those who do not dare cry in public, or "don't know" how to

express emotions. She said loud mourning is "a need. Very much. Since if you keep it, it eats

you from inside, and once you let it out, and people see you let it out, then it rather lets you..

discharge, people truly understand you, it doesn't eat you. Once it's inside, it eats you" (f23,

Arab).15 Whereas the therapeutic ethic shares with the authenticity ethic the decline of the

traditional imperative to "be brave," here the motivation is not rejection of inauthentic

behavior as such, but rather a utilitarian endeavor to minimize the mental damages of loss.

Ten interviewees employed this logic. One of them expanded this ethic to claim people should

also take into consideration the health of co-mourners, who may be "traumatized" by loud

14 Thus, the medicalized ‘bereaved role’ entails privileges and exemptions comparable to Parson's sick-role.15 Interestingly, the therapeutic ethic is very much in line with the principles of emotional management

identified by Wikan (1988) among Egyptians.

15

mourning. She told of a friend who had lost her mother as a teenager and collapsed in the

funeral, allegedly because of the dramatic loud cries: "once her aunties started screaming and

crying as if they were insane, the girl fainted and lost consciousness, for maybe four hours

she remained unconscious. And in the hospital they said it's because there was a lot of

physical and emotional pressure on her (…) it's like, you start hearing them [mourning

loudly], and you like look at them, and you [in a loud, reproaching tone]: 'what's wrong with

you?!'" (f23, Mizrahi).

As my data demonstrate, both the authenticity- and the psy-ethics are flexible: they

can be used to either justify or criticize both quiet and loud mourning performances, at the

agent's discretion. This is so, because unlike the self-control ethic, their evaluation criteria

refer to interiorities, which cannot be accessed directly: the morality of conduct depends on

its correlation to the actor’s interiority in the former case; and to its (beneficial or harmful)

impact on the interior, psychological well-being of self and others in the latter. Put differently,

the susceptibility of moral logics to flexible use depends on their kind of referents. Ethics with

interior referents open a space for interpretation by enabling divergence between being and

seeming.16 Only then can the same act be evaluated differently by different evaluators based

on the same evaluation criteria.

On the judgment of judgment. While the three moral logics portrayed above enabled

interviewees to engage in evaluation of mourning performances, a different meta-moral logic

limited the space of moral evaluation by criticizing the very act of critique, putting mourning

beyond the reach of moral evaluation. This tendency is often espoused with a liberal morality,

according to which anyone may do as they wish as long as no harm is done to others. Liberal

statements that everyone has the right to mourn as one pleased17 were common in the data,

without preventing the same speakers from making judgmental statements. However, nine

interviewees went as far as delegitimizing acts of judgment by others, explicitly claiming that

mourning practices are beyond judgment. Some interviewees emphasized that even when

exposure to loud mourning is unpleasant, judgment is not allowed.

Denying oneself and others the entitlement to judge and condemn the practices of

others is a highly modern tendency (Lukes, 2008:153-155; Wouters, 2002), which may rely on

liberal, multicultural, or relativist sentiments. It led some interviewees to either criticize their

16 Only then can the moral challenge to act morally be distinguished from the performative challenge to seem moral, as suggested by Goffman (1959: 251).

17 On the individualization of mourning and replacement of general cultural scripts with personal, family or subcultural scripts see Walter, 1994.

16

own criticality, that is, their own use of the logics portrayed above—or to avoid using them in

the first place. The judgment of judgment is thus a meta-criterion that delimits morality rather

than guides it. This pluralism may be either multicultural (assuming that differences represent

cultural/ethnic conventions that should all be respected in an anti-racist, multicultural

fashion);18 or individual (understanding diversity in mourning as legitimate individual

idiosyncrasies, which are often viewed as instinctive, uncontrollable, and even unconscious—

and hence beyond moral responsibility and judgment).19 The critique of critique can rely not

only on anti-racist or psychological liberal grounds, but also on nationalist ones. Since

sacrifice of life in the army symbolizes for many Israelis national unity, criticizing mourning

practices of Mizrahim may be read as a challenge to their inclusion within the national

collective, e.g. "Each ethnic group and its own habits. That it grates on the ears of those who

aren't used to it? Maybe. So they shouldn't come. But so many, all the wars we've gone

through, all the sons we've buried, and how many of them were Mizrahim? What, [blowing

air] have anyone even thought of criticizing it? No. and there have been no critique till this

very day" (f80, Ashkenazi). Be it because of nationalism, liberalism, anti-racism or

psychologism, the critique of critique marks mourning as a territory beyond social regulation

and judgment for people who are often highly judgmental about sonic practices in other

contexts discussed in the interviews.

Having presented the main ethics represented in the data, I wish to explain my choice

to discuss specific ethics rather than the "worlds" to which they belong. In the terms of On

Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), the authenticity ethic belongs to the "inspirational

world," whereas the self-control ethic belongs to the "domestic world," where good manners

are "trappings of worth" (p.169), proofs of character and good upbringing. However,

confining ourselves to this reductionist portrayal would sacrifice the historical and cultural

specificity of these ethics in favor of philosophical abstractions. The problem exacerbates

with the therapeutic ethic, which cannot be neatly categorized: it is a utilitarian ethic

(industrial-like), but one directed towards a new object—psychological wellbeing,

increasingly perceived as a civic right.20 For sociologists, the specificity of ethics is just as

18 Those who advocated this stance were not necessarily radical relativists believing that cultural variance put any custom beyond moral judgment: some of them strongly condemned some other manifestations of what they considered to be loud Mizrahi/lower-class practices, yet they put mourning beyond the reach of "good manners." While customs are not always beyond normativity, widening the boundaries of custom may narrow the sphere of moral judgment.

19 Unlike the authenticity ethic, here behaving authentically is not construed as an ethical choice, but rather as an involuntary response.

20 Psychological frameworks have gained such predominance that wellbeing is increasingly understood in psychological terms: being respected, feeling good, being able to express one's emotions, etc. Thus, old rights such as the right to health gain new meanings.

17

important as their generality. The ethical trinity of psy-wellbeing, authenticity and self-control

(alongside the critique of critique) constitutes a moral ecology which is unique to late-

modernity (and employed beyond the sphere of mourning). It is not merely "inspirational

justifications," but those modern inspirational justifications whose authority comes from inner

emotions (not from supernatural beings) and is always subject to the hermeneutics of

suspicion; not any "good upbringing," but the one associated with Western middle-class

respectability; not merely "rational utilitarianism, " but the one that aspires to the

maximization of psychological well-being.

While the social game cannot be understood without knowing its pieces, it cannot be

reduced to them. Having presented the pieces (the ethics used for critique within my data), the

next section will focus on how this historically-specific trinity is actually used, while

introducing actors, context, positions, and identification strategies.

Strategies of identification

The former section presented the tools used for judgment of emotionally-laden

performances. These are the discursive and moral logics, through which people can give

meaning and ascribe value to ways of conduct, a culturally and historically specific moral

repertoire that shapes judgments and behaviors. This section will explore the ways in which

these tools are used, which are creative, but not chaotic.

The case I would like to make is that moral evaluations are shaped not only by the

available moral repertoire but also by the identifications of actors (Jenkins, 2008).

Sociologists have recently shown how moral judgment is used in demarcation of group

boundaries—not only for exclusion and closure, but also for the constitution of self-value and

dignity by those lacking other forms of socially recognized worth (Kefalas, 2003; Lamont,

1992, 2002; Paul, 2011). Whenever people negotiate evaluation criteria they redistribute

socially acknowledged worth (Bourdieu, 2000). Whenever people morally evaluate the

conduct of others, they position themselves vis-à-vis those others; make claims regarding the

social value and the identities of these others and of themselves; and try to win recognition for

these claims. Just like judgments of cultural taste (Bourdieu, 1984:6), moral judgments

classify the classifiers: they are statements about the identifications evaluators ascribe

themselves or want others to ascribe them, about the collectivities to which they aspire to

belong, and those from which they wish to dissociate themselves. Moral resources are

important instruments in this identity and boundary work (Lamont 1992, 2002). This self-

definitional dimension is so central to morality, that it can even define the moral realm itself:

18

for Iddo Tavory, the difference between moral and amoral actions lies in the strong self-

definitional character of the formers—they qualify actors as belonging to a certain kind of

people, categorization which is strong, emotionally laden and relevant across fields (Tavory,

2011). However, evaluation classifies not only the actor but also the evaluator. If people are

aware of the self-definitional dimension of moral judgment, their identifications—their desire

to occupy certain positions in the social world and avoid others—would constrain their

choices of moral logics and ways to employ them. People do not only “develop lines of action

based on who they already think they are” (Swidler, 2001:87), they also develop lines of

judgment that take identification into consideration. Semiotic codes attach meanings to moral

logics, and actors know that by employing these logics they attach these meaning to

themselves. While Swidler did not elaborate on this issue and left the broad categories used

for social classification at the margin of her empirical account, it should be noted that by

introducing identification we may well re-introduce social structure: for example, once

practices are racialized, racial identifications often become a departure and reference point for

their evaluation.

In my data, no strong correlation could be found between moral logics and identities:

moral judgments are not determined by identity factors such as the actor's class, age or

ethnicity.21 However, thinking about the ways in which interviewees used these logics in terms

of identification strategies, such as boundaries delineation, activation, relocation, or blurring

(Tilly, 2004; Wimmer, 2008), enables us to make sense of their choices and what they mean

for the evaluators and their audiences. Unlike 'identity' (which is seemingly fixed and

predetermined), identification is always agentic, performative, dialogic and dialectic

(Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Jenkins, 2008). Identification is also embodied, not only

because it may rely on durable embodied habits, but also since the body restricts the range of

identities an actor may reliably claim (as identifications and external categorization are

dialectically constitutive: Jenkins, 2008). Furthermore, whereas access to moral vocabularies

is seemingly universal, their employment by different actors is interpreted differentially, with

different implications on the social worth ascribed to them.

Thus, a moral judgment that would gain symbolic benefits for one actor could threaten

the social worth of another. Actors may thus avoid using moral logics in ways which would

endanger their identifications or deny them socially recognized worth. The identification of

21 Some collective patterns may be discerned in the data (e.g., Arabs and Jews from Asian ex-soviet republics did not use the critique of critique, and were most prone to use the self-control ethics); however, a representative survey is needed before such claims can be substantiated. More importantly, all main logics were employed by interviewees from diverse demographic backgrounds.

19

actors with current and aspired social positions and their awareness of identification threats

(to be classified in ways inconsistent with these identifications) may thus encourage or deter

actors from some evaluative moves, delimiting the repertoire effectively available to them.

This is not to say, however, that social actors (ab)use moral logics cynically: despite logic

inconsistencies in lay morality, actors take both their judgments and their social identifications

seriously. Furthermore, if morality is a realm of self-definitional action, the relative stability

of identifications (stabilized by narratives, practices, and the actor's accumulative investment

in them) would result in a heightened level of commitment of people to their moral judgments

—commitment that according to Lowe (2006) singles out moral repertoires from other

cultural repertoires. By employing abstract moral values, actors ascribe themselves and others

concrete social value and identity, negotiating the redistribution of positions, identities and

social worth. This is where social structures of identities and cultural structures of morality

meet.

Moral logics in context

The point of departure for this discussion is the strong identification of loud mourning

with both concrete social groups (Mizrahim) and abstract values (traditionalism, lack of

control) that lack symbolic capital. Identification with loud mourning practices—both

conventionalized laments and unstructured screams—may hence be dangerous, threatening to

stain individuals and damage their social worth as judged by others. 21 interviewees (34%)

have explicitly spoken about differences in mourning between "ethnic groups" and their

respective "cultures" (although not explicitly asked about it). Ashkenazi mourning was

described as quiet, restrained, internalized, respectable, modern, and private/individual;

whereas Mizrahi mourning was described as loud, uncontrollable/hysterical, emotional,

chaotic, externalized, traditional, and public ("I've never encountered Ashkenazim who

scream, cry, and so. Because Ashkenazim are more restrained, Mizrahim—they let it all out":

f23, Ashkenazi, upper-middle class). One interviewee (f70, upper-middle class) went as far as

suggesting that loud mourning practices draw on Mizrahi belief in ghosts, thus casting it as

primitive and superstitious.

One way in which culture shapes action is by investing practices with meanings: actors

then often take into consideration the implications of different paths of action on their

impression management, the way paths of action operate as statements about themselves and

their attitude towards others (Goffman, 1959; Rosaldo, 1993; Swidler, 2001).22 The meanings 22 However, since actors often sincerely identify with the social positions they claim, this alignment of action

with claimed identity cannot be reduce to shallow impression management: it also consists of deep action.

20

associated with loud mourning practices may make identification with these practices

harmful, especially for Mizrahim who may be viewed as confirming negative ethnic

stereotypes (cf. Desmond & Emirbayer 2010:335-7). Some Mizrahim prefer to distance

themselves from these practices as much as possible, as part of their general strategy of self-

repositioning by relocation of ethnic boundaries (Tilly, 2004; Wimmer, 2008).23 Another

possible strategy is "transvaluation" (Wimmer, 2008)—insisting on the superiority of the

stigmatized practice, e.g. by suggesting that quiet mourning is inauthentic, psychologically

ineffective, or that it testifies emotional indifference to one's dear ones. However, not all these

strategies seem equally promising and feasible to all actors, regardless of their social

positions, aspirations and resources.

For those who move in certain trajectories in the social space, being exposed to

unrestrained emotional expression may be literally unbearable, as the next example

demonstrates:

"Funerals of Moroccans are not quiet. No. they are full of weeping, and much

shouting, and a lot of emotions going out. I think that's why I try to avoid them. People

seem ridiculous to me while behaving that way, and they make these sounds, and I just

prefer not to [go]. Even to my best friend's funeral I didn't go. I preferred to keep her

honor where I believe it should be, rather than.. To me it seems grotesque, this mess

going on in funerals." [f25, Moroccan descent, university student].

Similarly, she reported avoiding prenuptial Henna ceremonies and weddings in which

there are ululations, and preferring events in which ethnically-marked loud gestures are spread

in a "more boutique fashion, so that grandma ululates only once in a while." The word

"boutique," denoting in Hebrew small luxury shops, expresses her desire to turn her ethnicity

from a burden to an asset. During the interview, she also condemned some sonic and other

manners of her parents as "barbaric" and low-brow. This student, who said she "passes" as

Ashkenazi, employs a strategy of contingent detachment (Mizrachi & Herzog, 2011): she

distances herself as much as possible from stigmatized, shamed mourning (and other)

practices of her parents and their co-generationals, and participates in their shaming. Her

commitment to the ethic of civilizedenss—self-control, considerateness and respectability

(she portrayed loud mourning as disrespectful, staining the honor of the deceased)—rather

than to the authenticity ethics was an integral part of her broader identification strategy.

This self-distancing from ethnically-marked stigmatized practices is a claim for 23 This strategy is sometimes criticized as hishtaknezut—"Ashkenazization" or "acting white."

21

inclusion and for non-ethnicized self-identity (cf. Mizrachi & Herzog, 2011): the

'culturization' of ethnic boundaries in Israel has rendered performative identity (life-style and

habitus, including sonic styles: Schwarz, 2012) ever-more consequential and sensitive, as the

case of mourning testifies. Her claim for inclusion is made as an individual: while talking

about it, she noted "it seems to me you've stumbled here on quite a standard deviation"—yet

this claim is embedded within a broader narrative on modernization and intergenerational

assimilation ("for my parents it seems.. stupid that I don't come to these things. Like, for them,

you should mourn loudly. (...) We are a generation away from each other").

Conversely, for Ashkenazim, demonstrating openness and a sympathetic attitude

toward these practices is an opportunity to accumulate "multicultural capital" (Bryson, 1996):

cosmopolitan liberal tolerance/openness as a high-status marker. Some Ashkenazi

interviewees simultaneously distanced themselves from loud mourning (describing it as

“foreign” or “belonging to another culture”: f44, Ashkenazi, upper-middle class)—and

constructed themselves as progressive by stressing it is a “good custom”, since it is authentic

("real"), therapeutic ("if you let the pain out, that's what needs to get out"), legitimate

("everyone and his thing"), or even "cool." The very topic of ethnicity is highly sensitive for

Ashkenazim: talking about ethnic difference or hinting at cultural hierarchies may stain the

speakers as quasi-racists, or at least disqualify them as "progressive" (ne'orim) (cf. Sasson-

Levy, 2008). Some interviewees used code-words such as "culture" or "mentality" in lieu of

(or before) explicitly referring to ethnicity. High-status progressive identity thus consists of a

mixture of personal commitment to self-control and multicultural attitude toward others (the

idea that "the more progressive ones are also more refined and more quiet"—as quasi-

reluctantly formulated by one interviewee: f58, Ashkenazi, librarian—is always a latent point

of reference that shapes discourse and action, although explicitly evoked only rarely).

While recognizing that low-status practices have some value is a common practice that

may support claims for worth and 'progressive' identity, the opposite strategy—inverting

hierarchies and devaluating high-status practices—is much less common. While the idea that

strong grief emotions may be expressed involuntarily and be too strong to restrain was not

uncommon in the data, only one interviewee drew the logical conclusion that silent mourning

reflects shallower, milder emotions—which is a common conclusion among Afro-Americans

in the US (Rosenblatt & Wallace, 2005). It was a poor Mizrahi beautician/masseuse (f29)

from a poor town who contrasted Mizrahi real mourning (e.g. her mother-in-law who

scratched herself to bleeding) with Ashkenazi mourning, which she assumed would be quiet

22

and milder, and which she characterized in a belittling tone as “a sort of sadness, kind of, I

guess“. It may be suggested that this transvaluation strategy (which she also employed in

other contexts) is more likely among people like her who have no identification claims for

assimilation in the middle-class.24

However, the ethnic dimension is not the only one that informs mourning practices and

their judgment. The three ethics discussed above have unique histories, and are also identified

in generational and class terms. The authenticity- and psy-ethics are emphatically late-

modern moralities that were introduced by a new generation—as demonstrated by Collier's

account of the shift from an ethic of duty to ethic of desire and authenticity since the 1960s

(Collier, 1998). Binkley (2004) identifies a similar shift from repressive self-discipline to the

“new morality of individuality, authenticity, and therapeutic release” with the baby-boomers

of the 1970s—the new, creative post-Fordist middle-classes who revolted against the ethic of

their parents. This class identification may explain why among Englishmen, self-restrained

mourning has become rather a working-class practice (Walter, 1997). In Israel the introduction

of new moral logics has not dismantled the identification of self-control with social worth,

due to the centrality of ethnicity in social stratification and of Westernness as a major capital:

in Israel, unlike England and like Bangladesh, the colonial discourse on self-control as

Westernness is still an effective social weapon. Hence, as shown above, assimilation strategies

may entail commitment to the self-control ethic.

However, the next case offers a different articulation of class, generation and ethnicity,

in which the psy-ethic is propagated by a member of the younger generation against the ethics

of her parents. Here different ethics—the therapeutic ethic and the ethic of self-control—were

employed within an actual debate on the mourning practice of a particular relative in a

specific funeral. This case clearly demonstrates the dual nature of critique—as simultaneously

an abstract debate about values and a concrete instrument of claiming and distributing social

value. The excerpt is taken from an interview with a 25-year-old university student from an

upper-middle class, Iraqi-descent family. For her, loud mourning

24 Living in empathetically working-class occupational and residential environments may also make people less vulnerable to shaming. However, there might be other reasons why most interviewees did not engage in transvaluation, including (1) the formulation of my question (focused on loud mourning); and (2) my own class and ethnic background that could make Mizrahi interviewees feel less comfortable to openly criticize the Ashkenazi psyche. However, it is probably also influenced by class identification and the personal social networks composition of interviewees. Two interviewees proved familiarity with the idea that quiet mourning indicates indifference by defending themselves against it: “it was a kind of Ashkenazi funeral. Not that.. it was very touching, by the way (…) very touching, but.. there were no shouts” (m34, mixed-ethnicity, lawyer); “I think that whoever screams or cries more, it doesn't mean it hurts him more” (f64, Ashkenazi-ethnicity, upper-middle class).

23

"brings people a kind of relief. (…) We had a funeral in the family (…) and my

grandmother started screaming there, and that, and automatically everybody

was trying to calm her down, saying to her 'stop, relax, be quiet, be quiet'—god

dammit, let her scream! Like, how else do you want her to get out what she's

got [inside]?"

Interviewer: And why do you think they were telling her to be quiet?

Interviewee: "Because, because maybe a person who screams and cries like

that, it shows he's, he's out of control in a way. And that's something that we, as

a society, obviously don't see as a positive thing, maybe we.. People who tell

her 'be quiet' want her best interests, but I don't think it's in her best interests.

Yes, maybe they think 'oh, she's miserable, let's calm her down, let her calm

down, let her calm down'."

Interviewer: O.K. But you think, that emotionally, it's better to simply let

Interviewee: "you can't help it, sometimes, it's also, also shouting, it's a kind of

relief, which helps you release what you've got, and then, afterward—that's it,

you feel, a kind of catharsis, and you feel that's it, you're clean."

The grandmother mourns through uncontrollable screaming. Her descendants judged

this loss of control to be inappropriate, because (she believes) they employ the general view of

"society" that losing control is bad. By applying the ethic of self-control, which dubs this

mourning style inappropriate for a modern, Western subject, they acted as subjects of shaming

in order not to become objects of shaming (i.e., to distance themselves from the shamed

mourning practice). They try to calm grandmother down. The tone she ascribed them was not

therapeutic and empathetic but rather educational and authoritative (the imperative "be

quiet!"—as told to young children—rather than a soft "don't cry"). She depicts their action as

automatic one (without reflecting about grandmother's actual interests), motivated by the

prevalent ethic of self-control (yet she falls short of explicitly saying they are motivated by

shame, which would to be too harsh an accusation). The interviewee disagrees. For her, "the

best interests" of her grandmother are not to have her respectability defended, but rather to

have her psychological wellbeing defended. While acknowledging the good intentions of her

relatives, she challenged their ethical conception of the good. The granddaughter suggests that

discharging emotions, experiencing catharsis, and getting the pain out of one's system are

more important than impression management and respectability, that is, that psychological

24

internal goods are more important than social external goods.25

However, this framework does not represent a complete withdrawal from the game of

legitimacy and recognition. Over the last generation, the therapeutic ethic and discourse have

gained social legitimacy. The first to adopt them were high-status young members of the new

middle-classes, who thus differentiated themselves from both the working classes and the

traditional middle-class self-control ethic of their parents (Binkley, 2004, Illouz, 2008; Pfister,

1997).

This case demonstrates how strategies are developed within the matrix of class,

ethnicity and generation: her family was highly vulnerable to shaming since they were not

only Mizrahim living in a mainly-Ashkenazi neighborhood (where Ashkenazim outnumber

Mizrahim in a 1:2.5 ratio according to census data), and not only because they were upper-

middle class (according to Wilce, urban elite-aspiring classes are most vulnerable to shame,

i.e. the perception of ethnic customs through the lens of powerful Others)—but also because

they were residents of a lucrative neighborhood, where most residents (at least at their age

cohort) were constantly anxious about good manners and defending their symbolic status

(Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2000). The interviewee herself, however, criticized this good-manners

ethic: like many other younger people, she believed a healthy psyche is more precious than

respectability (Binkley, 2004). By turning to the therapeutic ethic, she posed a moral

challenge to her relatives.

The two women whose moral judgments I discussed at length in this section share a lot

in terms of sociodemographic categories: they are both young, university students, Mizrahi, of

(broadly speaking) middle-class background. However, they are very different in their

boundary work and identifications. The former asked to differentiate herself from the social

background in which she was raised (a low-status peripheral town) and from her Mizrahi

ethnicity, and to acquire an ethnically-unmarked identity through the embracement of middle-

class culture, which se associated with self-control, respectability and considerateness. She

gradually acquired various sonic sensitivities, preferences and styles in line with this

identification project, which also frame her attitude to loud mourning. This identification

move that informed her moral judgment was in no way determined by her structural position,

yet it was designed in relation to it. The second student, for whom being upper-middle class is

taken for granted, differentiated herself from the very same traditional middle-class self-

control ethic and from silencing as an assimilation strategy. She did so on behalf of rising 25 By doing so she departs from the sociological logic of Goffman (1959) and Bourdieu. The distinction

between internal and external goods, borrowed from Alasdair MacIntyre, is quoted in Sayer, 2005a.

25

psychological sensitivities, the new psy-ethics. Static identities (sociodemographic categories)

are thus proved to be of little avail in explaining moral judgment: among my interviewees, all

three moral logics were common across ethnic, class and age lines. However, a close look at

the dynamics of identification, identity claims, and attitude toward existing structure of

symbolic boundaries may help understand why different people use shared cultural repertoires

in different ways.

Conclusion

This article analyzed judgments of loud mourning practices and performances by

Israelis of diverse backgrounds. I analyzed both the internal logics of evaluative statements,

and their embeddedness in wider social contexts. Doing so has revealed the dual nature of

critique—simultaneously a relatively-autonomous cultural system of abstract evaluation

criteria and a set of instruments for concrete identification and positioning. Moral evaluations

are not determined by structural positions or group interests in any vulgar manner, yet social

actors cannot forget that moral judgment of others is always also negotiation over their own

identities and social worth, and that the most abstract claims may have very concrete

implications for themselves.

The findings also offer more refined and complex an answer to the disputed question

regarding the power and malleability of cultural contents: are moral logics mere instruments

that may be creatively used to justify actions at the actor's discretion? Above I suggested that

the flexibility of cultural logics depends on their referents. Indeed, different strategies may use

the same moral logics to draw contradictory conclusions, but not all moral logics may be used

this way. Some moral logics prescribe concrete paths of external action, and hence constrain

evaluation rather strongly; while others refer to the interiorities of the actors and others, which

are not directly visible and hence leave a leeway for interpretation and creative use.

Now it may be clear why the two processes documented in the literature—the

rehabilitation of loud mourning (Jalland, 2006; Wouters, 2002) and its delegitimation (Wilce,

2009)—are not as different as they may seem: both rely on the same moral vocabulary,

referring to the same criteria of worth—civilizedness and authenticity. They diverge on

whether these two criteria yield contradictory or consensual judgments of loud mourning: one

may consider loud mourning as either authentic emotional expression, or as inauthentic

traditional conventions; and similarly, consider quiet crying as either suppressed emotional

expression or a personal, less other-oriented way of expressing authentic emotions. In the first

case, the introduction of the ethic of authenticity would yield further stigmatization of

26

traditional wailing (as documented by Wilce), further bolstering the civilizedness ideal;

whereas in the former case it would result in the increased expressivity discussed by Jalland

and Wouters. This is only possible thanks to the flexibility of the authenticity ethic, which has

an internal referent and may thus yield contradictory judgments. The Israeli case demonstrates

that both interpretations may co-exist in the same cultural setting.

The article identified a trinity of logics that structure late-modern evaluation of

emotionally-laden action. Whereas the ethics of authenticity (as they developed since the

romantics to the post-Fordist era) have posed individuals new moral challenges (Binkley,

2004; Petersen, 2011), creating new states of worthiness and opening the way to new critiques

—hierarchies based on the self-control ethic, traditionally incarnated in Western men, are still

powerful. A third common ethic has directed the instrumental rationality toward the

maximization of a new kind of goods, psychological wellbeing, while relying on popularized

psy-experts knowledge (Illouz, 2008; Nolan, 1998). This trinity is not endemic to Israel: the

ethics of self-control and authenticity may be identified worldwide (e.g. Jalland, 2006; Walter,

1997; Wouters, 2002; Wilce, 2009), as well as the therapeutic ethic (Afro-Americans often

judge white mourning to be so private and restrained as to pose a severe mental health threat

that could amount to suicide: Rosenblatt and Wallace, 2005). More important: this moral

grammar is used for evaluating the appropriateness of conduct in other emotionally-laden

contexts, beyond funerals. For example, contemporary discourses on anger are usually defined

by the same three axes:

(1) Emotional authenticity: criticizing those who are not connected to

their feelings and who suppress anger; and praising emotional authenticity

and openness;

(2) The self-control imperative: criticizing unmanaged anger as irrational.

Anger should only be expressed through careful communication that would

yield mutual understanding and harmony rather than escalation. Praising

calculated, intentional expressions of anger by parents as rational

educational instruments; and

(3) The psy-ethic: anger viewed as a threat to the well-being of self and

others that must be cautiously neutralized, as both expression and

suppression of anger may result in psychological damage.

This schema may easily be applied to other contexts in a similar manner—although the

27

degree of exhaustiveness of any such application demands empirical inquiry.

Like the moral worlds of Boltanski and Thévenot, these three logics are irreconcilable,

as expressed in their contradictory "investment formulae": access to a state of worthiness in

any world (i.e. according to any single logic) entails the sacrifice of worth in others. It is

impossible to simultaneously fully control oneself, act fully authentically (that is, in an

uncontrolled and non-instrumental fashion), and maximize the psychological wellbeing of self

and others. As seen above, expressing one's authentic emotions or following one's ethnic

tradition may result in trauma for the fresh orphan; whereas helping grandmother retain her

respectability may threat her psychological wellbeing, and vice versa. "Being virtuous in

terms of one moral vocabulary may cause an individual to be perceived as being deviant in

another" (Lowe, 2002:119). However, despite these contradictions, it is possible to try to

avoid extreme violation of all three logics, knowing that an extremely inauthentic or

extremely uncontrolled behavior may evoke judgment within the relevant world. In such an

economy of worth and morality, a prudent strategy could be not to pursue a state of

worthiness in any single world, but rather to avoid states of unworthiness in all worlds.26

There is evidence that in some cases when contradictory ethics persist, "balancing strategy" is

the most successful moral strategy (Robbins, 2007:308-309). If so, Boltanski and Thévenot's

metaphor of "worlds" is misleading: people employ different logics of judgment

simultaneously, not in turns, as people shape their conduct and judgments in relation to the

whole matrix.

The simultaneous usage of different moral logics could be demonstrated with the

excerpt that opened this article. Hierarchies of worth based on truthfulness to nature

(authenticity) and those based on distance from nature (self-control) seem contradictory.

However, in reality they may be brought together. In the opening quote, loud mourning is

simultaneously reproached for being inauthentic ("a theater," done "for the public"); and

unrestrained ("What one feels inside can be endured in silence"). Here, a practice is criticized

simultaneously by ad-hoc employment of seemingly contradictory independent criteria of

worth: the speaker cannot accept it as either authentic or respectable.

This seemingly incoherent critique may teach us two important lessons: first, that the

regime within which evaluative logics are employed is different than suggested by Boltanski

and Thévenot: people are often required by evaluators to satisfy multiple ethics

simultaneously rather than excel (achieve grandeur) in any one of them. The most solid, 26 This strategy should not be confused with Boltanski and Thévenot's 'compromises,' where people identify the

intersection of moral worthiness in two worlds, not the symmetric difference of their states of unworthiness.

28

critic-proof performance would be then simultaneously reasonably authentic, psychologically

efficacious, and yet reasonably respectable and controlled. This of course should not imply

any consensus over an "ideal" performance or a single set that would yield consensual

evaluations (as demonstrated above, even within any social class or ethnic group evaluations

are plural and contested), but rather that avoiding multiple stigmatization threats may shape

moral evaluation and conduct no less than aspiration to virtuosity according to any single

ethic. In such a regime, the inertia of the self-control ethic could well have curtailed the

subversive potential of the authenticity ethic to fully rehabilitate expressive mourning

practices practiced by low-status actors.

The second lesson is that moral evaluation does not take place in a vacuum and cannot

be abstracted from its identification implications and meanings, which may encourage actors

to prefer some evaluative moves over others. . Evaluation redistributes recognition, social

worth, and social identities, and this is no secret for evaluators. As demonstrated above, by

using particular parts of the available repertoire of moral logics in particular ways actors

negotiate their own social position and worth, identify with some social identities and distance

themselves from others. The speaker in the opening quote is a Ukrainian immigrant, rich in

cultural capital and member of the creative classes, who lives in an ethnically-diverse poor

town. Like many other immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union, she tries to retain her sense of

value and dignity and avoid segmented assimilation into the Israeli working-class by

defending her cultural capital from devaluation and drawing symbolic boundaries against

allegedly non-Western, uncivilized others. While it is always possible to use different logics

simultaneously, doing so in this context obviously supported her attempts throughout the

interview and beyond it to identify herself as Westerner and differentiate herself her

surroundings.

Adopting the same line of critique may have different impacts on the actor's

impression management, depending on her ethnicity, age, class position, residential context,

aspirations, and even her phenotype. Moral statements thus cannot be understood

independently of the embodied speakers in a social context. Hence, although everyone nay be

familiar with all different logics, not everyone is as likely to use them in the same way. As

shown above, judgment of funeral performances (in Israel and beyond it) is an act of

negotiation over the distribution of symbolic value and the drawing of symbolic boundaries.

Making the wrong judgment of others could thwart one's own identification endeavor or

devalue oneself. Whereas people's moral judgment of mourning performances cannot be

29

predicted based on sociodemographic factors, these identities are the point of departure for

projects of identification, and supply the context necessary for understanding the dangers and

opportunities associated with embracing different lines of critique.

We shall then analyze two analytically independent structures in relation to which

evaluation is shaped: the structure of available moral logics, and the structure of social

identities, their differential availability to different actors and their characterizations and

meanings. The dual nature of moral judgment and critique demands that we study both the

pieces and the players, both the horizontal plurality of moral logics and the structuring,

vertical impacts of their use, both the structures of moral logics and those of social identity.

The meeting point of these structures is where strategies are developed, where moral

evaluation takes place.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Mathieu Hauchecorne and the AJCS anonymous reviewers and

editors for their generous and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

About the Author

Ori Schwarz is a post-doctoral research fellow at Tel Aviv University. His research

interests include sociological theory and cultural sociology, with special interest in the senses,

morality, social identity, and information and communication technologies (such as the

internet and digital photography). His studies on sound explore sonic habits, styles, judgments

and sensitivities, the cultural and moral meanings attributed to them and their discursive

representations, in order to understand their role in identity work and the delineation of

symbolic boundaries.

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