NAKED Is SHAMEFUL Nacktheit und Scham: Der mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess. By HANS PETER DUERR. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988.

Pp. 516. In his book Dreamtime (available in Felicitas Goodman's English translation [Oxford: Blackwell, 1985]), Hans Peter Duerr had already conceived the ambitious project to come up with a theory of culture that would be an alternative to the evolutionary theory of Norbert Elias. Since Norbert Elias, as my experience teaches, has been rather neglected by English-speaking scholars (despite the existence of a-rather poor-translation of his 1939 Civilizing Process [Oxford, 1978]), it would be useful to recall here his quite conspicuous influence on the French Annales school and especially on Philippe Aries's views on child rearing in the Middle Ages. It is rather easy to sum up Elias's theory of the sociogenesis of Western civilization in his own terms. According to him, the development of Western society was marked by "the increased tightening and differentiation of controls," which gradually led to a "higher level of social differentiation and integration." The reverse side of this linear process was the intensification of individual stress. Yet, since Elias could not leave recent Western permissiveness quite unacknowledged, he explained it as a result of the success of the long-term operation of multiplication of controls, not as a failure thereof. Indeed, asserted Elias, reduction of external control is possible only if internal control has been completely reached, socially absorbed, and individually assimilated. With his current offering about Nakedness and Shame, Hans Peter Duerr starts a personal crusade against Elias's "myth of the civilizing process." In his usual delightful way, Duerr takes us on a fascinating tour of early brothels, public baths, natives of many more or less exotic parts of the world, prostitutes, witches, nudists, and sectarians, in order to show that at all levels of civilization people experience the same shame about nakedness. Substantiated with hundreds of examples, from scurrilous to witty, the book reverses Elias's thesis, showing that Western civilization is rather going through a slow process of loosening control and that the result is a blessed lessening of social constraints. Coming from the author of Dreamtime, the thesis is surprising, for in his first book Duerr was less linear: he claimed that the fundamental process in the history of Western societies had been the liberation of women and the permissiveness of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, followed by repression in the sixteenth. Now all this seems to be forgotten, and in his polemic against Elias, Duerr is no less unabashedly evolutionary than his opponent. The book, which is verbally (although not intellectually) even more provocative than Dreamtime, is robustly hilarious and may occasionally make some old-fashioned readers blush, especially if they do not know yet that we all live in the most permissive age since the creation of the world. (Duerr's book is sufficient proof of this.) Duerr's knowledge of the sources is wide and, in general, accurate, and even when one does not find all his arguments compelling, one must certainly follow his overall rejection of Elias's thesis. Pleasant, well documented, and copiously illustrated with spicy scenes, this book, like the precedent ones, is a new challenge to the scholarly establishment and will undoubtedly be enjoyed by a wide audience. The main reservation that applies to Duerr's workspecifically, that it lacks any historical perspective-could be easily overruled if his treatment of the evidence would be synchronic and would thereby disclose new perspectives on the multiplicity of solutions that humankind has found in order to cope with nakedness and shame, or even if Duerr would share the (misguided) premises of ethologists and sociobiologists, thereby promoting who knows what new instinct of "shame." Dreamtime, and especially Sedna, Duerr's second book, were extremely well written but perhaps too ideological and arbitrary in their demonstrations. On the contrary, Nakedness is the long defense of a negative thesis, that is, that Norbert Elias does not offer a satisfactory view of the evolution of Western civilization. Being negative, Duerr's thesis

becomes on the positive side a mere reversal of Elias's, thereby incurring the fallacy of the "linear" development. One example should suffice: Duerr knows very well Leah L. Otis's thesis (Prostitution in Medieval Society [Chicago, 1985]), corroborated by countless reports from different European regions, that Western prostitution was tolerated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, institutionalized in the fifteenth, and completely suppressed by the Reformation in the second half of the sixteenth. Yet he chooses to treat this period indistinctly, reporting only that in the past prostitution was "institutionalized" and thus not less controlled than in the present. For some unknown reason, indeed, Duerr tried also in Dreamtime to stay away from the Reformation, which resulted in a riddle without solution: "permissiveness" disappeared without a trace in the sixteenth century, but without any definite cause! And yet the mere reality of the Reformation and the tightening of controls that it entails shows that any linear interpretation of Western history, be it the "increase of control" thesis of Elias or the "decrease" thesis of Duerr, is provisional, not to mention the regional determination factors. Indeed, for as short a period as 192130, the Soviet Union, for example, would first show increase in permissiveness and subsequently drastic repression. If, on the other hand, Duerr would have tried to examine every position concerning shame resulting from nakedness as another variant of the sum total of all possible attitudes that human beings could produce in relation to this particular aspect of their body in society, his book would have been even more enlightening. Neither synchronically nor diachronically is the book unquestionable; but it is a new and salutary provocation, and even if its beauty will pass like that of ephemeral flowers, its unique and important merit would nevertheless have been that of shaking some of the most deeply rooted prejudices of the scholarly establishment. IOAN P. CULIANU University of Chicago