Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present [Book Review]

Abstract

G. Geltner has aimed his slim volume squarely at the narrative that as civilization has advanced into modernity, it has progressively abandoned corporal punishment—an idea whose intellectual underpinnings he associates with Michel Foucault and, more recently, Daniel Pinker. He argues that premodern societies used corporal punishment far less, and when they did were far more careful and thoughtful about it than commonly assumed, while modern societies have by no means abandoned it. Societies both present and past have used corporal punishment to mark and separate out internal deviants. These same societies have also promoted their own collective identity at the expense of other groups by accusing them of using it, or of using it wrongly, in an effort to cast the “other” as “profoundly different, brutal, and uncivilized” (18). The result is a direct, scathing, and largely successful critique of what Geltner sees as the intellectually dishonest rhetoric about corporal punishment in modern Western identity narratives and policy arguments.