Sociology Plus
Degradation Ceremony Definition
A degradation ceremony is the communicative work that transforms a person’s entire status and identity into something lower, less honourable, and less prestigious. The concept was introduced by Harold Garfinkel (1956).
Garfinkel’s Analysis
The court trial is the classic example: the guilty offender is publicly reduced to the degraded status of “murderer” or “thief,” with implications for their total identity as a human being. For Garfinkel, such ceremonies stand in “dialectical contrast” to — and thereby demonstrate — the “ultimately valued, routine orders of personnel and action” in society: by dramatising what a society condemns, they affirm what it holds dear. The concept is linked to deviance amplification and to ethnomethodology.
Goffman and the Mortification of the Self
A closely related idea appears in Erving Goffman’s work on total institutions, where “mortification of the self” names the procedures — replacing personal clothes with a uniform, shaving heads, confiscating possessions — designed to strip away a new inmate’s old self in preparation for the construction of a new institutional persona.