Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present [Mīkstie vāki]

Corporal punishment is often considered an unholy relic of the Western past, a set of thinly veiled barbaric practices largely abandoned in the process of civilization. As G. Geltner argues, however, neither did the licit infliction of bodily pain typify earlier societies nor did it vanish from modern penal theory, policy, or practice. Evidence spanning the length and breadth of human history reveals that, far from experiencing a steady decline that accelerated with the Enlightenment, physical punishment was often contested in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, its application expanding and contracting under diverse pressures. The modern prison, moreover, did not replace the rod. For even beyond its impact on inmates' bodies, its integration into their criminal justice systems, modern nation states and colonial regimes grew rather than limited the use of corporal punishment, at times in order to subordinate populations perceived as culturally inferior. Today as in the past, corporal punishment thrives mainly thanks to its capacity to define otherness efficiently and unambiguously, either as a measure acting upon a deviant's body or as a practice that epitomizes-in the eyes of external observers-a culture's backwardness. Flogging Others thus challenges simplistic views of modernization and Western identity from a new perspective, and underscores earlier civilizations' nuanced approaches to punishment, deviance, and the human body.