In the late 1960s, the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter arrived in New Guinea armed with mirrors, video and Polaroid cameras, and a mission: to blow the minds of members of the Biami tribe, who had never seen full reflections or images of themselves. “They were paralysed,” he wrote later. “After their first startled response – covering their mouths and ducking their heads – they stood transfixed, staring at their images.” Like any of us, the Biami carried an inner image of themselves, but unlike us, it was formed without mirrors or photos. Carpenter’s devices disrupted that inner image, triggering discomfort. But not for long. Within days, “they groomed themselves openly before mirrors… In an astonishingly short time, these villagers… were making movies [and] taking Polaroid shots of each other.” If they weren’t technically posing for selfies all day, as I’m told the young people do in 2018, it was only through lack of the right gadgets.
As Melissa Dahl points out in her brilliant new book Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, just published in the US, it’s unclear if the Biami were really as unfamiliar with mirrors as Carpenter thought. But in any case, what’s striking isn’t how strange their reaction seems, but how relatable. You know how it feels when you make an amiable remark in a lift, but nobody responds? (I hope so. Otherwise it’s just me.) Or when two people greeting each other misjudge whether to go for a handshake, hug or social kiss? That’s the same awkwardness: “self-consciousness tinged with uncertainty,” as Dahl defines it. It’s “the feeling we get when someone’s presentation of themselves… is shown to be incompatible with reality in a way that can’t be smoothed over.”
Suddenly, I see I’m viewed not as a friendly conversationalist, but as some weirdo who talks in lifts. The horror I feel is “the dread of catching a glimpse of my looking-glass self”.
As awkwardness feels unpleasant, it’s natural to want to overcome it – and Dahl’s initial motivation for her book, she writes, was to surmount her own. But after a journey through various awkward experiences (improv classes, talking to strangers, reading from her adolescent diaries to a theatre audience), she makes a persuasive case for celebrating it. We live in an era with more opportunity than ever to burnish the image we’re projecting, and more pressure than ever to do so. But awkwardness pierces that facade, exposing the imperfect life behind it. It creates, in the words of the philosopher Adam Kotsko, “a weird kind of social bond” – a solidarity arising from seeing that behind the fakery, we’re all just trying our best to seem competent.
The awkward you, then, is the real you, the one without the defensive performance. Dahl even hints that taking a friendlier attitude toward awkwardness might help us make the connections we’ll require if we’re ever to break out of the polarisation currently ruining politics. Put a Trump voter and a Trump hater in a room together for a conversation, after all – or a Brexiter and a remainer – and at least they’ll agree on one thing: they’ll both feel pretty awkward.
Listen to this
The Mortified podcast, in which adults share “their most embarrasing childhood artifacts”, from journals to lyrics, is at getmortified.com – if you can bear it.
