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Why we ostracise - the failing Cat’s Cradle

By Malcolm King - posted Thursday, 3 July 2008


The Amish practice of meidung (translated as shunning) is used to discipline members of the faith. The Amish view meidung as being a “slow death” because it demands that friends, community members, and even close family cannot speak to the perpetrator at the risk of being similarly ostracised.

Adolescent girls operate on a level of factionalism, craft and guile that make the Australian Labor Party look like a Sunday picnic. Type “school girl bullying” into the Google search engine and you’ll get more than 20,000 hits. Young teenage girls use ostracisation to exclude members who no longer adopt their secret “in codes” of dress, mien or behaviour.

It's a paradox that one of the effects of ostracism in groups is to make the group tighter and stronger. The very act of excluding a person thereby adds a twisted form of social cohesion. Ostracism reinforces the notion of “us and them”.

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Ostracisation is also used to terminate relationships. The failure to return phone calls or emails may be a legitimate tactic to end the hopes of an ardent suitor or even the affections of a long time partner.

This is a delicate matter and does not necessarily lead to total disengagement. But as one woman said of her former romances, “I wipe them completely off the face of the earth. I don’t speak to them. I don’t acknowledge them.”

We learn the techniques of ostracism, of silent or slow death, at an early age.

Yet normally the tendency to check its use is the centripetal force of peer pressure and society at large. One has to, in some shape or form, get on with his or her neighbours.  Yet when this force starts to fail and becomes desiccated by our desire to “live within ourselves” then ostracism goes unchecked.

A 65-year-old woman said: “I used the silent treatment whenever there may be a fight or confrontation. The silent treatment accomplishes for me all the things that fighting does for other people: control, power, and punishment. It gives me pleasure, and I’m in control. I also think it is funny how people grovel. I never feel guilty or ashamed, because it’s always justifiable.”

But ostracism did not always have its intended outcome. One woman said “One day I decided that I wouldn’t bother to speak to my husband at all. I managed to keep this up for three weeks but finally he did something that really annoyed me so I yelled at him. He was taken aback and said “But you’ve been so happy lately.”

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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