Face

Face is not reputation and not standing in a group, which is what distinguishes it from honour. It is an integral part of a person, a signal that the personal membrane is healthy, the ledger is clear in both directions and balanced connections can be formed. Both halves of the ledger matter. Debt is what an unbalanced interaction leaves with whoever took, and unreleased credit is what it leaves with whoever gave and was never repaid, and either one damages face, which is why Marsh said unreleased credit can do as much harm as debt. The term is borrowed with care. She points to the First Nations peoples of northwestern Canada and their concept of face skin, and to the way English handles the same territory badly, reaching for mental health or self esteem and naming the effects rather than the thing. The mechanism of damage is shame. Shame is the feeling that destroys face, and the pattern shows in ordinary behaviour, since blushing and stammering increase in the presence of someone perceived as an endo-ideal. It also accounts for something otherwise puzzling about groups at the bottom of a structure. Because prominence for a negative image frequently produces shame rather than pride, members of a negative image work to hold each other back from achievement, which is the crabs in a pot pattern with a mechanism attached.

Face is a major concept in Chinese social thought, where mianzi and lian distinguish prestige from moral standing, and Erving Goffman built an influential sociology on facework, the interactional labour of maintaining face for oneself and others. Politeness theory, from Brown and Levinson, formalized positive and negative face as universal wants underlying linguistic strategy. All of these treat face as something conferred and negotiated in interaction. Marsh's version relocates it inside the person, since a healthy membrane and a balanced ledger are properties an individual has whether or not anyone is watching, which is why she can distinguish face from honour and treat one as owned and the other as awarded.