Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

66 DON’T STARE
admonishes his fellow Americans to control their eyes. Washington counsels
people not to look at “men of quality . . . full in the face” when speaking
to them (2000 [c. 1744–1748], 12). Besides this gesture of deference,
our first president warns as well against “looking everywhere about you”
to anxiously assess your own status in comparison to others (19). Washington’s
strongest prohibition against staring, however, is a directive to “gaze
not on the marks or blemishes of others and ask not how they came” (23).
Washington’s pronouncement against intrusive, questioning stares that demand
an account of our fellows’ “blemishes” gets at the heart of our mothers’
scoldings. Our urge to explain the visual novelty that attracts us merits
a firm hand slap from the Father of Our Country. By decreeing that inquisitive
eyes threaten “civility” among our fellow citizens, Washington endorses
a national ban on staring.
A gush of conduct manuals appeared in nineteenth-century America that
unanimously affirm Washington’s declaration that we must not stare at one
another. The manuals extend uniform admonitions to readers seeking social
propriety: “Never stare at people. It is a mark of ill-breeding, and rightly
gives offense,” a book entitled Manners that Win proclaims (1883, 24). In
short, the manuals conclude that to “stare is odiously vulgar” (Howard and
Roberts 1868, 77). Many of these etiquette guides also offer clues as to why
staring is improper in America. Considering the larger cultural context of
these books suggests that prohibitions against public staring at one another
arises from a convergence of several historical phenomena.
Perhaps the major influences making staring “vulgar” were the emergence
of the middle class and the accompanying ascendance of anonymity in public
culture. 3 During the nineteenth century, America unevenly but decisively
transformed from a face-to-face traditional, agrarian society where people
were born, lived, and died in the same community into an individualistic,
industrial, wage-labor, mass society in which most interaction occurred
among strangers in an urban, public setting (Lofland 1973). This enormous
shift in human social relations required new rituals of interaction and spatial
choreographies that differed greatly from those of a collective village setting
organized around established status and kinship relations. This modern
world demanded a new urgency of looking that allowed us to recognize
and respond appropriately to one another. Awash in all kinds of unfamiliar
sights, Americans were increasingly surrounded by people whom they had
never laid eyes on before. Confronted by this new alien landscape, people
needed to know what to do with their eyes.
At the same time, an emerging middle class, armed with capitalism and
egalitarianism, firmly renounced the old aristocratic order that new America
so distrusted. Part of that required inventing new ways of looking at
one another. The stable hierarchy of the old aristocratic order required its