Granta 178

To be humiliated is to be put to the ground, brought back down to earth. The root of the word 'humiliation' comes from the Latin 'humus', the soil. In the Christian centuries, the ideal of the crucified and humiliated Jesus reversed the meaning of humiliation for many societies. It has never been in short supply in the modern world, but remains one of the hardest subjects to report about accurately. Our finest psychologists - from Dostoevsky to Mary Gaitskill - have teased out its extreme possibilities: how humiliation can be actively pursued or converted into pleasure.The 'Humiliation' issue of Granta examines the phenomenon via a wide angle and in different forms, from the most personal as explored in fiction, memoir and poetry, to humiliation in national and world history.