This week I began reading a book I may have never come across if it weren’t for my PhD supervisor. It’s a book entitled Saving Face, which our cohort will be discussing together over the next few months.
This is the the thrust of the book, taken from the Amazon abstract:
Faces are all around us and fundamentally shape both everyday experience and our understanding of people. To lose face is to be alienated and experience shame, to be enfaced is to enjoy the fullness of life. . . This pioneering book explores the nature of face and enfacement, both human and divine. Pattison discusses questions concerning what face is, how important face is in human life and relationships, and how we might understand face, both as a physical phenomenon and as a series of socially-inflected symbols and metaphors about the self and the body.
The Prodigal Thought 