Honor - Early Conceptualizations Of Honor, Public Expressions Of Honor, Honor And Gender, Honor And Violence
mediterranean societies especially studies
Codes of honor are all-pervasive in human societies, but the modern study of honor as an academic formulation originated in the Mediterranean region, and especially in the work of anthropologists working in Spain and Greece. Julio Caro Baroja, J. G Peristiany, and Julian Pitt-Rivers wrote some of the seminal and most influential works on the concept of honor. They placed the honor complex in the Mediterranean world and based their work primarily on rural societies. Since those early works, the use of honor as a framework to study different cultures, especially those of Latin America with their Mediterranean roots, has become almost ubiquitous. Furthermore, the initial categories of analysis used in honor studies have been considerably refined and expanded.
The early model of Mediterranean honor as a catchall framework soon became the target of criticism by later scholars dissatisfied by a model based on peasant and rural sources, whose conceptions of honor cannot be transferred and applied willy-nilly to other times and places. Modern honor studies, although retaining these frameworks as a very useful starting point, take into account regional and temporal variations in the notion of honor, especially when applied to extremely diverse societies far distant from the Mediterranean.
Additional Topics
For these early scholars, honor was a brittle value—one that could not be rescued if harmed. They emphasized honor as a framework for social hierarchy and as an attribute that people were both born with (status) and attained or retained through proper behavior (virtue). More recently Frank Henderson Stewart has criticized this way of formulating honor. In his model, honor retains its dual c…
The literature on honor and shame is closely connected to the study of public and private realms. Honor was a quality that was expressed in public, and contested there: insults and slights enacted in the public sphere could be construed as attacks on the public persona or reputation of a person, and thus on his honor. Thus, societies where honor was perceived as an important value were marked by v…
There were alternate types of morality based on gender. Male morality had little to do with prudent sexuality. In fact, men enhanced their honor at times by seducing women. In seventeenth-century Spain there was even a fashion in the upper circles of trying to seduce nuns. On the other hand, women protected family honor by remaining virginal until marriage or the taking of order and then remaining…
Historians have been fascinated by the violence associated with the defense of honor, and especially with the duel. The ritualized nature of duels made this violence acceptable in elite male contexts, an acceptance that plebeians and women in general could not reproduce. In a larger sense, dueling has been analyzed as an example of the relationship between forms of social mediation and levels of v…
Systems of honor also affected the way people conceived of spaces. The places in which insults were bandied have been productively analyzed to reveal the spatial framework of honor. Anthropologist Beverly Chiñas's study of Mexican Zapotec women added a gendered dimension: women acted covertly to manipulate men's movements, either preventing men who nursed a sense of insult again…
Early twenty-first century scholarship has taken issue with the notion that slaves had no claim to honor. An earlier formulation held that the very purpose of the slave in the social scheme was to be "dishonored," and so to provide their owners, and indeed all free people, with enhanced status in contrast to the slave's abasement. In fact, however, studies have shown that the …
One early-twenty-first-century development in the study of honor has been a changing appreciation for its role in the development of the modern state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Earlier studies either focused on traditional societies or rural communities portrayed as isolated from modernity, or premodern state societies such as the European ancien régime. More recently, how…
Honor seems to be a value or social system that is so basic as to exist—under many other names—in most societies. Honor as a framework to understand past social dynamics has been diffused widely, from China to African slave societies to the more traditional Mediterranean cultures. Yet this very diffusion of honor as an analytical framework has attracted some criticism. Because of its…
Caro Baroja, Julio. La ciudad y el campo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966. Chiñas, Beverly. The Isthmus Zapotecs: Women's Roles in Cultural Context. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973. Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. "Open and Shut: The Social Meanings of the Cinquecento Roman House." Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, no. 1 (fall–winter 2001): 61–…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments