Honor

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 against one another from meeting in public spaces—or putting them on a collision course. More generally, the dichotomy of public and private shaped honor for women, whose presence inside the home was honorable and outside the home was dangerous and dishonorable; codes of conduct and particularly dress were drastically affected by this dichotomy as well. For men, in contrast, absence from the public sphere might be considered questionable.

A more complex analysis of honor and space comes from the historians Elizabeth Cohen and Thomas Cohen, who showed how the house in sixteenth-century Rome became symbolic of the human body. Seating at public events and the relative arrangement in terms of height or distance from the most honorable point in the room became a concrete manifestation of the ideas of honor made concrete in spatial terms.