Culture of Honor: A Myth - or a Fact?

Factual Questions
1

Richard Nisbeit and Dov Cohen wrote in thier book “Culture of Honor” that the cause for an “honor culture”, a culture that its people value honor highly, and will not hesitate to resign to violence at the slightest insult. A culture that accepts the norms of duels, blood feuds, and a high level of violence.
The explanation presented in the book is that because in hill countries, where the majority of people practice in herding sheep and other livestock, there is a minor goverment and police presence(as for the low population density) and that stealing an entire herd is much easier and profitable then stealing an entire harvest(what the thief will do - start harvesting the field?)
There is a low risk the thief will be caught and punished, and high profit to be made from each theft(which is easier to), therefore a low risk/high reward ratio of crime.

So the only way a man can protect his family and property is through intimidation. He must make sure that any thief will know that if they will mess with him - they can respect harsh and fatal retaliation. That kind of reputation is bought by basically not taking shit from anybody. If you dont respond to threats and insults to you or your families “honor”, youre a weak prey that will expect harassment from thiefs.

This corresponds nicely with southern US population that decends from irish and scottish border country herdmen, and arabian families that accept killing family members for “the family honor” which have roots in beduin and arabian nomad ancestors.

Problem is that the “culture of honor” could also be the collection of a low scoioeconomical status effect on violence. I struggle to find areas that contain a population of herdsmen/bordersmen/low population density area that are not subjected to harsh socio economic conditions.

So the question is - Is tendency to violence is to be attributed to low socioeconomical status, that just happens to contain herdsmen/bordermen? Is tendency to violence can be attributed to BOTH herdsmen/brodersmen causes AND low socioeconomical status?

Are there any good socioeconomical status herdsmen/bordersmen that dont have the “culture of honor?”

2

The major snag that the theory hits is that your “culture of honour” was pretty much universal across all of Europe just 400 years ago. Unless you think that all of Europe was hill country populated by herders then the explanation fails right there.

The second problem is that the theory seems to assume that people have always lived in some form of stateless society with no legal system. That hasn’t been true for most of the world for over 6, 000 years. If someone living under a feudal system in Europe or the Middle East knew who stole their herd, they would simply take the issue up with the local courts. The nobility did not think high of people stealing the entire source of their taxation base. So it’s not like a herdsman had particularly more need to resort to vigilante justice than anybody else. And of course if they didn’t now who the thief was,then nothing really made any difference.

The next flaw is that the Irish were not herders. There were herds in Ireland, but proportionally smaller than in England, or indeed most of Europe. I’ve also never heard that the Scottish lowlands were ever particularly dependent on herding.

Then we hit the problem of establishing that stealing an entire herd is somehow easier than stealing crops. Sure, nobody is going to sneak in in the middle of the night and harvest crops, but they can easily enough steal the crop once it has been harvested. In fact that would probably be easier than stealing a herd, because at least you can hide a thousand bushels of grain until the heat dies down. In contrast, you can’t hide even a small herd of livestock. You can’t slaughter them and store them without electricity, and you can hardly drive them along the roads while being pursued. So what exactly are you going to do with them?

Stock theft was, and is, an important crime in regions that are *very *sparsely settled, such as frontier America or modern Australia because you can simply drive the animals across unsettled lands, grazing them as you go. But in Arabia or or Ireland? Not a hope. In Arabia the stock routed were highways, and outside of those routed travel was exceedingly difficult. In Ireland the land was all owned by somebody, and traveling along the highways with a dozen head of livestock was hardly inconspicuous, or fast enough to avoid pursuit.

Stock theft did occur of course, but I would have to see some evidence to believe that it was any more common than theft of crops, which also occurred. It certainly wouldn’t have been the simple task that the explanation requires it to be.

Everything I have seen supports the idea that the “culture of honour” that you describe is the result of a society with limited civil dispute resolution systems. Under such a system a person was completely dependent on their honour and their family contacts in order to be able to enter onto any sort of contract at all. IOW people had to just take your word on everything, making the value of your word enormously important. You couldn’t allow people to tarnish your reputation because that reputation represented your ability to function in society.

The other point you need to realise is that the whole culture of honour thing wasn’t universal. It was really only an issue for the middle and upper classes. The peasants and working classes weren’t nearly s hung up on it, which s understandable because their need to undertake contracts with people who didn’t already know them well was almost non-existent.

And that by itself makes the explanation you posited seem implausible. The people who actually raised livestock weren’t too hung up on hounour. And the people who were hung up on honour were more than capable of tracking down anyone who stole livestock from their tenants/peasants.

In short, it seems like a classic example of selecting facts to support a theory, rather than constructing a theory to explain the facts.

3

But

So was it universal?

4

So a classic case of academics mixing fact with fiction into pesudo bullshit science that takes boring subjects and explains them in a cool way that allows them to sell books and gain mainstream recognition and respect - while only a handful of people will actually fight thier inner “wishful thinking” and look into the facts?

5

Seems to me that these aspects pretty well describe inner city culture in some parts of the U.S., where herding livestock is not part of the equation at all.

6

Trying to say anything sensible about varied cultures across centuries and continents is like trying to score bullseyes blindfolded, but a few generalities can be said.

First, you shouldn’t mix concepts like duels and blood feuds together. They’re separate. Duels are found among the upper classes and are individual. You’re insulting a particular person’s honor and provoking a response. It is dishonorable for the rest of the family to gang up. In a dueling culture the expectation is that there is a small class of gentlemen who are putatively equal, with equal wealth, education, and experience in handling expensive weapons. Therefore duels are between equals and outsiders are definitely not welcomed to interfere. In reality, some people would be hugely better at weaponry than others and so they often degenerated into bullying cultures without any real equality but the pretense lived on until these already decadent cultures dissolved entirely. (You do see some individual battles in lower classes but these are never formalized into a rules-based culture like dueling was.)

Blood feuds can take place at a variety of social strata, but the core connection is that the family rather than the individual is held up as the repository of honor. If you insult my brother, father, or womenfolk you are as reprehensible, probably more so, than if you just insulted me and any or all of us may respond. You see historical evidence of this at the highest levels, with nobility hieing off into stupid petty wars because of family insults, but it more prevalent in lower social classes just because they outnumbered the elite by ten to one and so there were ten times as many opportunities. (Substitute whatever number is appropriate for 10 in any given culture.)

You can have both a dueling and blood feuding culture, because the American South was one. But they can equally be separate and feuds can be part of any culture even if the dominant culture hates them. Gang feuds have been a constant in American history from the Irish through the Italians to African-Americans and Chinese. You can’t say that America is a culture of honor. These are subcultures and often illicit ones at that.

There is an economic aspect to most of these, as history shows us that bands of like people will join forces against outsiders - however outsiders are defined and there are a million ways of doing so - when their livelihoods are threatened. But this can take a multitude of forms without active violence - segregation and redlining - and can take the form of active violence - think lynchings - without feuds or gangs. It’s a continuum or maybe a game of pick-up sticks with a hundred starting and stopping points rather than a thing.

7

My reply ought to be in IMHO, so be warned that this is my personal opinion.

I believe that a culture of honor (and violence) grows up whenever police presence is minor of non-existent. Stealing herds might be one cause, but nowadays it strikes me that in the US at least, the main examples are in illegal businesses. Drug dealing, gambling, prostitution being major examples. Under those circumstances, contracts cannot be enforced in court and so the participants must police themselves, using “enforcers”.

Actually, it occurs to me that hockey uses enforcers too, and for much the same reason. Since the only one can call a penalty (other than a “technical” foul such as too many players on the ice) and his attention is glued to the puck, any foul away from the puck cannot be called and so teams employ players called enforcers to remedy these. Occasionally, the enforcers turn into decent hockey players (anyone else remember John Ferguson?) but not often.

So yes, I think that cultures of honor exist, but not necessarily associated with herding, but always with lack of being able to gain satisfaction in court either because of light police presence or otherwise. But be warned; this is just my personal opinion.

8

Actually, IIRC 3 people on the ice can call hockey penalties. But yes, the Russians were notorious for doing nasty things behind the net like slashing, since fighting was not allowed in international hockey. In that case it was a tit-for-tat retaliation threat that enforced good behaviour, except it deteriorated into physical intimidation to make good players more hesitant - just the opposite of honour.

IIRC, there has always too been a retaliation culture in baseball - be nasty to my players and I’ll bean yours; this too occiasionally deteriorated into an intimidation culture, relatiate for good plays by head-beaning the guy.

In the chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, he cites psychological experiments - a forced collision in a constricted university hallway on unsuspecting students, followed by a muttered “asshole”. They showed (or at least their data said, which may have been massaged) that southern students were less likely that northern ones to ignore the insult. So allegedly the culture of “take no insults” is somewhat real.

The problem with herders is not a whole flock - it’s theft of individual anmals. Whne you have a few dozen animals, and so does he, how do you prove that one of your flock suddenly became his? It’s a lot easier to lose a stray animal than a sack of grain. It’s not just a lack of policing, it’s the inability to prove your case. Only two people know for sure who’s right - you who lost the sheep, and Geordie who took it. Absent actual evidence, possession is 9/10 of the law. This is where “fear of retaliation” palys a big part in discouraging others messing with your flock.

9

I came in to this thread to shout “Aaron Burr,” but I had food in my mouth.

10

Thief was a capital offence because often one killed to get the other’s possessions.

11

It reminded me of jail/prison culture.

12

In the one case, it’s a matter of - there are no police to enforce the unwritten rules in jail or the inner city.

In the other, enforcement may exist but it is not pervasive, and it is difficult to prove your case when animals can’t be identified, ie. physical proof is hard to come by, and it deteriorates into “I said-he said”.

In both cases, it’s you and your friends (or extended family) against the others; group cohesion counts more than fairness, and being seen as willing to respond in excess is seen as a deterrent. People don;t mess with you, not because “it’s not fair”, not because of fear of the authorities, but because they understand you’re a bad-ass.

13

And, in support of Blake’s point, I’d say that limited means of civil dispute resolution applies there as well–albeit not because no such means exist, but because, for various cultural reasons, such means are much less likely to be seen as useable.

14

Seems pretty obvious–Blake is saying that it was universal in the upper class in Europe 400 years ago.

15

But that would be a hold-over from the medieval/feudal era, when the warrior class was the ruling class. As a warrior your reputation was everything. And of course, it woudl be analgous to gangs in the inner city today, where you enforced any “code of honour” by your group’s actions.

16

Okay, but why did you start with the word “but” in that post?

17

There’s nothing “alleged” about it. I grew up in the rural South, but went to college with a bunch of suburban white kids. I was the only one I knew in college who’d actually gotten into fights while I was a kid (other than with siblings), and I got into a LOT.

This was common for boys growing up in my area. All my friends got into fights, some more than others. It was nearly unavoidable. What are you supposed to do? Sure, there are a few people who are born saints/enlightened, with no particular ego or malice in them. That’s a tiny minority, though…and I’m not one of them.

18

A bit of trivia I love to share: Michael Bay directed that commercial. Michael fucking Bay…

19

This sort of evopsych just-so story is a perfect example of how anthropology can become a slave to overarching theories such as functionalism. Honor cultures exist, but that does not imply that there is an identifiable historical REASON for why some cultures encourage murdering people who offend you and others don’t. They just do.

20

I can’t figure out exactly what you’re saying here. If you’re merely saying that no anthropologist can pinpoint the murder of Ivan Ivanovich on the spring equinox in the first year of the emperor Drago as the start of the blood feud, then you’re correct. (Although the Hatfield/McCoy feud is pretty well documented. That was in historical times, admittedly.) However, anthropologists can certainly examine the larger culture and determine attitudes, mores, hierarchies, and all the other jargon and align those with other cultures to pull out similarities. When they do, it turns out that similarities are rampant. Honor cultures are all very alike in numerous ways. And they also stop being honor cultures over time in predictable and similar ways.

Malcolm Gladwell may be immediately dismissible, but he isn’t a scientist. You can’t dismiss scientists just because of the reporting on them.