Honour, Violence and Emotions in History

Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, Christopher E. Forth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472519467
• eBook ISBN: 9781472519498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Honour, Violence and Emotions in History is the first book to draw on emerging cross-disciplinary scholarship on the study of emotions to analyse the history of honour and violence across a broad range of cultures and regions. Written by leading cultural and social historians from around the world, the book considers how emotions - particularly shame, anger, disgust, jealousy, despair and fear - have been provoked and expressed through culturally-embedded and historically specific understandings of honour. The collection explores a range of contexts, from 17th-century China to 18th-century South Africa and 20th-century Europe, offering a broad and wide-ranging analysis of the interrelationships between honour, violence and emotions in history. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to all researchers studying the relationship between violence and the emotions.

1

Historical perspectives on honour, violence and emotion

Carolyn Strange and Robert Cribb

From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, connecting the words ‘honour’ and ‘violence’ conjures up two images: the assault and murder of girls and women thought to have cast family honour into question; and the duel, an outmoded ritual of masculine confrontation. The first is a grave political and legal issue that persists in many parts of world, whereas the latter – knights locked in mortal combat or gentlemen squaring off over points of honour – appears to be a phenomenon of the Western past. Psychologist Steven Pinker attributes the decline of duelling in the West not to the laws that criminalized it, but to its growing disrepute: ‘honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humour’.1 In other words, duelling persisted in Europe and North America until it was undone by disdain, contempt and ridicule. In contrast to Pinker, whose objective is to chart the diminution of violent tendencies over human history, anthropologists and historians have delved deeply into the norms that have supported the violent defence of honour in diverse political, social and cultural contexts. This body of research has focused on the ways in which cultural codes have informed individual behaviour, particularly codes associated with gender, class, religion, ethnicity, age and marital status. From the Ancient World to the islands of urban impoverishment in world capitals, we now have a wide array of scripts and rituals associated with violent encounters over notions of honour.2 However, the subject of emotion and its relation to codes of behaviour has yet to be interrogated systematically in these studies. In view of the emotion-laden terms in which clashes over honour have been articulated historically, an intriguing question arises: what role has emotion played in the history of honour-associated violence? This question is the instigation for this volume.

A rich vein of literature on codes of honour and on violence inflicted in its name emerged in the 1980s, when social historians, drawing on earlier anthropological and sociological studies of the dynamics of honour, produced landmark studies of duelling in England, Western, Northern and Southern Europe, and the United States.3 This research highlighted honour’s profound association with masculinity and demonstrated that males, overwhelmingly, have been the chief antagonists in violence inflicted in its name. Whether in German military academies of the early-twentieth century, where young officers were tutored into responding to ripostes, or in the village squares of early modern Spain or Italy, where men of lower ranks knew which dishonouring words or gestures had the potential to spark a knife fight, historians have studied honour disputes to illuminate the ways in which social and economic hierarchies were cross-cut by other status markers defined through character traits and behaviour. Although the emphasis placed on particular qualities (such as bravery or honesty) has varied over time and between societies, legal and medical records confirm that failure to uphold such characteristics, or even the insinuation of failure, could spark physical attacks, often lethal. To ward off the unpalatable prospect of losing respect or feeling shame, men have turned to violence (albeit not invariably, and rarely after the turn of the twentieth century, except in remote and loosely governed pockets of the world). Duelling and other rituals of violence associated with honour have gone in and out of fashion in different jurisdictions and the social locus of these customs has also shifted over time. For instance, in France the duel declined as a noble male practice, only to be taken up by bourgeois men in the nineteenth century, eager to adopt their betters’ touchiness as a sign of refinement. More recent literature stresses that men at all levels of society valued public standing and were prepared to resort to violence – often in ritualized brawls – in order to recover respect.4 But, as with aristocratic duelling, this plebeian form of honour’s violent defence eventually declined in response to increasingly disfavourable public opinion, which eroded the capacity of violence to restore respect.

Ironically, historical analysis of the demise of duelling in Western history commonly points to the suppression of aggressive emotions without first establishing how emotion figured in the history of honour-based violence. Despite the fact that texts associated with duels and honour-related brawls are often suffused in emotion – such as words of anger, shame, fear, pride and grief in letters and diaries and in public accounts – the dynamics of the duel are depicted principally through codes of masculinity in connection with youth, class and regional codes. This approach illuminates what made individuals act with violence in confrontations over honour, but it does not probe how historical actors felt about honour, nor the relation between their feelings and their sense of honour’s meanings.5 The measures that drove duelling and brawling from the social landscape were legal, ethical and moral, but the emotional registers of those measures are unclear in studies of the rise and fall of duelling. Instead, the foundational literature on honour-based violence attributes its decline to the ‘taming’ of emotions.6 When it comes to the study of honour-based violence, the realm of emotional experience has thus far taken second place to social and political factors, which in some contexts encouraged the violent defence of honour, while in others, it has provided the means and encouragement for the peaceful resolution of differences, whether through litigation or pledges.7

This approach to emotion is most mechanistic in the work of historians who work within the framework of Norbert Elias’ interpretation of civilizing processes. Elias (1897–1990) drew on a vast array of European etiquette manuals and literature that set standards of politeness, and he plotted them in relationship to changes in state formation, especially the growing monopolization of violence. These political and social changes altered the psychological make-up of ‘Western man’, rendering him more capable of controlling his impulses (everything from spitting to doing violence) by the modern era.8 Written in 1939 and influenced deeply by Freudian analysis of personality development, Elias’s masterwork continues to inspire historians intrigued by the steep drop in the rate of recorded homicides, from a high point in the late medieval period to the comparatively peaceful nineteenth century, after which it has remained low and relatively stable in European countries (though not in the United States).9 According to Pieter Spierenburg, the key trigger for this shift is the transition in the meanings held for honour over this long period. Prior to the 1800s, honour was a bodily oriented concept for Western Europeans. Medieval and early modern man, left on his own to defend his property, took pride in his capacity to defend his reputation and the standing of his family, and he made ready use violence to deter rivals and to maintain his status claims. Trespass against the ‘ideal sphere’ of his body (a notion traceable back to Freud), even a symbolic affront such as knocking off a hat, risked an impulsively violent response, unrestrained by challengers’ or victims’ thoughts of possible consequences.10 Gradually, and in tandem with the rise of centralizing powers in modern monarchies and new republics, the notion of honour became ‘spiritualized’ and democratized, Spierenburg argues, since anyone deemed to be trustworthy, comradely, honest and generous could now be considered worthy of honour.11 Under the subtitle, ‘Ritual, Masculinity and Impulse’, he states that ‘impulse is always a matter of degree .… to get angry and aggressive, you first had to have a reason, however suddenly found’.12 Some medievalists have questioned the assumption that people of the distant European past were impulsively violent by showing that public rituals, particularly customs associated with honour, channelled individuals’ ‘free-floating’ violent passions far earlier than Elias had recognized.13 But criticism of this nature leaves the Eliasian concept of ‘impulse’ unchallenged, since the terms of the debate remain the same: whenever, and wherever, violent impulses are least controlled, the idea of honour provides a ‘reason’ for violence.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Historical perspectives on honour, violence and emotion
• 2. The severed head speaks: Death, revenge, moral heroism and martyrdom in sixteenth to seventeenth-century China
• 3. From honour to virtue: The shifting social logics of masculinity and honour in early modern Sweden
• 4. ‘For the Shame of the World, and Fear of Her Mother’s Anger’: Emotion and child murder in England and Scotland in the long eighteenth century
• 5. ‘Unbridled Passions’, honour and status in late eighteenth-century Cape Town
• 6. Death on a river: Honour and violence in an Australian penal colony, 1826–1827
• 7. Of clubs and whiskers: Young men, honour and violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil, 1865–1889
• 8. Emotion, gender and honour in a fin-de-siècle crime of passion: The case of Marie Bière
• 9. Deeper than the death: Chaste suicide, emotions and politics of honour in nineteenth-century Korea
• 10. How the duel of honour promoted civility and attenuated violence in Western Europe
• Honour, violence and emotion: An afterword
• Index
• Imprint