This is a very, very different concept of honor than the one I grew up with. I was taught that honor means doing what is right (ethical, moral), regardless of personal cost. It meant being unfailingly honest, always keeping your word, doing your duty, etc. How others perceived you was irrelevant. One example of this notion of honor is the case of Sir Thomas More, who was executed by Henry VIII because his conscience would not allow him to cooperate with Henry’s establishment of the Church of England. Another is the Dreyfus Affair and Colonel Georges Picquart, who suffered grave personal consequences for insisting on giving an honest report and refusing to go along with the framing of Alfred Dreyfus for espionage. (There’s a wonderful movie about this, called Prisoner of Honor.)
What you describe is not as different as it seems. Doing what is right regardless of personal cost fits exactly into the larger framework of honor. The question is mostly what exactly those right things to do are.
Sommers mostly refers to herders, but if we turn to history there is a larger group of cultures further along the same continuum: pastoralists. The best documented among them are the Mongols, and the stories of the Mongols are replete with extreme examples of this sort. For example, falling asleep on guard duty was punishable by death, yet when asked whether they had fallen asleep they famously would not lie and then be executed.
I used to believe that this sort of thing was the kind of routine exaggerations that often are told about enemies in order to make them more exotic or dangerous, but further reading has heavily updated me in favor of taking them seriously.
The point is that the right thing is always a matter of personal responsibility under the honor paradigm. The examples you provide fit the pattern perfectly; the difference is that Sir Thomas More identified with the Church and Colonel Picquart with the military in deciding what the right thing to do is.
From the OP: “honor requires recognition from others.” That’s not a component of the notion of honor I grew up with. Nor is the requirement of avenging insults.
It looks like I focused on the wrong part of the comment; if I read you rightly now, then you are speaking to the difference between honor cultures and dignity cultures.
That other people are not a component is why the difference is sometimes called shame cultures vs. guilt cultures. In dignity/guilt cultures, when we do the right thing we just get the satisfaction of having done the right thing, and when we do the wrong thing we are supposed to feel guilty.
In honor/shame cultures, when people do the right thing they also get the respect of their community, and when they do the wrong thing they tend to be deliberately humiliated by them.
There’s another group of scholars that think of this entirely in terms of reputation because of the role other people play, but I haven’t read anything by them.
This is a very, very different concept of honor than the one I grew up with. I was taught that honor means doing what is right (ethical, moral), regardless of personal cost. It meant being unfailingly honest, always keeping your word, doing your duty, etc. How others perceived you was irrelevant. One example of this notion of honor is the case of Sir Thomas More, who was executed by Henry VIII because his conscience would not allow him to cooperate with Henry’s establishment of the Church of England. Another is the Dreyfus Affair and Colonel Georges Picquart, who suffered grave personal consequences for insisting on giving an honest report and refusing to go along with the framing of Alfred Dreyfus for espionage. (There’s a wonderful movie about this, called Prisoner of Honor.)
What you describe is not as different as it seems. Doing what is right regardless of personal cost fits exactly into the larger framework of honor. The question is mostly what exactly those right things to do are.
Sommers mostly refers to herders, but if we turn to history there is a larger group of cultures further along the same continuum: pastoralists. The best documented among them are the Mongols, and the stories of the Mongols are replete with extreme examples of this sort. For example, falling asleep on guard duty was punishable by death, yet when asked whether they had fallen asleep they famously would not lie and then be executed.
I used to believe that this sort of thing was the kind of routine exaggerations that often are told about enemies in order to make them more exotic or dangerous, but further reading has heavily updated me in favor of taking them seriously.
The point is that the right thing is always a matter of personal responsibility under the honor paradigm. The examples you provide fit the pattern perfectly; the difference is that Sir Thomas More identified with the Church and Colonel Picquart with the military in deciding what the right thing to do is.
From the OP: “honor requires recognition from others.” That’s not a component of the notion of honor I grew up with. Nor is the requirement of avenging insults.
It looks like I focused on the wrong part of the comment; if I read you rightly now, then you are speaking to the difference between honor cultures and dignity cultures.
That other people are not a component is why the difference is sometimes called shame cultures vs. guilt cultures. In dignity/guilt cultures, when we do the right thing we just get the satisfaction of having done the right thing, and when we do the wrong thing we are supposed to feel guilty.
In honor/shame cultures, when people do the right thing they also get the respect of their community, and when they do the wrong thing they tend to be deliberately humiliated by them.
There’s another group of scholars that think of this entirely in terms of reputation because of the role other people play, but I haven’t read anything by them.