We tend to think of honour cultures, like that one of the Samurai, as a thing of the past. However, they are still alive and might even be growing. While there are things about honour culture, like bravery and heroism, we admire, honour cultures certainly have their dark side too, including a propensity to violence and honour killings. In her book Rebel: My Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom (2022) Rahaf Mohammed describes her 2019 escape from Saudi Arabia where she thought she would have faced certain death as a lesbian who had brought shame over her family. The eighteen-year-old only made it as far as Bangkok where her passport was taken away and her father and brother caught up with her. She found herself trapped, barricaded in a hotel room. As men pounded on her door, the teenager decided to reach out to the world on Twitter – and the world answered. Her account gained forty-five thousand followers overnight and offered her a vital lifeline. She was taken under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and granted refugee status. Rahaf was lucky, she was granted asylum in Canada and lived to tell her tale, many girls aren’t.
Most people wouldn’t consider filicide ethical, and perhaps not even honorable suicide. They are certainly not adaptive from an evolutionary point of view, which is why they should be given special attention. Mark Moritz writes in ”A Critical Examination of Honour Cultures and Herding Societies in Africa (2008)”:
A feature of many honor cultures is that men are prepared to use violence and even die to defend their reputation as honorable men. Moreover, aggression in these specific contexts is institutionalized, regarded as legitimate and necessary by the society at large. Other features associated with many, but not all, honor cultures include a concern with the chastity of women, extreme vigilance about one's reputation and a sensitivity to insults, male autonomy, patrilineal kin groups, and assertive and often violent relations outside of the kin groups.
Richard Nisbett was one of the first psychologists to establish a connection between pastoralism and the Southern US honour culture that was made up mostly of Irish and Scottish immigrants with a background in herding:
Violence and the Culture of Honor: We believe that the most important explanation for southern violence is that much of the South has differed from the North in a very important economic respect and that this has carried with it profound cultural consequences. Thus the southern preference for violence stems from the fact that much of the South was a lawless, frontier region settled by people whose economy was originally based on herding. As we shall see, herding societies are typically characterized by having "cultures of honor" in which a threat to property or reputation is dealt with by violence.
Anthropologists generally tended to disagree with Nesbitt’s hypothesis. Nomadic pastoralists do share a belligerent culture that stems from livestock raiding with honour cultures, but honour killings and other features of honour cultures are absent. In fact, there is often considerably more freedom for women in pastoralist societies than in farming societies. Looking at a world map of honour killings, they typically occur in countries with a PAST history of dominant pastoralism (Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.), whereas honour killings are absent in countries like Mongolia.
Anthropologist Mark Moritz argued that honour cultures are not part of nomadic pastoralism, but of settled pastoralism, which he calls “peasant pastoralists”. One huge difference he cites is social embeddedness within a clan. When pastoralists settle down the traditional clannish ties tend to break down and honour tends to become associated with the closer family, which makes it much more personal. Also, sexual virtues tend to be farmer values rather than pastoralist values, which then get adopted by those peasant or sedentary pastoralists. So, honour cultures tend to arise where herder cultures are incorporated into farmer cultures. Moritz cites the case of Maroua, the provincial capital of the Far North Province in Cameroon, where one-third of the prison population in Maroua is in prison for stabbing to death someone who insulted their mother.
As paradoxical as it may sound, the flip side of having a high sense of honor (and shame) is having an increased risk of criminal offence. It is often said that Islam produces a culture of honor killings, but Islam also spread mostly among pastoralists (e.g. in Africa farmers tended to adopt Christianity whereas pastoralists tended to adopt Islam). Moreover, honour killings are not restricted to Islam. In 2017 Mafia Boss, Pino Scaduto, ordered his son to kill his sister. Maria Caterina Scaduto was having an extramarital affair with a member of the carabiniere, Italian militarised police for which she refused to end once it became known to her family. Her father was furious and, beyond the danger of her daughter informing the police, Mafiosos believe themselves to be men of honour which made the notion of his daughter’s infidelity completely unacceptable.
Tangney et al ( “Two faces of shame: The roles of shame and guilt in predicting recidivism” 2014) found that people who are more prone to feeling shame have higher recidivism than people who are more prone to feeling guilt:
Guilt proneness negatively and directly predicted reoffense in the 1st year after release; shame proneness did not. Further mediational modeling showed that shame proneness positively predicted recidivism via its robust link to externalization of blame. There remained a direct effect of shame on recidivism: Unimpeded by defensive externalization of blame, shame inhibited recidivism. Items assessing a motivation to hide were primarily responsible for this pattern. Overall, our results suggest that the pain of shame may have two faces—one with destructive potential and the other with constructive potential.
People who have a high sense of honour are therefore more likely to become both heroes (e.g. the firefighters who rescued people from twin towers) and criminals (e.g. mafiosi). The underlying evolutionary mechanism may be based on a high sense of status achievement and a high sense of having to protect one’s family and clan (in-group). We can see such patterns in
- Feudalism
- Aristocracy and oligarchy
- Mafia organisations
and probably is also behind America’s gun culture, which is based on the myth of the “real American” free cowboy (herder) as well as Putin’s reluctance to continue a senseless war. I am quite sure that Putin’s war on Ukraine bears a lot of resemblances to the Early–Hasley Feud (1865–1869), a family feud that took place immediately following the Civil War, in Bell County, Texas. It’s not about anything that can be explained by rationality, it’s all about honour.
For more information check out my book Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic
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