DOUGLAS CAIRNS Honour and shame: modern controversies and ancient values When I began to work on honour and shame in ancient Greece in the late 1980s, the predominant view of honour among classicists was one drawn from studies of modern Mediterranean societies.1 On this view, honour was a scarce non-material commodity, pursued mainly by men in small-scale, face-to-face communities in more or less aggressive forms of zero-sum competition. For men, honour was intimately bound up with assertive, traditional forms of masculinity, and so was fundamentally related to female chastity, the source of such honour as women possessed and a crucial conduit through which men's honour was vulnerable. This model was felt to be typical of traditional Mediterranean societies, both Christian and Muslim. It put all the emphasis on the standards of society, on the public, visible nature of one's actions and their evaluation by their audience. Bourdieu's classic formulation was typical: 'The point of honour is the basis of a moral code of an individual who sees himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his existence, because the image he has of himself is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people.'2 On this view, honour has very specific normative character- istics; it belongs with values of a specific sort; it is characteristic only of some forms of social organisation; and it is associated with certain specific types of action, motivation, and personality. This approach to Mediterranean sociology no longer seems to enjoy much currency in its own field. But the view of honour that it promulgated lives on. An egregious example of the tendency to associate honour with a very specific set of values and behaviour is a 2006 volume by James Bowman.3 For Bowman, honour is an essentially primitive phenomenon: a matter of 'bravery, indomitability and the readiness to avenge insults ... for men' and 'chastity for women', it is 'always intimately related' to manhood.4 It involves identification with a specific group, and requires aggressive retaliation when the honour of that group is impugned or attacked. This kind of honour, which Bowman calls 'primitive honor', persists (he claims) unchanged in modern Islamic societies, because those societies themselves 'have
24 Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1 hardly changed or developed for millennia and remain different only in detail from the "primitive" cultures studied by anthropologists'.5 In the West, on the other hand, the notion of honour has gone through a series of transformations: in the earliest works of the Western literary canon, the Homeric poems, it exists in something like the primitive form still found in Muslim societies, but a tradition of 'scepticism' about honour arose in classical Greek and Roman thought, and Christianity exerted a strong pressure to moralise the notion that became increasingly strong in the Renaissance and reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, when honour had at its core an attachment to Christian morality, to personal integrity, to ideals of fair play, to good manners, and to patriotism.