Honour, History, and the History of Mediterranean Anthropology

The cultural syndrome of honour and shame, as conceptually developed by anthropologists working in the Mediterranean in the third quarter of the twentieth century, came under attack in the early 1980s, when it was dismissed as a mere “summation of ‘translated’ terms”. Very much in the same years, however, some historians began to use a notion of honour borrowed from anthropology to investigate in a fresh way family and gender relations in the past, suggesting that honour was strong and pervasive in the Mediterranean from Antiquity up to the recent processes of modernization. This raises questions of considerable significance for both anthropology and history, their interdisciplinary relations, and their epistemological status. We argue that, in order to understand why honour lost its grip in anthropology while remaining a fruitfully innovative concept in history, more attention should be paid to the relationships between the history of Mediterranean anthropology and the history of the societies and cultures anthropologists were studying.