Honor.

• Author: Asad, Talal

Anthropologists of the Mediterranean region have written much on the topic of honor, but as Frank Stewart says, they have rarely done so with adequate precision. This essay is not only an admirable example of analytical skill, it also displays an impressive range of scholarship that is quite unusual among contemporary anthropologists. Stewart is equally at ease when he is citing the Arthurian romances and Icelandic Sagas, Conan Doyle's stories and Fielding's novels, Roman codes and Bedouin customary practices, Mediterranean ethnography, and Renaissance drama. But his most important source, and the one that orients his entire analysis, is nineteenth- and twentieth-century German jurisprudence. It is this literature that prompts his basic question, "what is honor?" and provides him with the answer that honor is a right, "the right to be treated as having a certain worth."

The book is divided into three parts. The first (and in my view the most fascinating) deals with European ideas of honor. The second part is an analysis of ideas of honor among the Bedouin of the Negev, whom Stewart has personally studied. The final part offers a comparison of European ideas with Bedouin ones.

Stewart begins by outlining the wide disagreement among scholars over how the notion of honor is to be understood, and points out that the reason for this disagreement is twofold: the wide - and historically shifting - meaning of the word "honor," and the fact that the concept of honor has been a part of very different ideologies. Indeed, one of the most important points made in the book is that in the West the concept underwent a number of crucial changes from roughly the twelfth to the nineteenth century: it came to be (a) objectified through personal experience, (b) based on notions of moral virtue, and (c) thought of as a right. It is this modern form of honor - which Stewart calls personal honor - that is the focus of the first part of the essay.

Personal honor, as a right to respect, is something that can be lost, and so every society that recognizes personal honor has rules about who can hold it, and how it can be defended or lost. The respect in question is claimed by an equal, and so Stewart calls it horizontal honor in contrast to the respect owed a superior, which is appropriately called vertical honor (or more familiarly, rank honor). Thus in every society there will be rules for the allocation of both horizontal and vertical types of honor - and also (in...