The Sacred and the Social: Cultures of Honor and Violence

Abstract

Abstract It is a ritual for those who complain about the decline of our culture to point out all the trivial things that people have been killing their acquaintances, friends, and family members over recently. It’s almost never hard to find these examples. Open the newspaper and in a week one can pretty easily find an extensive list of things that one party deemed important enough to kill the other party over. Somewhere near the top of the list is going to be sexual jealousy, and in terms of male-on-male violence, you can add things like spilled beer, suspicious glances, escalated name calling contests, and stepped-on shoes. That’s the American list. Certainly, the lists of offenses that must be punished by death are going to vary from culture to culture, but they will have one thing in common. That is, many of the acts that led to a killing will probably seem quite trivial to outsiders.

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