Honour and Social Context
Honour is a code of behaviour that defines the duties of an individual within a social group. Margaret Visser observes that in an honour-based society "a person is what he or she is in the eyes of other people". A code of honour differs from a legal code, also socially defined and concerned with justice, in that honour is implicit rather than explicit and objectified. Honour can also be distinguished from dignity, which Wordsworth assessed as measured against an individual's conscience, rather than against the judgement of a community.
In the early medieval period, a lord's or lady's honour was the group of manors or lands he or she held. "The word was first used indicating an estate which gave its holder dignity and status." For a person to say "on my honour" was not just an affirmation of his or her integrity and rank, but the veracity behind that phrase meant he or she was willing to offer up estates as pledge and guarantee.
The concept of honour appears to have declined in importance in the modern West. It has been replaced by conscience in the individual context, and by the rule of law and the rights and duties defined therein in a social context. Popular stereotypes would have it surviving more definitively in cultures that are more tradition-bound (e.g. Southern Italian, Polish, Persian, Turkish, Arab, Iberian, "Old South" or Dixie). Feudal or other agrarian societies, which focus upon land use and land ownership, may tend to "honour" more than do contemporary industrial societies. An emphasis on the importance of honour exists in such institutions as the military (serving officers may conduct a court of honour) and in organisations with a military ethos, such as Scouting organisations.
Honour in the case of females is frequently related, historically, to sexuality: preservation of "honour" equated primarily to maintenance of virginity of unattached women and to the exclusive monogamy of the remainder. One can speculate that feminism has changed some linguistic usage in this respect. Conceptions of honour vary widely between cultures; some cultures regard honour killings of (mostly female) members of one's own family as justified if the individuals have "defiled the family's honour" by marrying against the family's wishes, or even by being the victims of rape. These honour killings are generally seen in the West as a way of men using the culture of honour to control female sexuality.
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Famous quotes containing the words honour, social and/or context:
“The only thing of weight that can be said against modern honour is that it is directly opposite to religion. The one bids you bear injuries with patience, the other tells you if you don’t resent them, you are not fit to live.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourer’s fireplace ... will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.”
—Macmillan’s Magazine (London, September 1871)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)