Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man.Although anthropologists have dealt at length with the theme of honour and shame in the Mediterranean, the code of honour as such still awaits further unravelling. By combining structural with historical analysis, this article tries to demonstrate that the meaning of the horn-symbol as a disgraceful attribute of the deceived husband or cornute provides a key to an originally pastoral code of honour predicated upon virility and strength.My wish has always been to take seriously Durkheim's idea that the properties of classification systems derive from and are indeed properties of the social systems in which they are used (Douglas I975: 296).The problem as to why deceived husbands in European societies have been referred to, derisively, as cornutes, men who wear horns, has never been solved (cf. Brand I877; De Jorio I832; Elworthy I895; Cocchiara I932; Onians I95i). A recent study of gestures in western and southern Europe and the Mediterranean rehearses no fewer than fourteen different 'theories' on the symbolism of horns and the vertical horn-sign (Morris et al. I979). Although the authors have reasonable doubts about most of these explanations, they still believe that 'one day, some new evidence will come to light that will favour one above the rest' (1979: I2I). As will be shown, however, the problem has less to do with a scarcity of ethnographic data than with the mistake of separating a code from its context.Oddly enough, anthropologists writing on honour and shame in Mediterranean societies have fared no better than earlier folklorists and modern students of semiotics. Ignoring that 'the elements of symbolism are not things in themselves but "relations" organized in pairs and sets' (Leach I973: 48-9), their emphasis has been on horns as such, on horns as a phallic symbol, and on horns as attributes of the Devil (e.g. Pitt-Rivers I96I: i i6; I965: 46; Campbell I964: I52). This leaves the question regarding the implicit meaning of the cornute completely open.In the Mediterranean code of honour we are not concerned with horns as such, but with the horns of a specific animal, namely the billy-goat-a fact Man (N.S.) i6, 427-40

Seductions of the Bouzouki and the Brass Band: Transgressive Reflections on Mikis Theodorakis and Giuseppe Verdi

“…Although Verdi was not himself the author of his libretti, we do know that he chose his themes with passion and care (see, e.g., Toye 1931, 39–40). We may therefore legitimately see his narrative predilections following the path once described by Anton Blok (1981, 435–6) as a devolution of such values as the honour–shame complex toward the nation itself: national honour displaces the sexual honour of the villager, much as the nation-state absorbs the loyalty of kinship beyond that of the nuclear family. This was an appropriate trajectory for an active participant in, and emblematic figure of, the Risorgimento , the Italian struggle for independence and a unified nation-state.…”

Negotiating Honour and Shame in the Contemporary Moroccan Rif: A Review of Concepts and Literature

“…In particular, they emerge in pastoral (and some agricultural) communities which suffer from severe organisational problems and where competition over scarce resources -such as arable land, water and grazing rights -is rife (ibid.). Similarly, Block (1981) combined structural and historical analyses to argue that the horn symbol, representing the billy goat, can be linked to a pastoral code of honour predicated on the physical strength and virility of men. Historically, these communities functioned outside the reach of state control, and honour and shame codes developed as alternative politico-moral systems.…”

Transnational Political Cosmology: A Central Mediterranean Example

“…The transnational challenge that the Mediterranean posits becomes doubly relevant because it was in crossing that sea northward that segmentation theory and kinship studies encountered their main obstacles. Once in Europe, social anthropologists encountered resistance both from their non-Europeanist colleagues, who regarded Europe as a continent unfit for anthropological analysis, and from historians, who rejected the application of concepts deriving from the study of stateless societies in a continent that for them epitomized modernity, real history, and the state (Blok 1981: 435). That same state monopolized both honor as a national motivating value for political actions and the historicist accounts of national identity to justify defending that honor.…”