ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the primary honor code of tribal warrior societies, focusing on the role of self-help justice in shaping key elements of those societies: clan loyalty/solidarity, revenge killings, alpha male military prowess, the overriding importance of avoiding shame (lying) and gaining honor (shedding blood), egalitarian brotherhood and anti-monarchy, gender relations shaped by public male dominance, and religious traditions and religiosities of military might (triumphalism). It then considers how honor “mutates” with the advent of stratified societies (monarchy, aristocracy, priesthood) in which the egalitarian relations among males cedes to a hierarchy in which everyone has a superior. Most importantly, this cleaves the body social into honorable elites who do not work, and stigmatized commoners, whose manual labor marks them as dishonored. Honor then becomes a marker of superiority rather than equality, producing a constant struggle within each group for some form of power/honor/ascendance. This includes various contenders (warrior/literati, men/women, nobility/aristocracy, merchants/farmers/laborers). On a religious plane, this struggle for honor expresses itself in holy war (Jihad Crusade), supersessionism (claim to monopoly on salvation), and inquisition (branding heretics).
