This includes discussion of definitions to be used in the course of the seminars, along with caveats about their use. Starting with a careful consideration of what we mean by “honor” and “shame” and by their proffered opposites, “integrity” and “guilt.” In a second time, we consider the terms listed in the proposal as tools for situating the discussion in historical time. All participants should provide a short statement in response to the suggested terms and concepts and are invited to suggest alternative concepts that can be discussed in the following panels.

• Primary Honour-Code: tribal warrior, “heroic.” One is not a “man” until he has killed another man. Honour here primarily zero-sum, based on shame/ disgrace/ defeat of rival. A blackened face must be washed in blood (duel, feud). Men gain, lose, regain honor; women have, must preserve honor which reflects on their men’s honor.
• Secondary Honour-Code: a system of public values according to which honour and shame are awarded that challenges major elements and practices of the primary code: previously honourable behaviour – in the case of the West, slaveholding, duelling, bullying, racism – become considered shameful.
• Honour Group: those whose opinions most count in granting and withdrawing honor, either because they control public opinion, or they supersede it. (In a schoolyard, the peer group is the honor group; the teacher the arbiter of public opinion.)
• Prime Divider Society: agro-literate societies, empires, in which public honor is bestowed upon a small dichotomous ruling elite (clerics and warriors), while the labouring classes (the vast majority) are in varying conditions of disgrace. Elites monopolize public honor in the form of legal privilege, control of the technology of communications, weaponry, and travel, and have access to royal court; commoners endure servile status and the disgrace of manual labor (serfdom). Most commoners in such societies live at subsistence (poverty) levels.
• Triumphalist vs Demotic religiosity: styles of “living one’s religion,” as opposed to formal beliefs to which one adheres. Triumphalist religiosity prizes the primary honor code and seeks visible dominance as proof of “truth”. Demotic offers a counter-culture of (secondary) values: dignity of manual labour,, egalitarian legal status, access to sacred scripture to all including commoners, penitence/introspection, forgiveness, empathy, modesty/humility. In demotic religiosity, visible dominance is either unimportant or explicitly to be avoided.
• Dignity Culture: (an ideal type of secondary code) honor goes to egalitarian and positive-sum behavior – unlike honor, everyone can have dignity. Fairness (equality before the law) replaces violence in dispute settlement (privilege to those with “honor” before the law). Dignity cultures are experiments in social organization that try to dismantle the prime divider and substitute secondary for primary honour codes, with both intended and unintended consequences.
• Shame vs Guilt: it will be difficult to do these volumes without settling on a reasonable, fittingly vague, but helpfully oriented definition of the difference between shame and guilt. For the time being, this important discussion remains open.
• Prime Divider: The overwhelming majority of civilized polities for the last 5000 years, from the ancient empires of the iron age to the early modern period in Europe to today’s conditions in much of the world, are structured along a fundamental fissure — a prime divider — between elites and commoners that structures most of the features of political and social life in basic ways. These societies are based on the political axiom “rule or be ruled” and permit even require the use of violence to defend one’s honor.
• Demotic: In the sense of popular, but rather than condescending (images the bible of the illiterate), empowering (universal literacy).
• Hurtado de Mendoza et al. (2010): Emotion terms, category structure, and the problem of translation: The case of shame and verguenza. Cognition and Emotion 24, p. 661-680.
• Landes (2018): Tribal Honor
• Burkhart (2018):The Unwieldy Phenomenon of Honour/Shame (Ehre/Schande)

(ca. 150,000 BCE – present): adaptive foundations of cultural traits. Evolutionary role of social emotions, and specifically of honor and shame, in shaping both human physionomy and emotions and their societies. Limbic, mimetic, invidious impulses; oneidophobia (overriding [limbic] fear of public blame/humiliation), socialization/education. Relevance of these foundations for honor/shame dynamics in historical times?

• Fessler (2007): From Appeasement to Conformity
• Jacquet, Hauert, Traulsen, Milinski (2011): Shame and honour drive cooperation

the establishment of primary honor groups and codes, honor codes in tribal vs. prime-divider societies, gender differentiation in warrior tribes. Furthermore we want to review and discuss theories on honor and shame and their possible application to explain historical concepts of these emotions.

• Fassin, Didier (Hg.) (2012): A Companion to Moral Anthropology: Wiley-Blackwell
• Burkhart (2018): Paradoxical Communication in the Ballad Hasanaginica

Counter-traditions that reinterpret honor and challenge the primary honor-code: philosophy (Gyges ring non-effect), demotic religiosity (guilt). The moral dilemma: public honor and private guilt vs. public shame and private integrity. In this panel we want to review and discuss theories on shame, guilt and dignity in their secular and religious dimension and identify related historical concepts.

• Katchadourian (2009): Guilt: the bite of conscience, chapter 1: guilt and its neighbours
• Devereaux, Simon and Paul Griffiths (eds) (2004) Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English. London: Palgrave Macmillan
• Groebner, Valentin (1995) Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honor in the Late Medieval Town. English trans. Pamela Selwyn. History Workshop Journal 40, 1–15.
• Braithwaite, John (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Ingram, Martin (1999) History of Sin or History of Crime? The Regulation of Personal Morality in England 1450–1750, in Heinz Schilling (ed.) Institutionen, Instrumente und Akteure sozialer Kontrolle und Disziplinierung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 87–103.
• Ingram, Martin (2003) Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lidman, Satu (2018) Ambivalent Fatherhood: On Disobedience and Assaults Against Parental Authority in Munich in the Early Seventeenth Century, in Marianna Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds) World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence. Parricide and Violence Against Parents throughout History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 171–190.
• Lidman, Satu (2013) Violence or Justice? Gender-Specific Structures and Strategies in Early Modern Europe, in Marianna Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Tovio (ed.) Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 238–260.
• Matikainen, Olli and Satu Lidman (eds) (2014) Morality, Crime and Social Control in Europe 1500–1900. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
• Österberg, Eva and Dag Lindström (1988) Crime and Social Control in Medieval and Early Modern Swedish Towns. Uppsala: University of Uppsala.
• Schwerhoff, Gerd (2004) Social Control of Violence, Violence as Social Control: The Case of Early Modern Germany, in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds) Social Control in Europe 1500–1800, vol I. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 220–246.
• Strasser, Ulrike (2004) State of Virginity. Gender, Religion and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

What do we know about honor and shame dynamics in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel and Greece? What was the importance of those concepts for the societies and how important was religion and monotheism in shaping the dynamical relationship between them? We want to look at honor in the Roman Empire and will try to better understand the gendered concepts of honor and shame in the Mediterranean.

• Herzfeld, M. (1980): Honour and shame: problems in the comparative analysis of moral systems, Man (N.S.), 15, S. 339-351.
• Landes (2018): Judah and Tamar and the History of Honor.
• Nojima, Kunio (2011): Ehre und Schande in Kulturanthropologie und biblischer Theologie

This panel is devoted to a period where concepts of honor and shame played a crucial role in structuring the society and we can observe overlapping and even opposing honor-codes: prayers vs warriors (crusades), honor clashes (Gregory VII/Henry IV), literacy, demotic textual (apostolic) communities, commoner-elite discourses (when Adam delved and Eve span… vs. laborers disgraced), noble and urban solidarities and honors, rites of violence, public penance and shaming.

• Owen, Morfydd E. (1980): Shame and reparation: womans place in the kin, in: The Welsh Law of Women. Studies presented to Prof. Daniel A Binchy on his eightieth Birthday 3. June 1980, ed. by Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen, Cardiff, p. 40-68, here 49: “The three shames of a girl are: One is that her father tells her, I have given you  to a husband, the second is, when she first goes to bed to her husband, the third is when she first rises from the bed to the midst of people. For the giving, her amobr is paid. For her virginity her cowyll; for her shame her egweddi.”

In the later middle ages honor and shame continued to play a crucial role in structuring the society and there is good reason to believe that honor and shame have become the primary cornerstones of social life around 1500. Literacy and individualism, Shakespeare’s plays and art reflects the extraordinary importance of honor and shame in this period

• Sère\Wettlaufer (2013): Shame between punishment and penance (Introduction)

Reason as challenge to honor, the triumph of civic honor, dueling laws, punishments, (Montesquieu), individual autonomy (Kant), economic relations and the abatement of aristocratic honor, free speech and inquiry, public self-criticism, city of letters, universities, capitalism, dismantling the prime divider, revolution as a secondary honor code.

• Zeilinger, Florian (2016): Cases concerning the restoration of honor in supplications filed by subjects at the Aulic Council under the reign of Emperor Rudolf II (Summary, 4 Pages)
  diploma thesis, Graz, Austria.

In this panel we want to discuss possible pathways towards a cultural history of honor and shame in Modernity. Topic cover Slavery in the American South, Communism, journalism and honor (Dreyfus duels), vestiges of primary honor-shame (WWI). 

• Greenberg (1990): The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in Antebellum South.
• Kilday/Nash (2017): Shame and Modernity in Britain 1890 to the Present.

From shame-guilt dichotomy as key to triumphant democratic capitalism (post WWII) to cultural relativity and cognitive egocentrism, immigration, gender and honor-shame, post-modernism and radical anti-shame, clash of primary and secondary honor codes, return of honor-shame sensibilities (free speech and safe spaces).

• Bowman, James (2006): Honor. A history
• Lethen, Helmut (1994): Verhaltenslehre der Kälte, Stuttgart: Suhrkamp.
• Lethen, Helmut (2002): Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, University of California Press.

How can approaches from psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, gender studies and other fields integrate and support a collective attempt of a cultural history of honor and shame?

• Butler, Sara M. (2007): The Language of Abuse. Marital Violence in Later Medieval England. Leiden: Brill.
• Heijden, Manon van der (2004): Punishment versus Reconciliation. Marriage Control in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Holland, in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds) Social Control in Europe 1500–1800, vol I. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 55-77.
• Douglas, Raymond M. (2016): On Being Raped. Boston: Beacon Press 2016.
• Ehrlich, Susan (2001): Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London/New York: Routledge.
• Fox, Vivian C. (2002): Historical Perspectives on Violence against Women. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 4(1), 15-34.
• Freedman, Estelle B. (2013) Redefining Rape. Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  Hong, Tuuli (2014): Discourses on Honour-Related Violence in Finnish Policy Documents. Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 1-16. doi:10.1080/08038740.2014.964648.
• Husso, Marita, Tuija Virkki, Marianne Notko, Helena Hirvonen and Jari Eilola (eds) (2017) Interpersonal Violence. Differences and Connections. New York: Routledge.
• Liliequist, Jonas (2011): Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century. Gender and History 1, 1-25.
• Muravyeva, Marianna (2013): “A King in his own Household”: Domestic Discipline and Family Violence in Early Modern Europe Reconsidered, in: Marianna Muravyeva (ed.) The History of the Family vol 18: 3. London/New York: Routledge, 227-237.
• Wikan, Unni (2008): In Honor of Fadime. Murder and Shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

.

Critical assessment on what we achieved. On what did we agree and disagree? Is it possible to write a deep history of honour and shame? Can we confine the topic to Western history? Where do we want to go from here? What would be the best way to carry out the project of a cultural history of honor and shame? What is the target group? Can we reach a “memorandum of understanding” of honor and shame in cultural history? Planning for the digital archive of honor and shame in cultural history. Collecting names and institutions that could contribute. Labelling volumes and sketching a table of contents. Size and scope, style and embedding.

…