Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife Fighting in Nineteenth-Century Greece

THOMAS W. GALLANT

자료: American Historical Review,  http://www.arts.yorku.ca/hist/tgallant/documents/gallantknifefighting_000.pdf

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※ 메모: 

ON THE SWELTERING NIGHT OF JULY 26, 1830, Tonia Theodoros from the village of

Agios Theodoros on the island of Kerkyra brutally slashed the face of his fellow

villager Gioragachi Mokastiriotis. Theodoros then spit on his prostrate victim and

left the wine shop where the incident had occurred, while five other men, including

the proprietor Panos Landates, looked on. Ten days later, Constable Andreas Sallas - -

approached Theodoros, served him with an arrest warrant, and took him into

custody on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon. At his trial in police court

on August 28, the various versions of Theodoros's assault on Mokastiriotis were

recounted. There had been bad blood between the men for some time; no one was

quite sure why. That night at the bar, both had been drinking heavily when

Theodoros called Mokastiriotis a fool and a braggart. Mokastiriotis loudly replied

that he would rather be a fool than "the lord of a house full of Magdalenes."

Theodoros erupted from his chair, drew his pruning knife, and demanded that

Mokastiriotis stand and face him like a man. None of the other men in the room

intervened as the knife-fighters traded parries and thrusts. Finally, Theodoros with

a flick of his wrist delivered a telling blow that cut his victim from the tip of his chin

to halfway up his cheek. As the blood flowed, Mokastiriotis fell to his knees cursing

his assailant. When asked by the presiding magistrate at the police magistrate's

court in the town of Kerkyra why he started fighting, Theodoros sternly replied that

no man would call his wife and daughters whores and get away with it. His

reputation would not allow it. As a man, he would not stand for it. He was found

guilty, sentenced to forty days (less time served) in the House of Corrections at Fort

Abraham, fined three Ionian dollars, charged for court costs, and bound over to

keep the public tranquility.'

This vignette captures the three themes I address in this article: honor, masculinity, and violence. In anthropology, the literature on honor, or that cluster of

attitudes and attributes often glossed as honor, is large and important. Ethnographers

and anthropologists working in Greece have been early and critical contributors

to this body of work, and consequently Greece is often considered paradigmatic

of an "honor culture." While some works in this corpus indicate that honor

was part of a masculine cultural code that often required displays of aggressiveness,

few studies have actually discussed the role of violence in the ethos of honor.

Indeed, for most of this century, Greece has manifested remarkably low rates of

interpersonal violen~e.~

Historians working in other areas of Europe and the world have borrowed from

the rich anthropological honor literature in order to understand better the cultural

logic of male violence in the past. Prominent have been studies of the duel-a form

of ritual male-on-male violence that drew its cultural meaning from an ethic of

esteem or honor. Kevin McAleer in his recent study of the duel in Wilhelmine

Germany, for example, explicitly connected the two literatures, stating, "I hope to

challenge the conventional shibboleth of cultural anthropology that sees Mediterranean

societies as far more sensitized to the point d'honneur than their neighbors

to the north."3

However, historians have by and large related honor to the duel among members

of elite classes; few have tried to connect it to plebeian or peasant violence. There

seems to be a paradox: ethnographers have studied honor among peasants but did

not discern notable manifestations of interpersonal violence; historians have

studied interpersonal violence among elites and found it to be intimately connected

to honor. One element of this paradox has been that historians have not studied

honor among the lower orders, and they have been reluctant to accord the same

ritual status to plebeian violence as they do to upper-class dueling, even though they

been more than willing to see other forms of plebeian behavior as rooted in

culturally constructed rituak4 Another is that ethnographers have studied groups

in societies where levels of interpersonal violence regardless of class have plunged

to historic lows.5

This study aims to contribute to the existing scholarship by showing that plebeian violence in the past was quite prevalent, that it was often rooted in an ethic of

honor, that these forms were as ritualized and rule-bound as the aristocratic duel

and, indeed, should be considered a form of lower-class dueling. It aims to move

that literature forward by offering an explanation for why honor remained an

integral component of Greek men's identity while dueling violence ceased to be an

important element in the cultural construction of masculinity. It also shows that the

court system imposed by the British on the islands played a crucial role in the

transformation of men's contests over honor and status. By explicating how Greek

men retained honor as a cornerstone of masculinity but dissociated it from violence,

this article seeks to further our understanding of the reduction of interpersonal

violence noted so ubiquitously in the historical record.

***

"IN MANY PARTS OF THIS COUNTRY the knife," according to Charles K. Tuckerman,

U.S. consul to Greece during the 1860s, "is as quick as the t ~ n g u e . "T~h e Ionian

Islands, even though under the control of the British Colonial Office, were no

e~cept ionA.~c counts by contemporary observers and the abundant archival sources

of the criminal justice system bear this out. William Goodison, for example, noted

of the Ionians that the blade was "the means of directly prosecuting their revenge,"

and that all too frequently they were "given over to the license to raise the dark

knife and bloody stiletto against the breast of unoffending inn~cence."E~a sy

recourse to the dagger was commented on by nearly every other colonial officer or

traveler to the islands during the period of the British Prote~torate.~

An examination of police and court records during sixteen years of the

Protectorate suggests that knife fighting was a relatively common occ~rrence.

Based on my analyses, the average annual homicide rate on Kerkyra and Kefallenia

was 12.4 per 100,000, and the combined rate for homicide and attempted homicide

was 37.9 per 100,000.~O~f those recorded homicides, approximately 20 percent

were the result of knife fights. Both of these figures are substantially higher than the

comparable rates from elsewhere in rural Europe, such as France, England, Spain,

Germany, and Italy. Indeed, only mid-nineteenth-century rural Corsica manifested

a higher rate.12

However, the homicide and attempted homicide rates do not provide a truly

accurate picture of the prevalence of knife fighting among Ionian Island men. Most

episodes of dagger fighting did not result in a loss of life, nor did the criminal justice

system typically categorize or consider them as attempted homicides. Instead, for

reasons that will soon become apparent, knife fights were classified as simple assault

or assault with a deadly weapon. I recorded in the sixteen sample years 2,677

warrants or indictments for assault or assault with a deadly weapon. This translates

into a rate of 134 per 100,000. From this group, I selected 125 cases (5 percent) for

detailed investigation, a thorough analysis of the warrant, the police report, and the

trial transcript if the case went to court. Of the 125 assaults, 61 were knife fights. In

other words, in 48 percent of the recorded cases of assault, the offense involved

dueling with knives. Assuming that this ratio characterizes the entire sample, over

8,000 duels would have taken place during the period from 1817 to 1864. The

figures become even more revealing if we consider only assault with a deadly

weapon. There were 37 of these, of which 33 (89 percent) were knife fights.

***

The role of the courts, however, was the one difference between the rituals of

Greek plebeian knife duels and upper-class dueling that was truly distinctive.

Greeks embraced them, others eschewed them. While this in and of itself is an

insufficient basis for drawing a categorical distinction, it may suggest an avenue for

explaining the other major difference: the ending of the duel. Studies of the duel on

the Continent are remarkably consistent in concluding that it was the carnage of

World War I more than anything else that caused the duel to fall into disuse. As

Nye put it, "the duel perished in the trenches of the Western Front."52 Italy walked

a slightly different path, whereon it was the war and then the advent of fascist rule

that kept Italian liberals off the field of h0nor.5~ Britain, as so often happened,

marched to a different drummer. On Albion's isle, dueling had more or less come

to an end by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Contributing factors seem

to have been the democratization of the duel, which led to the practice ceasing

among the aristocracy, vigorous action of the state to curtail dueling in the military

(where it had been most prevalent), and a shift in masculine sensibilities among

middle-class men that transformed attitudes about violence.54 Edward L. Ayers has

proposed a complex explanation to account for the demise of the duel in the U.S.

South. He sees the Civil War acting in much the same way that World War I did in

Europe to generate a revulsion against violence, but he also suggests that

evangelicalism and the spread and adoption of a bourgeois business ethos from the

North to the South led to diminution of the importance of honor among the upper

class.55 As honor lost its saliency, dueling was diminished in importance.S6 The

cultural arguments proposed by Ayers and Simpson for the duel follow along the

lines of other scholars attempting to explain the general decline of violence in the

West, which all derive from Norbert Elias's idea of the "civilizing process."57 None

of these satisfactorily explains why Greek plebeian men stopped dueling when they did. There was no war that rocked their world. There was no evangelical religious

movement or a transformation of masculine sensibilities based on bourgeois values.

We have to seek, like Ayers and Simpson, a complex and multicausal explanation

for the demise of the working-class duel in ~ r k e c e ,a nd our explanation must

account for why the duel ended but honor remained.

***

From the beginning of the period I examined, the courtroom discourse was an

integral part of the knife duel, constituting, as I argued earlier, the third act in these

narratives. By incorporating the court into their daily dramas about honor and

masculinity, plebeian men bestowed legitimacy on it. The nobility had shown that

the courts could provide a vehicle for disputing reputations through the charge of

criminal slander, and plebeian men used this new venue to contest honor in an

ideological climate that was increasingly hostile to interpersonal violence. Thus, in

an act of social mimesis, some plebeian men opted for the docket over the blade.

For the reasons cited above-especially the confiscation of their knives and the

stiffer sentences imposed by judges-men continued to contest reputations in the

court of public opinion, but now, rather than being restricted solely to the enclaves

of male sociability-the wine shops and taverns-the site for their contests was the

Hall of Justice.

To be sure, the knife fight did not disappear, and the heightened stakes may even

have held an attraction for men who saw greater honor in greater risks. But the tide

had turned. Beginning around mid-century, more men who suffered the slings and

arrows of outrageous insults took their antagonist to court rather than cut his face.

By the 1880s, the assault rate on the islands had fallen from 134 to 27 per 100~000,

and by the 1920s, it fell even further to 8.7.77 The Eliasian civilizing process had

occurred, and the knife duel as a means of defending one's honor became a relic of

the past. Honor, however, did not.

ELIAS ARGUED THAT the culture of honor predominating in early modern Europe

was prone to violence precisely'because honor and violence were causally connected.

Men of honor fought, and they fought over honor. For him and for the

historians who have followed his lead, the duel was a perfect manifestation of this

connection. He argued further that the rise of a "bureaucratic ethos" during the

nineteenth century supplanted the ethic of honor and that alternative mechanisms

of dispute resolution arose. Their advent severed the connection between masculinity

and violence.78 Studies of the changing ideas about masculinity in the West

during the nineteenth century suggest that the civilizing of working-class men went

hand-in-hand with industrialization and urbanization. In the factory, men internalized

ideas about discipline and self-control; these were reinforced by the new civic

institutions that developed in the burgeoning cities of Western Europe and the

United States.79 New ideas about middle-class male gentility were rooted in the emerging white-collar profession^.^^ In this new world, "respectable" men were

assertive, not aggressive, and violence became u n a ~ c e p t a b l e .I~n ~t he southern

United States, the way of life of the aristocracy was markedly changed in the

postbellum period. What we see, then, in the areas where the honor-based duel

flourished, is that its demise was accompanied by radical and profound changes in

the material infrastructure of the dueling class. The cultural logic that had given

honor its privileged place in defining masculinity had changed, and honor disappeared

with the duel.

This study of plebeian violence in nineteenth-century Greece shows that honor

was a more malleable concept than has been previously allowed. In this case, the

ethic of honor persisted, but the intimate connection between it and violence

changed. What remained of plebeian violence and masculinity were their symbolic

manifestations, so well documented in mid-to-late twentieth-century ethnographies.

The Greek men studied by Campbell, Herzfeld, and other ethnographers still

contested status and reputation in a variety of ways but without the high incidence

of interpersonal bloodshed that I have documented in this study of knife dueling.

The marked decrease in masculine violence was not associated with a shift from an

ethos of honor to something else.