Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean - Terje Stordalen
18. Honor, Shame and Hospitality: The Distribution of Power in the Premodern Levant
Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean - Terje Stordalen
Eveline van der Steen [+]
Independent Scholar
Description
The chapter makes a claim for a particular resilience in Levantine cultural production associated to local tradition and kinship structures. In particular, in her treatment of hospitality, honor and shame in the Levant, the author argues that sources from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries reflect how traditional values associated to local discourse (cf. Stordalen in the introduction) exerted considerable cultural and political influence long after tribal social discourse in the Levant had entered a modern pace. The author then argues for utilizing nineteenth century honor and shame practices as a heuristic prism for reading Levantine sources from the Iron Age.