culture of honor
a cultural norm in a region, nation, or ethnic group prescribing immediate, definitive retribution as the preferred reaction to an insult or other transgression, particularly one that threatens a person’s reputation. Ethnographic studies suggest that cultures that subsist by herding typically attach more importance to honor and reputation than do people from agrarian societies, since a person in a herding culture who vociferously defends against threats is less likely to have his or her livelihood taken away by rustlers. This phenomenon seems to apply to the translocated descendants of such cultures as well. For example, Whites in the southern United States, who derive historically from Scotch-Irish herding societies, have been found to be more likely to hold values about honor and reputation and to respond to insults with swift action than are northern Whites descended from agrarian societies. A related concept is the subculture of violence, used by U.S.
criminologist Marvin Wolfgang (1924–1998) and Italian criminologist Franco Ferracuti to explain the relatively high rates of violent crime among certain minority populations in impoverished urban areas.