Slime had they for mortar

“And slime had they for mortar” Genesis 11:3

The last blog post was about a major transition in evolution, the origin of social insect colonies, in which individual ants and bees work together to make up something like a superorganism. Around the same time that this was happening we find evidence for another venture in higher-level evolution, the slime molds. (The evidence is in the form of a recently discovered 100 million year old fossil, although slime molds were probably around long before this.)

John Tyler Bonner, who died in 2019, spent 70 years of a very long life studying cellular slime molds. Here are some weirdly beautiful movies he made. Cellular slime molds switch between being single cell organisms and multicellular organisms. Most of the time they live alone, looking and acting much like non-social amoebae. But when times get tough, and local food resources are exhausted, the cells start sending out chemical signals indicating they are ready to shift to another state. Individual cells aggregate to form a mass, which is capable of moving around, seeking out new food sources, even learning. (In cellular slime molds, cells retain their identity as separate cells. In plasmodial slime molds, the cells merge to form one super cell.) The mass may raise up a fruiting body atop a stem. The spores in the fruiting body may blow away, perhaps being carried some distance to a better home, where the survivors disperse and feast as the cycle begins again. There is an interesting sociobiological puzzle here: the cells forming the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the sake of the spore cells. This is probably an instance of kin selection.

Both social insects and slime molds may carry lessons for human social life, which, on a large scale, is radically different from the social life of our primate near relations. Both social insects and humans commonly build enormous social organizations with high levels of cooperation. These organizations are too large for their members to recognize one another as individuals. Instead they rely on signals to show others that they are the right sort. With social insects, these are mostly chemical signals. With humans these are the various insignia – letters of commission, uniforms, shibboleths, etc. – that mark the bearer as the occupant of a particular social role, independently of his personal character. (“You salute the uniform, not the man.”) For more on this topic, check out Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.

And, as with slime molds, humans seem to go through characteristic alternations in their social lives, on a time scale of multiple generations. With slime molds there is an alternation between solitary and social phases. With humans there is an alternation between phases of lesser and greater social solidarity (asabiya). Borrowing from Max Weber, we might call this an alternation between routine and charisma. In phases of routine, people learn the rules of their society, and do their best to get ahead by following the rules, or working around them. But in times of crisis, the old ways no longer serve. While slime molds secrete pheromones to instigate aggregation in hard times, humans secrete cosmologies. Prophets arise, with visions of a new order, taking their cues from divine visions, or the Book of Daniel or Revelations, or theories of political economy or race science. The great majority of such projects are stillborn, but occasionally one succeeds, subduing doubters and infidels, overthrowing the established order or leading a chosen people to a new land. The world we live in – the civilizational landscape of Eurasia, the cultural geography of the United States (I write this in Salt Lake City, Utah) – is in some degree the legacy of such projects.

The quotation above from Genesis 11:3 was used by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in the early years of the Cold War, still worth reading today.

Related, here’s me on the sociobiology of “ethnic group selection.”

Saddam’s kin

April 2003 – April 2005

We’re now taking history at the rate of around two years a day, getting close to one year a day on December 31.

After the American-led invasion of Iraq, it took more than eight months before Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of the country, was captured, on December 13, 2003. Tracking down Saddam was less a matter of deploying cutting-edge super-technology, and more a matter of rediscovering basic social anthropology. Here is a news story on the topic.

The gist is that two junior American military intelligence analysts began with a long list of about 9,000 names. They gradually narrowed this down to a “Mongo List” (it’s classified) of about 300 people, tightly interconnected by blood and marriage, who were involved in the resistance and connected with Saddam. Rounding up and interrogating central figures on the list ultimately led to Saddam himself. This approach was successful because Saddam’s immediate power base was his clan and kin.

In previous blogposts we have considered how different Eurasian civilizations developed different compromises between state power, established religion, and patrilineal clans. In the Middle East, clan-based politics have continued to be important right up to the present. In China, a millennia-old tradition of patriarchal clan authority was violently assaulted in the course of the Communist Revolution. In Europe, the move away from clan-based politics came much earlier. The decline of royal and aristocratic rule in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and the rise of mass politics further weakened the rule of the clan (except insofar as the nation itself operated as a kind of imagined kin group). Hence the contrast between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Western Europe’s premier Evil Dictatorship: compiling a “Mongo List” of 300 of Hitler’s closest relations by blood and marriage wouldn’t get you far in understanding Nazi rule.

Here’s a valuable book on The Rule of the Clan, still relevant to the present.

Europe of nations

December 1990– August 1993

The 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union was not widely anticipated. Academic Sovietologists were probably less likely than knowledgeable non-academics to anticipate that the Union was not going to last. One of the small number of people who got it right was public intellectual (and long-time Senator from New York) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He argued a decade earlier that the Soviet system faced serious economic problems and that ethnic divisions were likely to lead to a collapse of the Union, as they had to earlier colonial empires like the British.

Being of Irish ancestry helped Moynihan to appreciate the continuing importance of ethnicity and nationalism under the cover of universalist ideologies. As warfare diminished in importance over the later twentieth century, the earlier Orwellian nightmare of a world divided into a few warring super-states receded, and an older vision of a Europe of nations revived. In 1900, neither Ireland, nor Poland, nor the Czech Republic was an independent country; by 2000 they were all running their own affairs – not because they built unstoppable military machines, but because they mobilized feelings of imagined community.

However there was a dark side to the return to nationalism. The newly independent nations of Eastern Europe were successful in resolving older border conflicts partly owing to a wave of mass killing and mass expulsions during and after the Second World War that tidied up the ethnic map. In Yugoslavia, where different nationalities were still heavily intermingled, the return to nationalism resulted in a civil war that killed about 130,000 people, and introduced the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to the language.

At the time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw pact, and of communism is Eastern Europe, was widely seen as the decisive victory of one ideology – liberal capitalist democracy – over another. As it has turned out however, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe did not represent The End of History, even European history. Nationalism helped finish off the Soviet Empire; more recently it has emerged as a challenge to the multinational institutions of the West, NATO and the European Union.

On a scholarly note: Is ethnic nationalism an expression in the modern world of an evolved human psychology, a psychology shaped by the process of kin selection, as some scholars have argued? I considered the matter in an article, Kin selection and ethnic group selection (and here’s a blog post). The short answer: it’s complicated. Here’s my conclusion to the paper

Both the study of prehistory and political psychology are changing rapidly in the face of new evidence from biology, especially genetics. It would be intellectually satisfying if we could integrate these findings under the heading of an already existing theory, by equating ethnicity with kinship and applying kin selection theory. But we’ve seen that this won’t work. Ethnicity, like kinship, may have to do with shared genes. There may even be such a thing as ethnic nepotism. But an evolutionary theory of ethnicity – even the barebones theory presented here – has to be something more than the theory of kin selection, because of the way ethnicity is entangled with some of the most complicated aspects of human sociality: norms, rules, and political ideals, and their connection with large-scale population processes.

The veil

April 1978 –September 1981

From Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi.

Before the Iranian Revolution, a number of Western scholars wrote books attempting to develop general theories of revolution. Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is an early classic in the genre, treating different political trajectories – liberal, reactionary, and communist – as the outcome of different bargains between landowners, peasants, and bourgeoisie. Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions covers some of the same ground with an added focus on states and war-making.

But the class-centered theories that these authors develop don’t do a very good job of accounting for the Iranian Revolution or broader political currents in the Islamic world. It’s difficult to map Middle Eastern political movements onto a Left-Right spectrum. And both democracy and communism made far less headway in the Middle East than in either Latin America or East Asia. Nor do the class-based theories have much to say about gender relations and patriarchy, major issues in Islamic politics.

One of our themes in the past few months of Logarithmic History has been how the major civilizations of Eurasia have found different ways of combining patrilineal clans, state formation, and major world religions. From this perspective, the Islamic world is distinctive in several respects. The custom of marriage within the patrilineage (stemming from a culture of honor long predating Islam in the Near East, but spread far and wide by Muslim conquests) probably contributes to making the Muslim Middle East exceptionally fragmentary and fissiparous. And Islam has been exceptionally successful in overriding alternative identities based on nationality and class. Today for example, according to surveys, most Pakistani Muslims think of themselves as Muslims first and Pakistanis second, while most Indian Hindus think of themselves as Indians first and Hindus second. Michael Cook’s Ancient Religions, Modern Politics makes the case for Muslim exceptionalism in some detail in comparing the Islamic world with Hindu India and Catholic Latin America.

Half the sky

December 1947 – January 1953

Chinese state patriarchy – the alliance of the Emperor and his officials with patrilineal extended families and clans and patriarchal authority, under the sign of Confucius – was extraordinarily resilient. Over the course of several thousand years, it bounced back again and again in the face of foreign invasions, and neutered potentially disturbing influences like Buddhism and Christianity and the growth of mercantile wealth. It was finally severely weakened, if not quite eliminated, in the twentieth century. Chinese intellectuals, including the student reformers of the May 4^th movement, regarded the traditional Chinese family system as a source of backwardness, which would have to be overthrown for China to take its rightful place among the world’s powers. After the Chinese Communists took over in 1949, they promulgated a revolutionary new marriage law (1950), which stated, in part

The feudal marriage system, which is based on arbitrary and compulsory arrangements and the superiority of man over women and ignores the children’s interests, shall be abolished.

The New Democratic marriage system, which is based on the free choice of partners, on monogamy, on equal rights for both sexes, and on protection of the lawful interests of women and children shall be put into effect.

Bigamy, concubinage, child betrothal, interference with the re-marriages of widows, and the exaction of money or gifts in connection with marriages, shall be prohibited.

Marriage shall be based on the complete willingness of the two parties. Neither party shall use compulsion, and no third party shall be allowed to interfere.

(The law, however, allowed traditional rules of exogamy to stand. These required people to marry outside their clan.) A campaign began, launched in 1953, to enforce the new law. The Communists in China would prove willing to use extraordinary violence to attack old ways, including a kinship system that stood in the way of new forms of state power.

Big in Japan, continued

The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit…they are just a heap of loose sand. But the Japanese are sticky rice.Sun Yat Sen

Japan is an interesting case when you consider different kinship systems of Eurasia, which we’ve been doing on this blog, and which Joe Henrich does in his recent book, The WEIRDest People in the World How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. (See also the blogger and tweeter hbdchick.) Language provides some hints: Japanese kin terminology is very much like kin terminology in languages in the post-Roman West, including English. The important distinction is between lineal and collateral kin, not between patrilineal and non-patrilineal, or parallel and cross. 

Japan is different not only in terminology but in social organization from much of Asia. There is a broad geographic pattern here. Across a band of territories running from the Middle East through India to China, states developed in conjunction with patrilineal descent groups. By contrast, in northern Eurasia, and its western and eastern periphery, such groups were not as strongly developed. I wrote a paper once tracing the “deep history” of this and other macro-geographic contrasts in kinship systems. (I should caution that parts of the prehistory need updating.) The figure shows the contrast between a strongly unilinear and patricentric Middle Old World culture area, and a strongly bilateral North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area (i.e. without strong descent groups).

And here is a related take on the topic. Two economists show that measures of “kinship intensity” fall off with increasing distance from two early centers of agricultural and sociopolitical innovation in the Near East and China. While major world religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, shaped patterns of kinship and marriage in Eurasia, they were apparently elaborating on earlier foundations.

Feudal society in Western Europe and Japan depended on non-kin-based personal ties. This may have facilitated the later development of non-kin-based institutions like the public corporation and the nation-state. Certainly many Chinese, like Sun Yat Sen, were aware of the difference in social cohesion between their country and Japan.

Also worth reading on this (and many other topics) is anthropologist Alan MacFarlane, whose early work argued that English individualism has roots going back long before the Industrial Revolution, and whose more recent work has been concerned with comparing England and Japan, with what made Japan different from the rest of Asia.

Inbreeding depression

“Let others wage war. Thou, happy Austria, marry” (a description of Habsburg marriage policy). And here’s what “30 Rock” had to say about the Habsburgs, marriage and inbreeding. (Note: if Jenna Moroni, the blonde character in the clip, had managed to procreate with the miserably inbred last Habsburg heir, their kids would have turned out fine, not inbred at all.)

Human inbreeding has a genetic side, which favors outbreeding, at least within the species. Here’s a recent article showing that inbreeding is associated with a wide range of deleterious consequences, including reductions in stature, fertility, and mental ability. But inbreeding also has a political side, which may favor a balance between outmarriage (to make new alliances), and in-marriage (to conserve old alliances, and keep land and honor within the family).

The Habsburgs played the political game adroitly, putting together an enormous empire, partly by war, but partly by astute dynastic marriages. The Habsburg domains were so unwieldy that after the death of Charles V in 1558, they were divided between two branches of the family. Both sections were huge. The map below doesn’t even show the Habsburg possessions outside Europe, in Spanish America and the Far East.

By 1700, however, genetics caught up with the Habsburgs. The Spanish Habsburg line ended with Charles II, who was grossly disabled, physically and mentally. He was also impotent, and left no heirs. A recent calculation shows that, as a result of generation of in-marriage, Charles II had a coefficient of inbreeding of .254. For comparison, a child of full sibling incest will have a coefficient of inbreeding of .25!

A cycle of Cathay

1108 – 1158 CE

The innovations which make their appearance in East Asia round about the year 1000 … form such a coherent and extensive whole that we have to yield to the evidence: at this period, the Chinese world experienced a real transformation. … The analogies [with the European Renaissance] are numerous – the return to the classical tradition, the diffusion of knowledge, the upsurge of science and technology (printing, explosives, advance in seafaring techniques, the clock with escapement …), a new philosophy, and a new view of the world. … There is not a single sector of political, social or economic life in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries which does not show evidence of radical changes in comparison with earlier ages. It is not simply a matter of a change of scale (increase in population, general expansion of production, development of internal and external trade) but of a change of character. Political habits, society, the relations between town and country, and economic patterns are quite different from what they had been. … A new world had been born.

Jacques Gernet. A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 298-300

Scholars contemplating the sweeping economic, social, and political transformation of China under the Song dynasty (960-1279) seem compelled to draw analogies with later dramatic occurrences in Europe – with the Renaissance (as in the quote above) or with the Economic Revolution in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

The changes are dramatic. Population roughly doubles, from about 50 million to about 100 million. Cities grow. Both internal and external trade boom. The division of labor advances, with different households and different parts of the country specializing in “goods such as rice, wheat, lighting oil, candles, dyes, oranges, litchi nuts, vegetables, sugar and sugarcane, lumber, cattle, fish, sheep, paper, lacquer, textiles and iron.” In a number of fields of technology – iron production, shipbuilding – China reaches heights which the West will not attain for many centuries.

With changes in the economy come changes in the relation between society and state. Taxes come to be mostly collected in cash rather than kind. Eventually revenues from taxes on commerce, including excise taxes and state monopolies, will greatly exceed those from land tax. A Council of State will put constitutional checks on the power of the emperor.

Yet Imperial China will ultimately follow a different, less dramatic developmental pathway than Europe. Some reasons why:

Missing Greek science and math. The Greeks figured out the shape of the Earth (it’s a sphere) by the fourth century BCE, and Eratosthenes produced a fairly good estimate of its circumference in the third century BCE. The news spread: educated Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages knew the earth was round. Remarkably, however, China didn’t get the message, or didn’t pay it much attention. The standard cosmological model in China was a round heavens above a flat, square Earth, until Jesuits in the seventeenth century convinced the literati otherwise. And, while China had a sophisticated mathematical tradition (including an ingenious method of solving systems of linear equations with rods on a counting board, equivalent to Gaussian elimination), the massive mathematical legacy of the Greeks didn’t get that far. In his recent history of Greek mathematics, Reviel Netz argues that this alone is enough to explain the “Needham question” of why China did not produce a scientific revolution.

Church, state, and kin. Europe and China arrived at very different bargains between an imported ascetic otherworldly religious tradition, an imperial state, and patrilineal kin groups.

“Without the towering synthesis of the Principia there would have been no Newtonianism to define the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguably no Enlightenment, and a very different trajectory to modern history. But, working backward, without Galileo and Kepler, there would have been no Principia, and … both Kepler and Galileo would have been strictly impossible without conic sections. … Kepler and Galileo, and their entire generation turned to conic sections because they had Archimedes. … Conic sections … emerged exactly once in history – as the parting shot of the generation of Archytas and as the central theme of the generation of Archimedes. Take away these two generations and you take away the tools with which to make a Newton. … Europe, rather than China or India, produced the scientific revolution because, unlike the other major civilizations, Europe had the resources of Greek mathematics”

A New History of Greek Mathematics pp. 497 et. seq.

The nomad brake. By 1000, Western Europe has largely tamed its barbarians, folding them into a settled, stratified, Christian society. But the civilized folk bordering the Eurasian steppe, in Eastern Europe and continental Asia, are in for a rougher ride. During the whole Song period, China faces a threat from nomads to the north. In the Northern Song period (960-1126), the Khitan empire, founded by steppe nomads, occupies Mongolia, Manchuria, and part of northern China. In the Southern Song period (1127-1279), the Song lose all of northern China to a new barbarian dynasty, the Jin. Finally, the Song dynasty ends when all of China is conquered by the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his heirs, with the loss of about a third of the population. For all the wealth and sophistication of the Song, the succeeding native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, does not regard them as a model to be emulated.

Rice economics. Rice is the main food crop in southern China, the most populous and developed part of the country. Here’s a basic fact about rice versus wheat production (hat-tip pseudoerasmus): diminishing marginal returns to labor are less pronounced with rice than wheat. In other words, with rice, you can produce a lot more if you’re willing to put in a lot more work. With wheat, you more quickly reach a point where additional labor yields little additional production. This simple fact has far-reaching implications. Imagine an economy with two sectors, agriculture and manufacturing. And imagine that population expands up to a Malthusian limit. Under these assumptions, and given standard economic reasoning, it makes a big difference whether the principal crop is rice or wheat. With rice (diminishing marginal returns less pronounced), equilibrium population density is greater, output per capita is less, and more of the labor force is in agriculture, less in manufacturing.

So an economic model incorporating information about labor productivity of rice and wheat seems to account for some basic differences between China and the West. But rice cultivation may have more subtle implications.

Rice psychology. An older generation of humanist scholars was willing to generalize about Chinese thinking.

It is quite clear to all those who have been in contact with this world that it is quite different from the one in which we ourselves have been moulded. … China does not know the transcendent truths, the idea of good in itself, the notion of property in the strict sense of the term. She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction of mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality. … Chinese thought does not proceed from an analysis of language. It is based on the handling of signs with opposing and complementary values.

Gernet p. 29

Within the social sciences, sweeping pronouncements like this are suspect. To hard-headed materialists and quants they look hopelessly impressionistic and unscientific. To post-colonialist critical theorists, they reek of old-fashioned, condescending Orientalism. But there is now a substantial body of research demonstrating real differences in cognitive style across cultures, and between the West and China (and other East Asian societies), in line with the quotation above.

Of note here: there is also regional variation within China. Rice paddy farming requires high levels of cooperation, including joint work keeping up irrigation systems, and reciprocal labor exchanges. And research shows that there are differences in psychology as well between wheat and rice growing regions in China. Chinese from rice growing regions are more inclined to holistic, context dependent thinking. Chinese from wheat growing regions have a more independent, individualizing cognitive style. In other words, the expansion of rice cultivation in China may have reinforced some of its characteristic cognitive inclinations.

In conclusion: the history of the Song period poses in particularly clear form the “Needham puzzle” of why the Industrial Revolution did not originate in China. The answer, it seems, is complicated, combining (at least) political and social responses to external threat, the nature of agricultural economies, and more intangible (but still measurable) differences in intellectual traditions and cognitive style.

I now pronounce you

734 – 804 CE

Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800, a collaboration between Church and State. A particular division of power between secular and religious authorities would define European society for many centuries. 

On this blog I pay particular attention to kinship systems. They deserve this attention: the study of kinship is the most important contribution of cultural anthropology to the social sciences. And while kinship can seem like a recondite, specialized topic, I would argue that it is important for understanding not just small scale, tribal, “kin based” societies, but the major civilizations of Eurasia as well. Europe ­– specifically Western Christendom – followed a particular path in the development of kinship and family life. The Western Church prohibited cousin marriage, divorce and polygamy, and encouraged the breakup of extended families, and clans. Unusually among major civilization, Christian marriage depended on the consent of both groom and bride, rather than being arranged by parents (at least below the level of royalty and high aristocracy), resulting in a shift in power from older to younger generations, and probably encouraging the accumulation of physical and human capital by young couples.

There is evidence that modern Westerners, the W.E.I.R.D (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), have a distinctive cognitive style, relatively individualistic and context-independent. The roots of this distinctive psychology may go back to the Middle Ages. This argument is made in several recent articles and a book from Joe Henrich and co-workers. A few observations: religion isn’t everything; differences in kinship systemsand intellectual style between Europe and China are evident well before the advent of Christianity. Also, it’s not just the influence of the Church that mattered for the establishment of the Western kinship system in the early Middle Ages, but the development of a particular economic regime, the bipartite manor, in which peasants worked some of the week on their own land and some of the week for their lords. The lords of the manors, clerical and secular, pushed for the establishment of independent nuclear families as basic units of production and surplus extraction. Here’s a scholarly treatment, and you can find a lot more from the blogger and tweeter who calls herself h-bd chick.

Just a generation after Charlemagne, Tang dynasty China presents an instructive contrast. Buddhism had been spreading extensively in China, and Buddhist monasteries had come to acquire considerable wealth. Buddhism presents some clear parallels with Christianity, both in ideals and institutions, but China followed a different path from Europe religiously and socially. Confucian scholars resented the new religion, and complained that it undermined the loyalty of father to son, and subject to emperor. Responding to these complaints, the emperor Wuzong suppressed Buddhist monasteries in 845, and the religion was brought under heavy state control. State patriarchy won, and would dominate China for more than another millennium.

Culture of honor

The major civilizations of Eurasia found different ways to integrate

(a) systems of kinship and descent, with roots stretching back into the deep history of Neolithic demic expansions,

(b) states and state formation, especially along meta-ethnic frontiers, and

(c) major world religions.

In Classical Greece and Rome, devotion to patrilineal descent groups was edged out by wider loyalties to the city state. And in Late Antiquity and later, Christianity in Europe would also encourage the weakening of extended family ties. China took a different path, upholding state patriarchy and the rule of the clan, and eventually suppressing Buddhist monasteries.

In the case of the Islamic world, something about (a) kinship, marriage, and descent is reflected in this map, which shows percentages of consanguineal marriages (first and second cousins) around the world today.

Dravidian southern India has a tradition where men from group A can take wives from group B but not from their own group, and vice versa, which can result after a generation in cousin marriage, specifically cross-cousin marriage where the linking parents are of opposite sex. (Aboriginal Australia has similar marriage rules.) In the south Indian case even some uncle-niece marriages are allowed, specifically marriage of a man to his sister’s daughter, who is categorized as an in-law rather than a blood relation. The Islamic Middle East and Central Asia, a culture area formed in the course of the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, have another kind of cousin marriage, where marriages are kept within a patriline: i.e. it is common for a man to marry his father’s brother’s daughter. Such marriages are not directly mandated by Muslim law. However Muslim rules of inheritance may indirectly encourage them. Under traditional Muslim law, each daughter gets one share of inheritance; each son gets two shares. This is a better deal for women than the one where sons get everything (as in traditional China, for example). But it means that a lineage can expect to lose a third of its property with each generation if it lets daughters marry out.

There is probably more going on, though, than just inheritance law: marriage within the patrilineage long predates the rise of Islam among Near Eastern pastoralists. It is probably connected with another characteristic of this culture area: an intense culture of honor, including a high premium on female purity (guaranteeing the integrity of the patrilineage). To allow a daughter or sister to be seduced by an outsider is deeply dishonorable. But even a legitimate marriage to an outsider carries some shame, putting the wife-giving family in an inferior relation to the wife-takers. Not letting daughters and sisters marry outside the patriline is one way for a lineage to advertise its honor.

One of the classic studies of the culture of honor in the Mediterranean is entitled The Fate of Shechem. The reference is to the story of Shechem and Dinah and her brothers in Genesis 34. Shechem, prince of a then-Canaanite city, seduces (or maybe rapes) the Israelite Dinah. His father, the king, proposes to make things right with a classic marriage alliance: “Make marriages with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us; and the land shall be open to you; dwell and trade in it, and get property in it.” Dinah’s brothers, who are Jacob’s sons, pretend to agree to the bargain, but use a ruse to kill Shechem and his father and plunder their city. Jacob is outraged that he has acquired a whole new set of enemies, but his sons ask “Shall he make our sister a whore?” The advantages of an exogamous marital alliance are trumped by an unflinching determination to avoid a humiliating sexual connection: blood washes honor clean.