8. ‘How Can the Deftness of Stealing be a Mark of Honour?’: Krog’s use of Julian Pitt-Rivers and Pierre Bourdieu Krog's citations of Buruma and others on page 237, just before the conversation derived from Buruma, are misleading. ‘After the Catastrophe’ and ‘Imagination, Fiction, Myth’, both essays, are italicised as if full-length works. Puzzlingly, it is unclear how the conversations that follow derive from the anthology edited by Herbert Morris, Guilt and Shame (1971), which she cites. Perhaps she meant to cite another, similarly titled volume, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (edited by J.G. Peristiany), or rather two essays in it from which she borrows verbatim, namely ‘Honour and Social Status’ by Julian Pitt-Rivers and ‘The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society’ by Bourdieu. Both are ethnographies of Mediterranean society and their potentially spurious application to the South African situation might have been marked had they been cited. Krog borrows largely from the first part of Pitt-Rivers's essay, which forms a self-contained whole that comments on the ‘general structure [of honour] as it is found in Western Europe without much concern for the local and temporal variations’ (21). Even had Krog cited the essays by Pitt-Rivers and Bourdieu, it would have been untrue to say that it was only the ‘conversations’ that are derived from these publications. The following passage, which is presented as a reflection by Krog on the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela hearing, is clearly extracted from Pitt-Rivers: The point of resemblance between the mores of a street-corner society and those of the political aristocracy is this: both are contemptuous of legality. The political aristocracy claim the right to honour by tradition, which makes them the leaders of society and therefore ‘a law unto themselves’. Street-corner society also claims to be a law unto itself, not because it is above the law but because it is outside of it. (251)
8. ‘How Can the Deftness of Stealing be a Mark of Honour?’: Krog’s use of Julian Pitt-Rivers and Pierre Bourdieu Krog's citations of Buruma and others on page 237, just before the conversation derived from Buruma, are misleading. ‘After the Catastrophe’ and ‘Imagination, Fiction, Myth’, both essays, are italicised as if full-length works. Puzzlingly, it is unclear how the conversations that follow derive from the anthology edited by Herbert Morris, Guilt and Shame (1971), which she cites. Perhaps she meant to cite another, similarly titled volume, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (edited by J.G. Peristiany), or rather two essays in it from which she borrows verbatim, namely ‘Honour and Social Status’ by Julian Pitt-Rivers and ‘The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society’ by Bourdieu. Both are ethnographies of Mediterranean society and their potentially spurious application to the South African situation might have been marked had they been cited. Krog borrows largely from the first part of Pitt-Rivers's essay, which forms a self-contained whole that comments on the ‘general structure [of honour] as it is found in Western Europe without much concern for the local and temporal variations’ (21). Even had Krog cited the essays by Pitt-Rivers and Bourdieu, it would have been untrue to say that it was only the ‘conversations’ that are derived from these publications. The following passage, which is presented as a reflection by Krog on the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela hearing, is clearly extracted from Pitt-Rivers: The point of resemblance between the mores of a street-corner society and those of the political aristocracy is this: both are contemptuous of legality. The political aristocracy claim the right to honour by tradition, which makes them the leaders of society and therefore ‘a law unto themselves’. Street-corner society also claims to be a law unto itself, not because it is above the law but because it is outside of it. (251)
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