THE PERSONAL IS PATRILINEAL: NAMUS AS SOVEREIGNTY

Abstract

In this article I propose a new model of namus, the concept recognized in some circum-Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Central and South Asian cultures and usually translated as “honor.” One way to understand namus is to regard it as patrilineal sovereignty, particularly reproductive sovereignty. After an “honor killing,” a “defense of honor” explanatory narrative is told by both perpetrator and community alike. I argue that an honor killing represents a show of reproductive sovereignty by people who belong to a patrilineage. I first describe ethnographic contexts in which “honor killings” are operative, and then, relying on Delaney's (1991) model of namus as deeply bound up with patrogenerative theories of procreation, argue that a hymen is both a symbolic and real border to membership in the group. Finally, I apply this new conceptualization to statecraft, specifically to killings carried out in Iraqi Kurdistan following the founding of the Kurdish statelet there in 1991. Here, reproductive sovereignty and defense of borders were operative writ large as “honor killing” logic was expanded from lineage to state.

Key Words:

• namus
• “honor,” patriliny
• sovereignty
• borders
• the state

I gratefully acknowledge extramural support from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, as well as support from the University of Kentucky, American University of Beirut, and Washington State University. I thank Linda Stone, Jane Harmon Kelley, Samir Khalaf, Iman Humaydan, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. My greatest debt is to people in Iraqi Kurdistan who spoke openly to me about topics usually left unmentioned.

Notes

1. “Dowry murders” (Rudd 2002; Stone and James 1995) are another form of domestic violence that seems to be on the increase. They are found mainly among South Asian Hindus practicing dowry marriage payments (as opposed to bride wealth, the much more common marriage payment pattern among groups carrying out honor killings). Usually, the victim's husband or his mother or father perpetrate a dowry murder, with the apparent motive being for him to be able to re-marry so as to again collect dowry.

2. For my purposes in this article, the terms “honor killing” and “honor crime” are interchangeable. “Honor crime” is a more recent term and seems to be favored by activists, likely because it encompasses violence short of killing that still carries with it a “defense of honor” narrative. Honor violence results in death in the vast majority of cases.

3. Most cultures in which honor killings occur are Muslim-majority. However, examples of honor killings occurring among non-Muslims are easy enough to find that a compelling case cannot be made for a direct linkage between Islam and honor killings. The website Islam Awareness (2007) lists several examples of honor killings involving non-Muslims.

4. Multiple types of kinship reckoning can be found in Italy, especially if the historical record is taken into consideration. For example, Murru-Corriga (2000) argues that Sardinia has become more patrilineal over time. The presence of past bilateral and matrilineal reckoning there (and, one could speculate, in surrounding areas) should not be taken as evidence of honor killings occurring in the absence of patriliny.

5. In the Behdini dialect of Kurdish spoken in the region of my fieldwork, this word is rendered “namîs.” So that it will be more recognizable to readers, I use the more common spelling in this article.

6. Many sources on namus /‘ird note that it has a counterpart that is usually translated “shame”; especially since Peristiany (1965) and Pitt-Rivers (1977) “honor and shame” has been a central trope in the anthropology of the Mediterranean. With Kurdish people I heard frequent references to the Kurdish version of the shame concept, sherim, especially from mothers of young children, for whom inculcating sherim appeared to be a central part of their children's socialization process. Antoun (1968: 672) offers an early description by an anthropologist of an honor killing in a Jordanian village. Afterward, an observer told him the shame had been erased. Shame/sherim seemed to represent the inverse of not only namus, but additionally of sherif, a term also usually translated “honor” but not sexual in connotation. As van Eck explains it in the only book-length anthropological study of honor killings, namus is encompassed within sherif (2003: 20). I do not further develop shame/sherim and sherif in this article.

7. I have been conducting participant observation and interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan periodically since 1995. This article mainly concerns the period from 1991 to 2003, now historically bracketed as that period during which Iraqi Kurdistan was governed by local leaders, the majority of them ethnic Kurds, against the will of the Iraqi government headed by Saddam Hussein. While Iraqi Kurdistan continues to have very similar governance to the pre-2003 period, the governance of the portion of Iraq outside Iraqi Kurdistan changed significantly when a United States-led military coalition invaded Iraq and toppled its government in 2003. Thereafter, Kurdish regional self-governance became “legitimate” in the eyes of the central Iraqi state, in 2005 becoming officially recognized as one of the semi-sovereign entities in the new federal Iraq. Some Kurds played important political roles in post-2003 Baghdad as well, with a key Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, occupying the post of President.

8. Starting with my first visit in 1995, I saw evidence suggesting a rash of “honor suicides” in addition to “honor killings.” Health officials working in the main hospital in Dohuk told me that it regularly received large numbers of young female burn victims, more than it would seem would be the result of kitchen accidents (even though young females do most of the cooking in Iraqi Kurdistan). Often, as was exemplified by one burn victim whom I visited, the pattern of the burns suggested self-immolation even though the corresponding explanation given by the victim and/or family did not. People explained that such a suicide would result from family pressure on a girl or woman to kill herself so that her brother or father did not have to. Further treatment of this topic is outside the scope of this article.

9. “Peace” is here a relative term. Iraqi Kurdistan between 1991 and 2003 might better be described as in a state of what is called in NGO and UN circles, “no war, no peace.” I have written elsewhere (King forthcoming) about living and researching under fear of violence in Iraqi Kurdistan. After the 2003 removal of the Ba'athist government by the United States and its allies, fear of the Ba'ath subsided, but it was replaced by fear of “terrorists” (irhabiyin).

10. And/or it is curtailed for them. This raises interesting questions of agency that are beyond the scope of this article.

11. When I started my fieldwork in 1995, people could not cite a single example of a local woman driving in Dohuk or Zakho or the surrounding villages, and I never saw one myself. By 1998 I knew of one. On a short visit in 2002 I saw several women driving. None appeared to be young; they were perhaps in their late forties through sixties. A local friend who was very interested in driving and who had been observing the growing phenomenon of woman drivers estimated that in the Dohuk Governorate, an area with about 1 million people, perhaps 100 women were driving in 2002. Several women confided in me that they would like to drive, but that they were worried about what it would do to their (sexual) reputations.

12. Although Iraqi Kurdistan has significant numbers of non-Muslims (mainly Christians and Yezidis), I carried out research almost entirely among Muslims. My impression was that the gender and kinship conventions of adherents to other religions such as Christianity and Yezidism were very similar.

13. Following Stone (2006: 1, 5), I assume a mutual constitution of gender (“people's understandings of the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’” and “the ways in which these understandings are interwoven with other dimensions of social and cultural life”) and kinship (“relationships between persons based on descent or marriage”).

14. This assertion appears across the ethnographic literature, and the author of a recent quantitative study (Kulwicki 2002) concurs.

15. While I find Meeker's translation of namus as “sexual honor” (1976: 244) (italics added) to be superior to merely translating it “honor,” he frustrates both myself and Delaney (1991: 39) by stopping short of fleshing out the role of paternity even though he writes that namus has to do with the “legitimation of paternity” (Meeker 1976: 264). He is content instead with a description of namus as, although related to “women's chastity,” as “a sacred quality, mirrored in communal opinion, modeled on communal convention” (Meeker 1976: 268).

16. Delaney notes (1991: 101) that “[a]n Arab woman's brother is the one who would defend or avenge her transgressions against her honor, whereas in Turkey it would be the woman's husband and his father. The difference may have something to do with the salience of the patrilineage and whether the women continue belonging to it after marriage.” Most of the honor killing examples cited in the literature mention that the obligation to kill lies first with the transgressor's brother or father. But if Delaney's point here is true of Turkish villages (and I wonder to what degree it is, especially of Kurdish villages in Turkey, of which she makes no mention), then both the example and its interpretation provide an exception that proves the rule: A lineage member kills a lineage member.

17. All names of interlocutors are pseudonyms.

18. Despite Appadurai's (1990) convincing argument that the hyphen linking “nation” and ”state” in “nation-state” is more a representative of disjunction than of conjunction, what I describe here goes against that in that the Iraqi state has, despite itself, given rise to the Iraqi Kurdish nation. I follow generally accepted definitions in which the state “encompasses both a sovereign government and the geographically bounded territory, society, and population over which it presides” and “sovereignty is the indispensable attribute of the state” (Porter 1994: 5–6). I do not further take up the problematic of “nation” in this article.

19. During fieldwork prior to the 2003 war, I frequently heard talk of prostitution in both Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. Although it was difficult to get a sense of how common or uncommon it was, what was clear was that local people regarded the prostitute as an important symbol, one worthy of gossip and expressions of disdain. I was not aware of any sex trafficking to or from distant places; the prostitutes people talked about were described as local. Since the war began, however, reports have been surfacing of sex trafficking in Iraq and to neighboring countries (Amnesty International 2007).