Wednesday, June 12
Friday, June 7
Wednesday, June 5
The Honor Belt: Corporatization of Family
1. Descent
is traced through males
2. Clear preference for birth of sons over daughters
3. Growing up, boys
enjoy considerably greater freedom
and are groomed to assume a dominant role in the family. As girls grow up, their worlds contract; they gradually find
themselves more and more segregated from boys
4. Girls receive less schooling.
5. Girls typically required to wear loose clothing, conceal their hair--may be required to wear a veil
6. Woman’s sexuality
is not her own but belongs to her family. If suspected of having sex before marriage,
may be forced to undergo a virginity examination
7. Families marry
off daughters at a young age,
especially in under developed rural areas.
E.g., Turkey, 16% of women in the 1990s married before 15, the legal age
for marriage
8. On marrying, woman usually goes to her husband’s home, subject to the authority
of her husband and her mother-in-law
9. Outside the home, public world of work, politics, law, & religion: male
dominated
10. Families are clan-like, exhibiting temporal continuity stretching backwards and
forwards in time. The family has a
history and, its members hope, a future.
A married couple does not establish its own separate family but, rather,
continues and extends the family
11. Multi-generational
and extended: a man and his brothers and their sons and
wives and children and perhaps grandchildren may live under one roof – or close
12. Share
common property: land and animals
owned by the family rather than by individual members
13. Centralize
decision making: typically in the
hands of older members, esp men
14. Often practice endogamous marriage:
patrilateral cousin marriage (a son marrying his father’s brother’s
daughter) is preferred, sometimes modal, through M.E. Cousin marriage keeps property within the
family as wealth is transferred on marriage goes to kin rather than non-kin.
15. Parents
often choose the marriage partners of their offspring.
16. Honor
killing (killing a woman if she engages in sex, particularly outside the
religion) is the family’s social control but, according to the West, is itself
criminal.
17. The family
acts as a unit towards the world.
SOURCES (more soon) Faqir, 2001: 72 and Vieille, 1978
When families are
more individualistic, less corporate, honor offenses are handled less severely
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