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Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause
Читать онлайн.Название Honor, Face, and Violence
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783631789537
Автор произведения Mine Krause
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия Cross Cultural Communication
Издательство Ingram
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Working in three countries, and with intercultural experiences in Turkey, Western Europe, and China, we are associated with an Intercultural Institute which has published research volumes on value frameworks and value dynamics across cultures. Our academic profile is in comparative literary studies, partly connected with legal studies. Building on some earlier collaborative research, it is our aim to develop a more in-depth analysis of the literary culture of honor and face. Yet at each stage we should remind ourselves that “the acts of cross-cultural reading” which academics as well as translators and publishers perform are “never disinterested,” being inculcated by specific experiences of socialization and education and informed by our specific understanding of literature in the reading communities to which each of us belongs (Dalvai 277). The configuration of these communities, their reading strategies and practices, emerge as a form of discursive politics (see Dalvai 8–9).
Amy R. Williamsen is right: “We must acknowledge the potential bias inherent in every generation of scholars and respond to the undeniable need for continual reexamination of the presuppositions that operate in our discipline” (137) – whatever the discipline. Mine Krause’s perception of honor is influenced by both dignity culture and honor culture approaches, having been brought up with both value systems. She has worked with immigrant children and adolescents in Germany and France, which has allowed her to learn more about patriarchal family structures torn in-between different traditions. Having studied intercultural identity problems for several years, she regularly communicates with Turkish writers and feminists on honor-based issues to gain current insights on the subject. Yan Sun had been immersed in face culture before leaving home for college education. The emigration from rural to urban, from northern to southern China has provided her with a perspective on the complexities and varieties of honor conceptions. Then, a one-year visit to Mississippi as a Fulbright scholar as well as a one-year period in New York as an exchange scholar gave her chances to learn more about dignity culture. The M.A. program at the Law School of Fudan University and the Ph.D. Program in English literature at Shanghai International Studies University assisted her in gaining a more systematic and in-depth cognition of differences between face ←28 | 29→culture and dignity culture. Michael Steppat’s potential bias is grounded in a “dignity-culture” personal background, in Southeast Asia, Australia, and several countries in Western Europe, with no personal involvement in honor culture. Academically, he was already concerned with honor issues in a study of Shakespearian reception, then with literature in relation to cross-cultural communication in several Intercultural Research volumes which include attention to honor contexts (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).
Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz has agreed to write the Preface to this book (see above). Her novels and short stories, which describe Turkey’s social reality, cultural variety, and existential issues including the search for identity and the marginalization of minorities, have been translated into several languages. In a 2013 contribution to The Guardian, she sums up her country’s situation in the following question: “The real issues in Turkey – the language conventions forced upon us by nationalistic thinking, the simplistic attitudes induced by the power of mediocrity, the barbarity of popular culture, all the sexist attitudes I have to endure daily, the gulf that exists between writer and reader – are they not enough?” In her short stories collection The Well of Trapped Words and her latest novel Barbarın Kahkahası, we come across the problem of gender-related double standards which can also be analyzed in an honor-related context. Among other awards Sema Kaygusuz has received the ‘English PEN Translates’ Award, the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, the Coburg-Rückert Prize, the France-Turquie Award, the Balkanika Award, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, and the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Prize for Young Writers.
Chinese scholar Professor Ma Chi has agreed to write the Foreword (see above). With a Ph.D. in literature, Ma Chi is Secretary General of the Center For Thought and Culture Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, member of the Standing Committee of the China Democratic League in Shanghai, Associate Chair of the Mao Zedong Literary Theory and Thoughts Study Center, and Premier Scholar for the TV program Past at Shanghai Documentary Channel (DOCUTV). He has published more than 20 academic books including Theory, Culture and Practice, A Difficult Revolution: Marxist Aesthetics in China, and an essay collection Reading Scenery.
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6 Lindsey Devers and Sarah Bacon understand honor crime as “the killing of a female, typically by a male perpetrator, because of perceived or actual misconduct of the victim who has dishonored or shamed her family and clan by actually or allegedly committing an indiscretion” (360). Kwame Appiah points out that under the honor code women appear “less worthy of respect” than men, and he speaks of “wars against women” (Honor 167).
7 In our context, “culture” is only obliquely a phenomenon covered by the evolutionary approach of Churchill, for whom it is “an evolving product of groups, or populations, and of human brains” (184). Ermers’s approach is communicative, building for instance on Edward T. Hall: “beliefs, symbols and meanings […] which facilitate ways people of a given community can communicate with each other”; this includes “customary beliefs” and “(attributed) shared attitudes, values, goals, conventions and practices” (3.1.8). People can retain their moral norms and values when they “ ‘shed off’ (partly) their original culture and acquire a new one – or have several ones at once” (3.1.8.2). In our context, a static definition covers most cases: “an identifiable, pass-on-able, mutually adopted set or shared semiotic system of inherent meanings, acceptable behaviors” (Kulich and Weng 16); that it can be passed on to the next generation is decisive for tradition (see Hall 49–50 on cultural transmission, also Idang). This is also associated with a needs-based concept: culture is then evidence of a “need to associate with, identify with, and seek similarity, comfort/security, and belongingness in the inherent and constructed codes of a community” (Kulich and Weng 16–17). For the passing on of “the sense-making process of culture” together with “a sense of communal identity,” creating a tension with individual identity, see Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 42.
8 We agree with Talhelm et al. when they point out: “Even though psychology has cataloged a long list of East-West differences, it still lacks an accepted explanation of what causes these differences” (603).
9 Pakistan undertook new legislation concerning honor in 2016, not for the first time: Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offences in the Name or Pretext of Honour) Act; powerful clerics opposed the bill as “anti-Islamic” (see also Bilal). In India, The Centre in 2018 announced to the Supreme Court that it would bring a law to make honor killing a cognizable offense. In 2009, a Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) was enacted in Afghanistan by decree, but not ratified in parliament (see Churchill 243–44).
10 Robert Ermers takes face and dignity to be “universal concepts” (171). He adds that, as “loss of status,” face is usually “not a moral issue,” so that, owing to his moral concept of honor, it is “not equivalent to loss of honor” (52). This emphasis is not wholly supported in Patai’s analysis, to which Ermers does not refer. We observe that the loss of face (as well as the loss of honor) often results from moral misconduct and should therefore be regarded as a “moral issue.”