LITMIR.BIZ

Introduction

      Self-worth is not always and not necessarily a good thing. To be sure, it is appealing from a post-materialist perspective. It is somewhat uplifting to think that the fountainhead of international relations is not so much lust for power (animus dominandi) or the pursuit of gain (homo oeconomicus) but rather the striving for self-worth. In reality, the struggle for recognition brings out not only the best but also the worst in people. (Jörg Friedrichs, 2016)

Divisive values

Honor-related values are strongly divisive. They are not only a source of inequality, but of violence all the way to murder. Without claiming to exhaust the social or legal dimensions, we can define violence as gender-based, hence as “discrimination that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men,” including “acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty” (see Convention, General Recommendation 19, in 1992). The Human Rights Watch Oral Intervention (see Item 12, in 2001) focuses especially on honor-related murder in this context: “Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonor upon the family.”⁶ Yet that is too narrow to cover the scope of discriminatory acts; Robert Oprisko meaningfully points to the Face conception when he speaks of crimes of honor as including slander, assault, and battery (80–81). An awareness that these grim phenomena deserve investigation gives us the first motivation for our topic. We intend to use a pragmatic understanding of Honor and of Face, which we will explain in each of the respective sections below.

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      In principle, the term “honor” can have various meanings, including notions of dignity, loyalty, and honesty. Yet in many parts of the world, in so-called honor cultures which are traditionally located in parts of the Middle East, Mediterranean regions of Greece, Italy, and Spain, South America, and North Africa, honor is often seen in terms of women’s assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology. For this reason, a direct link between male reputation and the female body can be observed in such cultural contexts, creating a gap between a woman’s and a man’s honor by setting double standards. What happens here is not just a matter of geography: in our multicultural world, such values can now also be traced in some parts of the so-called West. They are of growing and disruptive concern, as they clash with legal norms that are difficult to implement, and have become the target of divisive security policies, as shown in the U.S. presidential “Executive Order 13780” Initial Section 11 Report of January 2018. It includes the finding that few statistics on honor killings are available at a federal level, but also provides the following information: “Based on a representative sample studied through open media sources, 91 percent of the victims in honor killings in North America were murdered for being ‘too westernized’ ” (8). Some “glaring ironies” of the executive order were previously picked apart in the political dispute (see Milani).

Face cultures share certain features with honor cultures.⁷ Collectivistic in nature, they too have traditionally encouraged the maintenance of strong family ←2 | 3→ties, social harmony, and interdependence in East Asia.⁸ Individuals need to show proper respect for hierarchy, including displays of humility, while sustaining harmony in the social system is crucial. Within the common features, there are nevertheless considerable differences. Triggering death can be used in both types of culture as a means to maintain honor and face, but in face cultures, rather than murder, suicide has traditionally been the expected form of response when a person’s honor is harmed, whereas in honor cultures, forced suicide is regarded as just being a “cleaner” alternative to honor killings in order to restore a family’s reputation. Thus, in countries like China or Turkey, coerced sex and rape have been a punishable disgrace for the female victim and also her family, so that the victim is sometimes put under pressure until she takes her own life. What Salman Rushdie has called India’s and Pakistan’s “code of dishonor” belongs in a similar context.⁹

The concerns of face and honor are clearly correlated. As is well known, Erving Goffman considers honor in the context of “face-work” (5 ff.); Simon Meier similarly sees face closely resembling honor. Raphael Patai points out that, in the “Arab mind,” in order to be honorable a man “must beware of allowing his ‘face’ to be ‘blackened’; he must always endeavor to ‘whiten his face,’ as well as the face of the kin group to which he belongs” (96, 108 ff.; see also Stewart 99). Robert Paul Churchill adds that Arabic wajh or “face” for honor signifies that “the face one presents to the world is precisely the same as the face one sees in reflection” (80–81). For Robert Oprisko, face is a dimension of external honor: face fulfills the “need for a process of socially valuing individuals as they wish to appear and of appearing as one would like to be valued” (79).¹⁰ Depicting an honor culture, Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra describes how “if a man lost face, then all the ←3 | 4→rest was futile” (What 96). Giving attention to honor without closer attention to face, and vice versa, would fall short of what either requires.

      Violence based on honor and face, which includes some of the most atrocious phenomena of our time, has been studied by a number of social scientists. Most researchers have used field studies of behavioral patterns linked to honor perceptions. These can be of interest for international business relationships, for instance, but are not so helpful for contexts which include the individual experience and implications of honor-based violence.

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