[GPC-ANTH] Discussion Topic for Chapter 10 - Honor Killings

Discussion topic for Chapter 10
Why did Honor Killing fit into the culture of some cultures as they emerged? Although the original conditions do not continue to exist, why does Honor Killing continue?

Student Response
Property rights and restitution. That is what it all boils down to.

Oftentimes in strictly traditional patrilineal societies, women are valued as property first and as thinking human beings second. They are a resource belonging to the family, rather than an individual with her own rights and privileges. It is a viewpoint that is strange to our modern Western society, but within that culture, it has come to be the norm.

Overall, people take offense when something they treasure is threatened or destroyed. Throughout recorded history there have been a vast range of small- and large-scale socio-political conflicts that, in essence, boil down to “he touched my stuff”. Each society, over time, develops some sort of conflict resolution system to ensure that the party wronged has a chance to recoup what was lost, gauging the punishment to the perceived severity of social infraction within that culture.

In the United States, where we truly do enjoy our materialist ways but do not (on the whole) believe theft or defamation to be a killing offense, this involves arrest and conviction for criminal violation with victims hoping for (eventual) financial restitution. In some parts of the world, we find in place various systems of indentured servitude or slavery for criminals that breach their culture’s property code. And in many countries of the Mideast, there is the custom of Honor Killings.

If you take a resource belonging to a man, you are saying, in essence, that he is too weak to protect that resource for use by his family; that the resources through which he provides for his family are outside the scope of his management. You impugn his very role within his society. In cultures where Honor Killings are the custom, that insult must be answered in a way that proves to the community that he is capable of taking care of his property and responsibility. By publicly eliminating the offender and the tainted resource from the gene pool, it makes a very clear statement that he is more than capable of managing his family’s affairs.

A friend joked with me when I told her of this assignment, likening some of our country’s entertainment habits to this practice. We laughed about the thought of an appearance on Jerry Springer as an Honor Killing, but these two things do share many of the same characteristics: Ritualism (care of the weapon and manner of execution for HKs, and time of day and formulaic scripting of the situation on TV), Public Viewing of the execution, and Death of the offender/Vindication of the Offended (physical death, and social death).

It was in interesting parallel to consider, and leaves me with the thought that our own society is not so far removed from “barbarism” as we might like ourselves to believe.