2017 Volume 82 Issue 3 Pages 367-385
The special focus of the articles in the current volume is so-called honor-based violence, particularly focusing on violence against women.
However, this paper calls attention at first to the fact that, at least before the 1980’s, anthropologists researching the relationship between violence and honor in the Arab world focused heavily on cases of violence between males, referred to as “blood feuds.” This paper connects arguments on blood feuds before the 1980’s with our contemporary concern with honor killing, so as to lead to a more integrated and inclusive understanding of honor-based violence. To do so, it illustrates how blood feuds and honor killings are narrated consistently using the same notion of honor(sharaf)and shame(‘ayb), while also showing how those two kinds of violence are narrated in a different manner in relation to those notions.
This paper mainly utilizes the author’s own observations and collected narratives from Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt derived from intermittent fieldwork conducted between 1988 and 2011. Bedouins were originally nomads herding sheep, goats, and camels, but now most of them have settled down since the latter half of the twentieth century.
Introducing seven short interviews, the former half of the paper clarifies that the notion of honor does not always result in violent actions, but, in most cases, it works rather to deter vengeance and reconcile relations between hostile groups. In those cases, honor should not be considered as a reason for violence, but as an idiom through which to discuss violence. Regarding blood feuds, people compete with one another, betting their own honor on their choice of violence and its determent.
(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)
