rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6896a2cf-4176-5782-9e26-69a6f89a55ff">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.
This gives us the second motivation for our topic: there is a growing corpus of fictional literature dealing with various forms of honor-related violence, in honor cultures and, with a different temporal dynamic, in face cultures. We can understand the literature as these cultures’ imaginary, in terms of the “creative and symbolic dimension of the social world” (Thompson 6). Yet this corpus has hardly been studied; as far as we could see, until now none of the research contributions dealing with honor and face in the sciences includes a literary focus. Drawing on Sufi wisdom, Turkish writer Elif Shafak points out one of the related consequences: “The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge. We know a lot about each other, or so we think. But knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves, it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected” (Shafak, “Politics”). Shafak tells us that, for fiction, the drawing compass is a desirable metaphor: while one leg is firmly grounded, the other “draws a wide circle, constantly moving” (“Politics”). With its presentation of temporality in the narration as well as in its content, narrative can qualify as a form of knowledge (see also Kreiswirth). Sociologist Mariano Longo explores literature in depth as a form of empirical material: his analysis considers fictional narratives as “tools that a sociologist may adopt to get in contact with dense representations of specific aspects of the social” (Longo 2). Since such narratives are capable of “organizing human experience in a meaningful temporal sequence,” they “may cast new light on human experience as such” (Longo 33). This emphasis also allows us to recognize that imaginative literature and phenomenology are not independent of each other; as Pol Vandevelde explains, literature is intrinsically phenomenological, just as phenomenology functions rather like literature. The social sciences, for their part, underline “the relevance of meaning as a structural element” in our relation with the social environment (Longo 34). Indeed, communication research indicates that phenomenology with a semiotic orientation ←4 | 5→can effectively engage complexities of “racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural difference” (Martinez 293). What is more, one can think of narratives as a process by which “the description of singular events and actions is useful to explain other contexts and actions” (Longo 50). Complementing sociology’s form of reality-understanding, they are able to give “a plausible representation of social reality and intercourse,” presenting events and themes as an “a-referential” representation of the referential world (Longo 137, 140, 147). We support this argumentation, especially seeing that the a-referential mode is elucidated further in the interpretive “shuttle” proposed by Harry Berger, to be explained further below.
Since the so-called ethical turn new attention has been given to Wayne Booth’s dictum that stories are “our major moral teachers” (241). Nie Zhenzhao argues that “[l];iterature teaches by giving illustrations of ethical choices” (Ross 7).11 As we turn our attention to the corpus, we should keep in mind Cao Shunqing’s call for taking into account not only the “homogeneity and affinity” but also “Variation and heterogeneity” (with a capital V) between cultures in studying comparability (xxx). Our chapters will give evidence of such heterogeneity. For these purposes, however, to offer literature as “authentic” material to explain or record a culture and by implication its mainstream would amount to a misunderstanding. It would mean essentializing the culture, treating a fictional artifact as a sociological and ethnographical document rather than as “a commentary on the culture” (Dalvai 282).12 From these considerations, we are encouraged by Pierre Bourdieu’s prominent attention to fiction’s lucid “ways of truth-telling” to analyze the masculinist experience of honor (Masculine 69).
←5 | 6→
Marginal or representative conditions? (I)
The composite story told by the fictional works we have found may perhaps appear somewhat marginal rather than representative, a) if one considers a dominant or hegemonic masculinity mainly as a societal ideal in Western advertisements, b) if one finds it theoretically awkward to focus on a gender bias in exploring stigma in non-Western populations, or c) if one foregrounds that women can damage a family’s honor in Western societies as well as elsewhere (see, for instance, Ermers 54, 76, and 192). Yet whether the supposedly marginal is less significant is a matter of perspective.
Thus we can suggest a first way of responding to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. Fiction “takes the prevalent thought system or social system as its context, but does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems” (Iser 71). It “tends to take as its dominant ‘meaning’ those possibilities that have been neutralized or negated by that system” (Iser 72). Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s work illuminates this: “[…] the focus of much of Pamuk’s work lies on transgressing the official narratives of Turkish identity enforced by Kemalism and challenging the uncompromising secularism of the republic” (Furlanetto 55). Hence we remain aware of the fact that literature sometimes represents “typical deficits, blind spots, imbalances, deformations, and contradictions within dominant systems of civilizatory power”; it stages and semiotically empowers what is “marginalized, neglected or repressed in the dominant cultural reality system” (Zapf 62–63). Esther Lezra argues in a similar direction, claiming that “[a];s critics, readers and writers, we contribute to the disordering of dominant discourses by recognizing, pointing to and pushing the limits that dominant narratives would impose. We contribute to the remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices by pointing to
