For the Boys in the Family: An Investigation Into the Relationship Between “Honor”-Based Violence and Endogamy

Abstract

Germaine Tillion’s classic work of ethnology My Cousin, My Husband related so-called “honor”-based violence (HBV) to the institution of cousin marriage as a response to women’s entitlement to inheritance within the Greater Mediterranean Region. This article will scrutinize Tillion’s position using original survey data gathered in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, finding that although there is a correlation between HBV and cousin marriage, Tillion’s association of this with inheritance laws is inadequate. An alternative position is proposed, in which the relationship between HBV and cousin marriage is situated in coercion around marriage, intergenerational tensions, and in-group exclusivity, exacerbated by the contemporary politics of nationalist neopatrimonialism and an economy based in oil rentierism.

Keywords

honor endogamy Kurdish cousin marriage

Introduction

A “Particular Endogamy”

In her foreword to the Saqi Essentials reissue of Germaine Tillion’s (1966/2007, pp. 9-16) classic ethnography My Cousin, My Husband, sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti identifies the book’s potential to throw new light upon so-called “honor”-based violence (hereinafter HBV), a topic which has seen an invigoration of interest since the turn of the 21st century. Tillion’s work valuably bridges the interest in “honor” as an aspect of Mediterranean societal organization within 1950s to 1960s anthropology (e.g., Peristiany, 1966) and the feminist preoccupation with the criminogenic nature of Middle Eastern/South Asian understandings of family “honor” (Gill, Strange, & Roberts, 2014; Welchman & Hossain, 2005). Despite this growing contemporary interest, Kulczycki and Windle’s (2011) systematic literature review identifies problems of poor generalizability and a lack of theorization due to a concentration upon local policy in discussions of HBV.

Tillion’s peregrinate research bridges the imagined religio-cultural divide between the “East” and “West” which currently besets discussion of the subject (Gill & Brah, 2014) through scrupulously reporting crimes of “honor” across the Northern littoral of the Mediterranean basin, particularly in Italy and Greece.

Tillion’s staunch refusal to orientalize HBV is based in a theory drawn from her observations of cross-cultural commonalities across the Mediterranean region as a whole. She identifies the doctrinal differences between Muslims, Jews, and Catholic and Orthodox Christians as largely ephemeral to the status of women in the region. She identifies a pattern of kinship unique to Central Eurasia—a “particular endogamy¹ . . . preferential marriage between the children of two brothers” (Tillion, 1966/2007, p. 28)—as being related to the conceptualization of “honor” and violence against women committed in its name. The particular nature of Greater Mediterranean endogamy is that male cousins may be considered to have a right of first refusal over female paternal cousins (Fernea & Malarkey, 1975, p. 188), as illustrated here:

When Haifa Khalil . . . refused to marry a cousin whom she found “disrespectful and childish,” her parents tried to arrange a marriage to another, unrelated man. But they faced opposition from her uncle, who threatened them. He said she could marry any of his sons, but insisted they had priority over anyone else. Under pressure from tribal elders, Haifa finally agreed to the match. (Institute for War & Peace Reporting—Syria, 2009)

Tillion contends that this pattern of cousin marriage arose out of the expansionist ethos of the Neolithic Revolution, but one which became fatally disrupted by directives for women’s inheritance, which are specified and quantified under Islamic law. Female inheritance, she suggests, tended to dissipate the corporate patrimony of tribal and other groupings, which are legitimized through patrilineal² transition through generation upon generation of male ancestors. This led to a regime of familial surveillance and control over women (p. 41) with the aim of “keeping the girls in the family for the boys in the family” (p. 86). For Tillion, the principle of endogamy was challenged by new, Islamized patterns of inheritance, then shored up by the doctrine of “honor,” operating both as an ideology of female conformity to familial interests and communal norms around marriage, and as a justification for disciplinary violence. As evidence, she claims an association between increasing religiosity, which she presumes leads to increased respect for female inheritance directives, and the occurrence of murders justified in the name of “honor.”

This article will consider whether cousin marriage and HBV are interrelated phenomena through a statistical analysis of original survey data gathered in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (hereinafter KRI), contextualized with Tillion’s wider argument.

This article addresses the following questions:

What is the prevalence of HBV and cousin marriage in the KRI?

What are the characteristics of cousin marriage in the KRI?

Is marriage type related to the occurrence of HBV? If so, how?

What are the theoretical and policy implications of these findings?

“Honor” and Cousin Marriage in the KRI

Affection and brutality

According to a Pew study (2013), only 22% of Iraqi citizens believed that “honor” crimes were never justified against women; 33% believed they were never justified against men, representing the highest support for HBV across in the “Muslim world” (p. 190).³ There were a reported 25 “honor” killings in the KRI in September 2011 (“NGO Survey,” 2011). The United Nations estimates that at least 255 women died in “honor” killings in the first 6 months of 2007 (Cockburn, 2008).

Kurdish feminist Shahrzad Mojab (2002) identifies “honor” killing in terms of the familial relationships between perpetrator and victim: “ . . . a tragedy in which fathers and brothers kill their most beloved, their daughters and sisters . . . Here, affection and brutality coexist in conflict and unity” (p. 61). Radikha Coomaraswamy (2005, p. xi), writing as the United Nations’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women, describes the operations of “honor” as follows:

Honour is generally seen as residing in the bodies of women. Frameworks of “honour” and its corollary, shame, operate to control, direct and regulate women’s sexuality and freedom of movement by male members of a family. Women who fall in love, engage in non-marital relationships, seek a divorce or choose their own husbands are seen to transgress the boundaries of “appropriate” (that is, socially sanctioned) behaviour. Regulation of such behaviour may in some cases involve horrific direct violence—including “honour killing,” perhaps the most brutal control of female sexuality—as well as indirect subtle control exercised through threats of force or the withdrawal of family benefits and security.

HBV can be distinguished from other forms of violence against women and domestic violence on the basis of agnation (the perpetrators are members of the same patriline⁴ as the victim), collectivity (the active or tacit collaboration of members of a patriline and the wider community in perpetration), and the deployment of a discourse of “honor” to justify violence (Payton, 2014). Such justifications often relate to the victim’s perceived failure to conform to the community’s expectations of gender and marriage roles where these are taken as aspects of the reputation of the collective (Glazer & Abu Ras, 1994): subordinacy to her own family until marriage, and to her husband’s thereafter. As a form of violence which is associated with non-Western populations, it is frequently situated within essentializing and exoticized orientalist framings (Reed, 2014). However, HBV sits within the spectrum of various forms of violence against women across all cultures (Heise, 1994) distinctive more for the number of perpetrators than their assumed “culture,” which has close analogues with other social groupings such as street gangs (Salter, 2014).

The KRI has a long and tragic legacy of HBV (Alinia, 2013; Begikhani, Gill, & Hague, 2010; Mojab, 2004) which has been particularly visible among Middle Eastern countries due to campaigning work by a dynamic local women’s rights movement (al-Ali & Pratt, 2011).

Cousin marriage is a fairly common practice among Kurds, where Tillion’s “particular endogamy”—cousin marriage on the father’s side—is termed amoza⁵ (Hassanpour, 2001). Yalçın-Heckman’s (1991) meticulous ethnography of the Kurdish Hamawand tribe, living in the village of Hakkari, indicates that of 66 marriages occurring during her studies, where the relationship between the couple was known, 34 were endogamous, and 19 were described as amoza. In Iraq, research into genetic illnesses found that 43.3% of the control group had consanguineous marriages, of which 35.6% were between first cousins (Al-Ani, 2010).

In the 1950s, Barth (1953) found that murders of Kurdish women and girls who refused their cousins were “not infrequent” (p. 28), and these continue to be recorded by activists in the present day. In a case recorded in Diyana, KRI, a girl who refused to marry her cousin applied for the annulment of a marriage contract made by her family while she was a baby. Despite the judge’s agreement, the village Mullah supported the match, and the girl was threatened with violence until she complied with family wishes (Minwalla & Portman, 2007, p. 17).

In the most notorious case of “honor” killing in the history of the KRI, Yezidi⁶ teenager Du’a Khalil Aswad was publically stoned to death after a failed attempt to elope with a Muslim youth in 2007. Her stoning was instigated by the paternal uncle against the will of the victim’s father, carried out by cousins, and observed by the male population of the village, many of whom recorded the event on their mobile phones. In this situation, the assumed “rights” of cousins as prospective suitors appeared to overweigh the potency of the nominal paterfamilias to determine his daughter’s fate, and were accepted as such by the observers, and by the security forces who observed the murder without intervention.

Alinia (2013) finds that survivors of HBV in the KRI were often women who had been given little or no autonomy over marriage choices. She notes,

Women and men who reject forced marriage and the various kinds of control reject and question not only gender roles in their own families, but also a whole system of knowledge, power and domination that has emerged in the intersecting violence of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and generation in a historical context permeated by colonialism, brutal ethnic and national oppression, poverty and mass violence. (p. 162)

Method

Survey Research

An online survey into marriage, family forms and attitudes to marriage, “honor,” and gender roles was developed, initially in English. With the assistance of the Kurdish IT Group and volunteers from the Kurdish community, the LimeSurvey⁷ program was adapted to display Kurdish script. The team translated a compilation of phrases necessary to render the front-end user interface in Kurdish. The survey was beta-tested by five Kurdish volunteers and the questions adjusted according to their comments, then all the questions and multiple choice responses translated into the Sorani dialect of Kurdish by a Kurdish academic linguist. This was then publicized through Kurdish universities and the Kurdish language Awene Newspaper, on a Kurdish-language job site, and also through the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter (using the popular hashtag #Twitterkurds) with short invitations to participate written in Sorani Kurdish.

Internet surveys are a cost-effective means of reaching a large population, and may be particularly useful in countries, like the KRI, which have no postal system, although the tendency to reflect the opinions of those wealthy enough to own personal computers, or those who have access to computers through an institution, is a clear limitation for representative sampling. There was a high rate of failure to complete, which could relate to the unfamiliarity of respondents to the online survey format, because several respondents needed clarifications around the nature of online surveys. Also, given the delicate nature of research into family life, no questions within the survey were coded as essential, meaning that respondents could, and frequently did, skip questions which they did not wish to answer. In combination, this led to almost half of the data being incomplete across all fields. However, with 426 respondents, and efficient survey design, there was an adequate response rate for several types of analysis which will be discussed below.

The intent of the survey was to capture family relations and patterns of marriage as well as attitudes to violence and gender roles. Respondents were asked to indicate not only practices in relation to their own marriage, where appropriate, but also those of their siblings, to extend the reach of the data, both numerically, and in the hope of gaining greater variation within the sample, rather than relying on solely upon the experiences of those with access to the Internet. The survey used logical operators to ask respondents to capture the experiences of marriage of the respondent himself or herself as well as that of 10 of their siblings of each gender. On average, each respondent recorded data for 8 siblings, significantly extending the data.

Measures

Marriage types

Respondents were able to select four different options to describe their marriages and those of their siblings. These included cousin marriage, marriage outside the family (exogamy), and “direct exchange” marriage. “Direct exchange” describes a distinct form of marriage where two couples’ marriages are connected through an “exchange of brides”⁸ mechanism, which evades brideprice payments and reinforces interfamilial links through “doubling up” the marriage relationship between the two families involved.

High/low consent binary

A dummy variable was created to indicate levels of consent to marriage, taken from the following responses concerning the respondent’s own marriage and those of his or her siblings:

Forced: I/my sibling was forced to marry against my/his/her will;

Fully arranged: The marriage was entirely arranged by the family;

Collaborative: The marriage was arranged jointly by me/my sibling and the family working together;

Free choice: I/my sibling married entirely by my/his/her own choice.

Low consent indicates marriages which were forced, or fully arranged; high consent marriages which were collaboratively or freely chosen.

Attitudes

There were 35 attitudinal questions, capturing opinions on marriage arrangement, types of marriage, intergenerational relations, gender roles, and “honor” on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from “agree strongly” to “disagree strongly,” with a “no opinion” option also available. Over a quarter of respondents agreed that “honor” had led to violence within their family, forming the basis of key HBV Experience variable which will be discussed in more detail below. All of these variables were recreated as dichotomous values, through removing non-committal and missing data, and combining “agree strongly/agree” as a positive response, and “disagree/disagree strongly” as a negative response.

Findings

Marriage Patterns

Types of marriage

Of 426 survey respondents, 292 gave information regarding 628 marriages: their own, and those of their siblings. Although cousin marriage formed the second largest group of categories of marriage type, it was far lower that the statistics given above for Iraq as a whole. It is likely that this is due to the high socioeconomic status of respondents, who are more likely to conduct marriages with an eye to maintaining or improving class status, rather than improving family solidarities (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Forms of Marriage Across the Sample.

	Marriages	Respondents
Exogamy	497 (79%)	211 (72%)
Direct exchange	33 (5%)	19 (7%)
Cousin	98 (16%)	62 (21%)
Totals	628 (100%)	292 (100%)

Intersection of marriage types across families

Figure 1 shows the responses of each single respondent relating to the forms of marriage occurring within his or her family. Most families used a variety of marital strategies; it is unlikely that all siblings and respondents would have married in the same type of marriage. In only 16 families were all marriages between cousins; 42 families combined cousin marriage with exogamous marriage and in 156 families, only exogamous marriage was found. This indicates that within this sample, cousin marriage appears as one marital strategy within the repertoire, with very few families arranging all marriages with cousins.

Figure 1.

Intersection of various forms of marriage across all families.

Distribution of marriage types within families

The proportion of cousin marriage also varied across birth order, with eldest siblings more likely to have married in this way, and younger siblings more likely to have married exogamously, shown in the percent stacked area graph in Figure 2. Cousin marriage appears to be frequently combined with other forms of marriage and to be favored for elder children, which suggests it is seen as a duty to be discharged at the earliest opportunity.

Figure 2.

Marriage types by birth order.

Attitudes

It should be noted that there was very little support for identifying cousin marriage as superior to other forms within the sample, suggesting that within this demographic at least, there is little support for cousin marriage as an aspect of Kurdish culture (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Attitudes to Cousin Marriage.

Prompt	Agree Strongly	Agree	No Opinion	Disagree	Disagree Strongly	Total
Marriages between cousins are the best and safest kind	1.4% (n = 3)	2.3% (n = 5)	7.9% (n = 17)	36.7% (n = 79)	51.6% (n = 111)	100% (n = 215)
Marriages between cousins can cause problems between the couple	25.1% (n = 52)	42% (n = 87)	14% (n = 29)	15% (n = 31)	3.9% (n = 8)	100% (n = 207)

There were valid significant differences on just three prompts between respondents from families where the respondent and/or one or more of his or her siblings had married a cousin and those where they had not (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Attitudes by Respondents From Families With Cousin Marriage.

Agreement With Prompts	Cousin Marriage	Other Marriage	p value
Husbands and wives should share their responsibilities without either of them taking overall control.	47 (88.7%)	153 (96.2%)	χ² = 4.24
			p = .049
Women should be able to work outside the home if they wish to do so.	41 (87.2%)	149 (96.1%)	χ² = 5.11
			p = .024
Where honor has been compromised, a family which does not respond will be excluded from the community until some action has been taken.	24 (70.6%)	58 (49.9%)	χ² = 4.69p = .023
			χ² = 4.69p = .023

Individuals from families with cousin marriage, then, have more conservative attitudes to gender roles and stronger beliefs that families who do not clear “honor” are excluded from the community. This latter belief was also more likely to be shared with individuals who had experienced HBV within their families (χ² = 5.5, df = 1, p = .006; see below).

Consent, endogamy, and violence

Consent varied significantly between cousin marriage and other forms (χ² = 36.73, df = 1, p ≥ .000), where just under half of all cousin marriages took a “low consent” form, compared with just over 15% of other marriages. There were no comparable findings in relation to exogamous or direct exchange forms.

In attitudinal questions, both respondents who expressed approval of HBV (χ² = 14.348, p ≤ .001, df = 1) and those who reported experiencing such violence within their families (χ² = 8.572, p = .006, df = 1) were significantly more likely to agree with the statement “families make better choices when they arrange marriages than individuals would do on their own behalf.”

The HBV Experience variable was developed from survey responses (see Table 4).

Table 4.

HBV Experience.

Prompt	Agree Strongly	Agree	No Opinion	Disagree	Disagree Strongly	Total
Disputes about honor have led to violence in my own family	10.9% (n = 21)	17.3% (n = 33)	13.6% (n = 26)	25% (n = 44)	35% (n = 67)	100% (n = 191)

Note. HBV = “honor”-based violence.

When cross-tabulated, there were no significant interactions between the presence of HBV within a family and cousin marriage (χ² = 0.76, p = .247). However, in a binary logistic regression in which free-choice forms of marriage were excluded from the data set (N = 88), the presence of cousin marriage increased the odds of HBV Experience by a factor of 2.5.⁹ When the binary consent variable was factored in, there was a significant effect found between HBV Experience, and cousin marriage—occurring where consent to marriage was defined as low. Although this analysis lacked power due to small cell sizes, it suggests that where marriages between cousins took high consent forms, there was no significant impact upon the risk of experiencing HBV (see Table 5).

Table 5.

HBV Experience and Cousin Marriage, in Families With Low and High Consent Forms of Marriage.

	Experience of HBV		Total	p value^a
	No	Yes	Total	p value^a
High consent
Other marriage	63 (81%)	31 (89%)	94 (83%)	0.136
Cousin marriage	15 (19%)	4 (11%)	19 (17%)
Total	78 (100%)	35 (100%)	113 (100%)
Low consent
Other marriage	24 (73%)	8 (42%)	32 (62%)	0.03
Cousin marriage	9 (27%)	11 (58%)	20 (38%)
Total	33 (100%)	19 (100%)	52 (100%)

Note. HBV = “honor”-based violence.

Probability calculated using Fisher’s Exact Test due to small cell sizes.

It is not then, the fact of cousin marriage that is associated with violence, so much as it is the expectation of control over marital choice within those families invested in this form. Where families are large, cousin marriage is considered acceptable, and socialization is often kinship-oriented, an individual is likely to interact with many cousins, increasing the possibility that she or he might voluntarily select a partner from among their numbers. This has a very different dynamic from the obligation to marry a cousin as suggested in Figure 2.

Cousin marriage alone is not a risk factor for HBV: The potential for familial coercion that accompanies the normative expectation of endogamy, and the values that this underscores, may be far more salient. This raises the question of why this particular marital strategy is seen as valuable.

Cousin Marriage and Social Reproduction

The republic of cousins

While there is some relationship between cousin marriage and HBV, as Tillion intuited, it may be more complex than her ascription of a situation in which female inheritance decreased tribal solidarities, leading to the development of the doctrine of “honor,” which she defines an ideology designed to ensure the reproduction of a mode of social organization by kinship which she describes as “the republic of cousins” (p. 47). There is certainly evidence for the co-occurrence of these phenomena. Sanmartìn (1982, p. 664) finds that cousin marriage is common where female inheritance is practiced in the Mediterranean region, but is considered deviant, even incestuous, where it is not. Korotayev (2000) finds that cousin marriage is strongly and significantly more likely in regions which were part of the Umayyad Caliphate, which is likely to have spread the Islamic tradition of female inheritance.

A woman or girl marrying an outsider from her group would be likely to pass on control of her portion of the patrimony to his custodianship. Just a few generations of portioning out inheritance would lead to the dissipation of farmland, pasture rights, and flocks. By contrast, cousin marriage ensures that women’s rights to their estates remain controlled by a member of the corporate, patrilinear grouping. However, this does neither explain the co-occurrence of endogamous and exogamous forms, nor the differences related to birth order, because sisters hold equal inheritance rights. As Yezidi women living within the Kurdish region do not inherit, yet still are encouraged to marry their cousins (Allison, 2001) and may be at risk of HBV, the patrilinear custodianship of women’s bodies appears to be a salient aspect of family identity whether or not these bodies come attached to dowries or potential bequests of property.

Fuad Khuri (1970) observes that there is a readily available alternative strategy to contain women’s inheritance rather than cousin marriage: the exploitation of their weak positions in patrilocal¹⁰ households to pressurize them into ceding their inheritance rights. Women tend to become dependent upon their brothers or fathers for food and shelter in the event of marital breakdown, and it may be a sensible trade-off to allow property to remain in male hands: A goodwill gesture toward the patriline, against the eventualities of marital discord.

Explanations based in female inheritance may be partial due to the omission of the wider intrafamilial relationships established by endogamous marriage. As Mounira Charrad (2001) claims, “[t]he preferential right of a man to his [father’s brother’s daughter] actually entails a relationship between two men, the groom and the bride’s fathers” (p. 59). Ladislav Holý (1989) identifies that cousin marriages are methods of maintaining the solidarity of a patriline. The ability of endogamy to consolidate power and property has long been a facet of dynastic power, from the brother–sister marriages of Ancient Egypt, to the patterns of first cousin marriage found in the family of Constantine the Great (Goody, 1983, p. 53).

Patrilineal forms of kinship are uniquely common to the south and central regions of Eurasia (Jones, 2003) and may be linked to family-based regimes of control over women (Dube, 1997). Patrilineal identity is very significant to Kurdish self-conception (King & Stone, 2010); it also is strongly expressed in Islamic law (Charrad, 2001, p. 42). The patrilineal pattern is vulnerable to segmentation: The fission of a patriline where one or more males desert his or their existing lineage, particularly upon the death of a father which can lead to struggles between brothers seeking to assume the patriarchal role. Where men’s inheritance rights are double the value of women’s, as is common in Muslim laws, the potential for disruption is likewise doubled. Furthermore, in agrarian settings, related men are expected to labor and share resources together, making the stability of their relationships crucial. A man who demands or threatens the separation of his portion from that of his brothers, or who refuses to co-labor with them, may fatally sunder masculine solidarities essential for the well-being of the patriline as a whole. It may be, then, that all patterns of distributive inheritance destabilize the patrilineal family, not just the inclusion of women as heirs.

Holý (1989) argues that cousin marriage on the father’s side tends to increase male solidarities: a particularly valuable strategy within an environment of intertribal contestations. He notes that in Kurdish regions, semi-nomadic Kurds, more likely to have greater needs for solidarity in the face of intertribal rivalries, have a higher level of amoza than those with a way of life based in sedentary farming. Through cousin marriage, transferences of women from their father to their father’s nephew effectively “stitch over” the potential fissures between brothers which arise within patterns of diffused inheritance and the everyday grievances of cooperative labor. A man’s relationship with his brother, vital for the survival of the patriline, is reinforced through entwining it with his relationship with his own daughter and his grandchildren.

There are strong expectations within every society for a person to identify potential sexual partners within a particular category, whether this be gendered, socioeconomic, or familial—with social penalties upon those who do not comply. Here, “honor” distributes presumed rights and responsibilities over the body of a woman to the kinship collective. Similarly, cousins, singly and collectively, as presumed potential future spouses, retain a residual responsibility and “right” over a woman’s body even before marriage—the “right” of access feeds into a motivation to control, monitor, and discipline; to assume the attitude of a jealous and custodial husband in advance of marriage. Thus, if a girl or woman is suspected of any premarital relationship, it may not be perceived as an indiscretion, but as an adulterous act against a group of men who have strong expectations that she will ultimately be married to one of their number, and as a threat to patrilinear stability. Through the institution of cousin marriage, a presumptive allocation of “rights” of access to a woman’s body, and responsibility for her behavior, derives from the moment of her birth onto a collective of related males, which is able to form both a surveillance network, and if need be, to take part in a murder. The normative expectation of cousin marriage creates a basis for the collective and familial control of women by their cousins, aunts and uncles, and other relations, whose interest in safeguarding her “virtue” is not merely deployed in the service of collective family reputation within their community but also in an individuated and possessive interest in her as a potential bride or in-law and an existential desire to maintain patrilinear solidarities.

In identifying inheritance as the key explanatory factor, Tillion may have neglected the colonial elephant in the room: It is likely that many of the effects she places in a causal chain—increased religiosity, disruptions to tribal life, increased surveillance, and prominence of violence against women in the Maghreb—could all be considered in terms of radiant responses to French colonialism, rather than as a self-enclosed program to resolve the contradictions of patrilinear family structures with the directive for female inheritance. Charrad (2001), for instance, notes that the colonial policy in this region tended to increase conservative orientations of the family:

. . . the objective of the colonizer was to make tribal kin groupings serve as conservative, stabilising elements of the social order . . . Among the colonized, the extended kinship unit acquired further value as a refuge from those dimensions of society being transformed by the colonizer. (p. 24)

Contemporaneously with Tillion’s research, Camilleri (1967) notes the economic modernization which accompanied the colonial presence led an increasing intergenerational friction around marriage arrangement in the Maghreb.

Patterns of normative cousin marriage are attuned to the needs of an agrarian society, where they are used to preserve the corporate patrimony; to organize and consolidate labor, resource, and other strategic relationships; and to reproduce group exclusivity. However, the agrarian way of life has not been predominant for a majority of Kurds since the late 1970s (Fischer-Tahir, 2009). Modernization leads to proletarianization, where inheritances are less likely to be reckoned in livestock and land, with the imperative that these be retained intact across the generations, but in currency, which has a far more partible quality. This alters the nature of threats to patrilinear property posed by inheritance and diminishes the role of fraternal co-labor.

Restrictions around marriage may also be harder to enforce within a post-agrarian society, within an urban environment where young people have much greater contact with “outsiders,” as neighbors, colleagues, and classmates. This has been shown to lead to increased levels of control and surveillance over women (Abu-Lughod, 1990, pp. 48-49). As the increasing prominence of HBV in India co-occurs with an unprecedented rise in caste/village exogamy, it appears that HBV is not uniquely linked to the “particular endogamy” identified by Tillion, but to coercive endogamies in general (Goli, Singh, & Sekher, 2013). Violence is also used to enforce in-marriage within extrafamilial identity groups. For instance, increasing sectarian tensions in South/Central Iraq has led to the targeting of “mixed relationships”—that is, couples from across the increasingly politicized Shi’a/Sunni divide (Integrated Regional Information Networks, 2006). Diane E. King (2008) observes that “honor” killings may be a way of policing ethnic boundaries. Given that the conception of Kurdishness (kurdayetî) which inflects nationalist sentiment is almost essentialist in character (Natali, 2005, p. 182), it is small wonder that these ethnic boundaries are policed with particular vigor (King, 2008, p. 335). King identifies, for instance, that some Kurdish militia fighters (peshmerga) took it upon themselves to slay “dishonored” women in the period after the Kurdish Uprising of 1991—but restricted these actions to women of Kurdish ethnicity. The charge of “fraternisation with the enemy” is often a cause for violence against women during conflict when inter-group boundaries become politicized (Yuval-Davis, 1996).

The understanding of “honor” in relation to women in the KRI, then, has been most fittingly characterized by King (2008) and Alinia (2013) as the ability of a group to enforce marital/reproductive boundaries. In the case of cousin marriage, this means that women are expected to reproduce their own patrilines, rather than those of other families. “Honor” may also feed into requirements that women reproduce other identity groupings salient to their collectives, including various endogamies of faith, socioeconomic class, and ethnic identity.

Still too early for the girl’s liberation

Tillion describes a situation where high-status girls had been subjected to careful custodianship for the sake of an expected marriage to their male cousins, but those cousins had chosen partners of their own while away at university, leaving the girls to lifelong spinsterhood, because no other candidates were considered eligible. She observes this as a particular transition moment where “it was already too late to secure the boy’s obedience, but still too early for the girl’s liberation” (p. 127). Although around 50 years have passed since My Cousin, My Husband was written, the tension between filial obedience and individual liberation remains across the Mediterranean basin, and more widely across Southern and Central Eurasia. Despite cultural and legal changes which have served to reduce the incidence of HBV among Italians (Bettiga-Boukerbout, 2005), young Italian men still concern themselves with their sisters’ “honor” (Baldassar, 1999) despite a move toward more individualistic patterns of kinship and marriage in Italy (Reher, 1998). As Bourdieu (2006) notes, aspects of structural violence which are built upon kinship relations “are often merged in the experience of respect or devotion and may live on long after the disappearance of their social conditions of production” (p. 341).

In the Middle East, as King-Irani (2004, p. 306) observes, due to harsh climates, economic and political insecurity, and the tendency of states to serve the interests of narrow élites rather than those of the populace, the flexibility and durability of kinship relations remain valuable. Even with the advent of modernization and the attendant challenges to the structure of the traditional family, she affirms that kinship relations retain “considerable power to galvanise ideologies, shape perceptions and guide actions in the realm of politics, commerce and administration.”

The organizational power of kinship is an aspect of the neopatrimonial state (Eisenstadt, 1973), where personalized relationships retain importance within the centralized bureaucratic state. “Incorporations of patriarchal kinship modes of operation, moralities or idioms are not perceived as disruptions to the state or family boundaries, but continuous with them,” states Joseph (2000, p. 27). Marriage may remain a key method of building and reinforcing personalized relationships, well after the decline of those agrarian lifestyles in which cousin marriage was first identified as a strategy for social and material reproduction and the advancement of the patriline.

“Honor” may be, then, a tenacious site of intergenerational and gendered conflict, where some of the younger generation increasingly insist upon their own bodily sovereignty, whereas some of the elder generation continue to cleave to in-group patterns of solidarity. Such solidarities may form channels for allocation of resources and influences within the top-down economy of the rentierist state, predominantly dependent upon the exploitation of mineral reserves and the channeling of the resultant resources through patronage relations (Nore & Ghani, 2009; Qadir, 2007). This combines with the predominant Middle Eastern identification of the family, rather than the imagined rights-bearing individual within liberal thought, as the basic unit of society (Joseph, 2000, p. 11), wherein citizens are imagined in terms of their membership of sub-national collectives—such as kingroups, and tribal, ethnic, and religious groupings.

Intergroup boundaries often become emphasized during periods of democratization, which can tend to lead to national subgroups developing into special interest groups, jockeying for position and resources (Snyder, 2000), which are controlled and monopolized by élite groups which often have strong familial, ethnic, or faith-based identities themselves. As Wolf (2001) predicts, such élites may reproduce and reinvent the restrictions upon marriage found in pre-modern societies into modernity, to “minimise the outward and downward flow of resources” (p. 172).

Given that one of the distinguishing features of HBV is the capacity to involve multiple perpetrators both from within the family and community, Charles Tilly’s (2003) observations on collective violence are very relevant. He argues that violence

. . . generally increases and becomes more salient in situations of rising uncertainty across the boundary. It increases because people respond to threats against weighty social arrangements they have built on such boundaries—arrangements such as exploitation by others, property rights, in-group marriage and power over local government. (p. 76)

It is not the choice of an individual to marry within a specific group that leads to the directive to subject women to discipline from their families, both in terms of surveillance and, and emotional and physical violence: It is the coercion implicit in the general requirement to marry in the interests of the collective, however, this interest is identified. This may particularly involve sub-national groups which instrumentalize various endogamies as a method of maintaining exclusive identities, which are used to mediate and contain access to power and resources.

Conclusion

While there is a correlation between cousin marriage and the experiences of HBV within this particular elite sample, these are likely to be located more within exploitative power relationships rather than the nature of cousin marriage itself: It is the co-occurrence of the stringent nature of requirements within certain families that young people identify their future partners within particular categories, alongside the expectation that families have the entitlement to arrange marriage on behalf of their members that leads to the policing of behavior which could be construed as deviating from these patterns and the use of disciplinary violence and threats. This is a system which relies on the compliance of a younger generation to continue. Compliance cannot be taken for granted, particularly in an era of globalization where the conjugal form of marriage, attuned to the needs of an industrialized economy, is effectively becoming the global norm (Coontz, 2004; Hartman, 2004). As Hirsch and Wardlow (2006) identify, companionate marriage is a practice which has been elided into the ideation of modernity and gender equality. For members of the emerging middle class (such as the sample discussed here), this may well mean the addition of a requirement for isogamous marriages¹¹ which intersects pre-existing identities based in ethnicity, religion, and lineage: Indeed, younger diasporic Kurds express a preference for education in a potential partner, while their parents remain more focused upon ethnic and religious identities (Buunk, Park, & Dubbs, 2008).

This could lead for an increased likelihood that those who wish to maintain control will make increasing recourse to coercion, to shore up normative systems which include a collective investment in marriage as a method of organizing kinship, identity, and labor relations and the transmission of resources. Further research could examine cross-cultural relationships between family structure and the expressions of violence; a more detailed profiling of the differences between families with tendencies toward cousin marriage and exogamy; and qualitative research into understandings of various patterns of marriage and the structures that underpin them.

Personal status laws of the Middle East tend to assume that families are patrilineal, and attempted feminist reforms are often stymied by religious and cultural conservatives, who defend these assumptions in the name of shari’a (see Alinia, 2013), within an environment in which family law has become an increasingly significant aspect of the Islamist identity since the 1980s (Hélie-Lucas, 1994). Reform of family law is not just in tune with the requirements of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), but may allow for the diversification of family forms (Mir Hosseini, 2000) which can allow for the emergence of less phallocentric orientations to family structure. It is notable that those countries with the lowest approval ratings for HBV in the Middle East and North African region (Pew Research Center, 2013) are those with the most egalitarian family laws (Charrad, 2012).

Family status may be threatened by marriages which overstep boundaries of exclusivity predicated upon other markers of exclusive identifications, such as ethnicity, religious identification, and class, just as much as those that which are linked to family identity, particularly due to the tendency for new democracies to balkanize (Snyder, 2000). Within neopatrimonial states, nepotism and corruption are social problems in the sense that they not only lead to social injustice especially for women and minorities but may also lead to intergenerational coercion to maintain exclusive identities through enforced endogamy. Transparency and good governance should be considered in terms of their gendered impacts, where the structures of neopatrimonial rule, intersecting with a society strongly ordered by kinship and other collective identifications, may lead to a familial investment in ensuring “their” women conform to communal norms around marriageability.

Action against “honor” crimes and actions to curb forced and early marriages must be considered part of the same project, forming a broader movement toward the recognition of the free expression of consensual adult sexuality as an aspect of bodily sovereignty, fundamental to human rights—and toward an of a concept of human rights which are borne by the individual rather than embedded within kinship or other sub-national groupings. HBV does not just tend to co-occur with coerced and child marriages; they are aspects of the same system. “Honor” is the ideology which justifies coercion and surveillance within a system in which the younger generation, and women in particular, do not have full rights to their own bodies. The assumption that parents hold hereditary, alienable, rights over the bodies of their children must be challenged robustly. This should neither, of course, prohibit parents from becoming involved in the intimate lives of their offspring, nor should youngsters be prevented from accessing parental intervention and advice if they so choose. It does, however, call for an adequate and overt expression of consent, and an environment in which the bodily sovereignty of young people can be asserted without fear of violent reprisals from their relatives and communities.

To erode both the instrumentalization of marriage, and the commodification of women’s bodies for the maintenance of in-group identities and the collective benefits thereof, there is a need to reduce inequalities of privilege and power between groups. There is also a need for “boundary deactivation,” movements toward ending internal segregations of ethnicity, confession, and other identity groupings, to reduce the “uncertainties across the boundary” noted by Tilly. Rydgren and Sofi (2011) suggest the fostering of intercommunity links to bridge troubled relationships between various ethnic and religious groups within Kurdish regions; this policy could also be extended to reduce the risk of violence erupting where young people seek partners from outside their group.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Amanda Robinson (Cardiff University, UK) and Prof. Debbie Epstein (Roehampton University, UK) for guidance and support, and Dr. Rashwan Galaly (Salahaddin University, Iraq) for survey translation services.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Joanne L. Payton has been working for the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization since 2005, and completed her thesis on “honor”-based violence in 2015 at Cardiff University. She is a member of the HMIC and Home Office Expert Reference Groups on “honor”-based violence. She now works for the think tank/media company Fuuse which produced the Emmy-winning documentary “Banaz: A Love Story,” for which she was a consultant. She co-organizes the international art and activism World Woman festival in Oslo. She has also worked on domestic violence perpetrator programs for South Wales Police and was a co-author of Uncharted Territory, a report into violence against migrant, asylum-seeking and refugee women in Wales.

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