Culture of Honour, Culture of Change. A Feminist Analysis of Honour Killings in Rural Turkey

This paper proposes a feminist analyses of honor killings in rural Turkey. One of our main goals is to dissociate honor killings from a particular religious belief system and instead, locate it within a continuum of patriarchal patterns of violence against women. To this end, we first provide a summary of the defining characteristics of honor killings and discuss the circumstances under which they are likely to occur. Second, we discuss the modernization versus the traditionalism in Turkey, emphasizing the contradictory forces in a culture of change. Third, we discuss conflict orientations in understanding violence against women, starting from some of the assertions and assumptions of the Marx/Engles hypothesis, and socialist feminism. Then we compare and contrast the radical feminist orientations with the materialist orientations. Fourth, we give examples of honor killings in Turkey that have been recorded in the recent years, specifically highlighting the common threads among these heinous crimes. The patterns we observe are more supportive of the radical and socialist feminist orientations than the Marx/Engles hypothesis. The paper ends with some modest suggestions about breaking the cycle of violence against women. We emphasize the personal, social, structural and global links in engendering positive change