Rethinking ‘Honour’: Human rights, Namûs and the self
Cetinkaya, Hasret
Cetinkaya, Hasret
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Identifiers
http://hdl.handle.net/10379/16856
https://doi.org/10.13025/17456
https://doi.org/10.13025/17456
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Publication Date
2021-07-06
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
This thesis asks: what does ‘honour’ (namûs) achieve in the making of the subject? The concept of ‘honour’ has come to be known in human rights discourse through scenes of violence and death. As a result, human rights discourse has sought to understand, govern and eradicate this ‘harmful practice’. This thesis argues that ‘honour’, or rather, namûs entails a life much richer and more dignified than human rights discourse can account for. Drawing upon advances in contemporary social and postcolonial feminist theory by Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood and Michel Foucault, and a rich ethnographic archive developed over the course of fieldwork in Turkey, North Kurdistan and Denmark, this thesis examines the ethical process of subject-formation specific to the lifeworld of Kurds living with and through namûs. Namûs has been mistakenly translated to ‘honour’, and through such a translation the cultural specificity of namûs has been overwritten. This thesis corrects this misapprehension and thin understanding through the theorisation of namûs in terms of what Saba Mahmood describes as a ‘positive ethics’. Exploring what role namûs as an ethical order plays in the formation of the self, the present research interrogates the techniques of embodiment and the shaping of ones desires in accordance with the norms and virtues of namûs. The subjects of namûs willingly offer themselves up to its ethical commands in order to come to live in accordance with the truth of a good life, as they understand it. The thesis argues that through the embodiment and inhabitation of norms and virtues associated with namûs, its subjects exercise meaningful and dignified forms of agency which escape the view of human rights discourses understandings of freedom and the human. The argument presented here pushes at the bounds of our dominant understandings of subjectivity, agency and desire.
Publisher
NUI Galway
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Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland