The Circum-Mediterranean

Index →Circum-Mediterranean

Specifically: Europe, Middle East, Supra-Saharan Africa

Schneider (1971)[1] examined cultural codes in operation in traditional Mediterranean societies which embody the notions of honour and shame. Analysis focuses upon how these practices govern 'family integrity', controlling the virginity of young women and girls. Women define the honour of the social group and honour is linked to family status and property within the community. Inter-community conflict is central to community values and the concepts of 'honour' and 'shame' operate to restore familial and community relations. Shame is defined as the reciprocal of honour and is especially important when one of the contested resources is women. Male control therefore is seen as crucial in maintaining the virtue of women and families associate honour with the virginity of unmarried daughters and the chastity of these women after marriage. An unmarried girl's loss of virginity brings unbearable shame on her family or lineage who, if they are to recover, must first kill the girl and then her lover.

Giovannini (1987)[2] observed that the category of ‘honour’, as employed by traditional anthropologists, has failed to examine the control of female sexuality. Instead, the term ‘female chastity’ is used to examine how it may operate as an indicator of social worth for all individuals and their respective kin groups. Analysis focuses on how the control of female chastity operates within the community/supra-local linkages, class relations and the politics of gender. ‘Female chastity’ is positioned within political, economic and ecological situations whereby kin groups compete over land and other scarce resources. Virginity thus comes to symbolise the family’s ability to protect its material boundaries. This approach, which links together the concepts of ‘female chastity’, material conditions and social worth, is based upon rational responses to objective conditions and seeks to avoid earlier ethnocentric models which focussed solely upon ‘culture’. State and religious institutions legitimate, enforce and symbolically justify the cultural codes of female chastity.

Janssen, D. F., Growing Up Sexually. VolumeI. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed. 2004. Berlin: Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology

Last revised: Jan 2005