magazine issue 1 2012 / Issue 13

Family Honour and the Purity of the Family’s Essence: A Relational Models Approach

• written by Cláudia Simão & Beate Seibt
• edited by Selin Kesebir

Overall, the available literature suggests that honour is an important attribute to social life: It provides a standard for judging one’s own actions and those of others. Honour is therefore immensely important for social reputation and respect, and it is typically based on the whole family, thereby increasing the interdependence and cohesion in the family. In addition, honour deeply influences the psychological functioning of individuals; it provides a basis for self-esteem, determines to a large extent which types of situations provoke emotions and how they are regulated. Nevertheless, there are still some questions remaining: What mechanisms maintain an honour-based thinking? How are honour concerns related to the protection of the group? Why should a culture of honour develop based on protection? We suggest that Relational Models Theory (RMT; Fiske, 1992) offers a good theoretical explanation for some of these questions. RMT claims that social life and social relations are essential in people’s lives. People organize their social lives into four different cognitive models – one of these four basic relational models is communal sharing. In communal sharing relationships people have a sense of shared identity, ignoring the distinctiveness among the members. The relationship is represented as a shared essence or substance between members of a group (Fiske & Haslam, 1997). Most, though not all, American and European families are organized in a communal way of relating. Accordingly, people often represent their families as sharing a common substance: blood. Understanding communal sharing might thus help us understand the way honour is conceptualized and experienced.

Relational Models Theory

According to A. P. Fiske’s Relational Models Theory (1992), all human interactions have a relational meaning – they initiate, affirm, question or end a social relationship of some sort. He suggests that across cultures, people organize their social lives through four different cognitive models. These four models are useful to structure social life. People know a-priori how to recognize each relational model, and this helps them behave in accordance with the norms of that particular model.

These four models are communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Each of these models is applied for different purposes. Communal sharing is applied when the participants in the relationship can be treated as equivalent; authority ranking is applied when relationship partners have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy Needs clearer definition—does it apply when both partners desire an unequal power distribution? Or just one partner?; equality matching is applied when the goal is an even distribution of resources; and market pricing is applied when the partners base their relationship on cost-benefit analyses. Though the four models are equally important for structuring social lives, we will only focus on communal sharing because of its relevance to honour concerns.

In a communal sharing relationship partners see each other as equivalent and undifferentiated. They treat each other not according to individual identities but according to the shared identity– people within the group are the same, outsiders are different. This principle of equivalence means that people take whatever they need and contribute with whatever they can. Members of the group do not keep track of what each member takes and gives (Fiske, 1992; Fiske & Haslam, 2005). Communal sharing organizes the relationship when people have in common something socially meaningful that differentiates them from outsiders. Some of the most intense communal relationships are constituted through sharing related to the body; participants share several aspects of their bodies (i.e., tattoos, clothes) or there is something that their bodies share in common (anessence). Thereby, communion is generated and developed by acts such as giving birth, nursing, breastfeeding, going through rites of blood sharing (i.e., blood brotherhood), commensal eating and drinking, and skin-to-skin contact. Sharing bodily substances creates a categorical bond among people. Thus, the act of sharing substances is a material sign of a social relation. It strengthens the social cohesion and the identification with the in-group (Fiske, 1992; Fiske, 2004; Fiske & Fiske, 2007).

When people perceive that everyone in the in-group shares essential substances (i.e., blood, food, or drinks), they apply a communal relationship model (Fiske, 1992; Fiske, 2004; Fiske & Fiske, 2007). Generally, communion makes people feel that all members of the group are of the same kind, are united by a common identity, or a common essence. This collective essence raises concerns about contamination of the group, i.e., fears that they can be vulnerable to pollution. Once one member is polluted, the whole group can be contaminated (Fiske, 1992).