"Pan-Mediterranean hypothesis"

[meltdown711]

Honor-shame syndrome, which in class I've also been calling the "Pan-Mediterranean hypothesis": the idea that a social ethic organized in distinctive ways around notions of honor, shame, and reputation is widely shared by a number of cultures in and around the Mediterranean region, and at various points in history, including modern times. By an honor/shame ethic, I mean one where considerations of one's own standing in the public eye, and that of groups with which one is closely associated ("ingroups," e.g., the family), exert pressure upon individuals to behave in ways conducive to the honor or prestige of the individual or ingroup, often at the expense of outgroups or members thereof. Expressed in terms of gender and sexuality, that translates as, "The man protects the family’s (sexual) honor; the woman conserves her (sexual) purity" (McGinn 10). But it also can involve the upholding by men of their masculine-sexual integrity, which, when compromised, can compromise one's standing in the ingroup (see especially Winkler in Constraints).

I would suggest that this "syndrome" has something to do with the masculine, use-of-pleasures ethic and related that Foucault proposes for archaic and classical Greece in HS2: sexual self-compromise, plus failure to police the sexuality of one's women, as a social-political liability.

Now, such an ethic will find plenty of parallels outside the Mediterranean sphere; codes of honor are nothing unusual. Conversely, we cannot afford to ignore its varied articulations, even within Mediterranean contexts. That is, we have no warrant to use this model reductively.

Still, in its various Mediterranean incarnations, it seems fairly consistently to involve a core set of elements that, when considered together, present a distinctively Mediterranean profile, elements like:

• androcentrism (patriarchy, the double standard, etc.)
• zero-sum competition (social and/or political rivalry for honor where "my loss is your gain")
• deep-seated suspicion of "Others" as, potentially, a threat to "Us" (one's household, family, village, etc.), and thus not to be trusted fully, etc. etc.

As the evidence for this "syndrome" comes primarily from village societies directly observed by modern anthropologists, there is the issue of whether it can really tell us anything about ancient societies. Among modern authors we have been reading and/or discussing, J. Winkler, D. Cohen, and T. McGinn think it can; S. Treggiari, writing on Roman marriage, has her doubts.

[meltdown711]

Ive been working with this in my study on Roman/classical Greek sexuality. But it doesnt apply just to them, many of the groups studied have come from North Africa and Spain.

Some, like Tregari, say this is not applicable to ancient people since she sees it as a development of the Islamic Age rather than a Med. thing. I dont believe her idea has ever been bought though.


It certainly is represented in Albanian society, look at, for instance, the fact that women and men had their own rooms separated from one another, and the strong shame culture present in Albanian society. Some would even see the squabbling among politicians as an exercise in this (that is, only my party can win and you will lose all your seats), which also occurs in Italy.

[donnie]

Very interesting Melt.

But I wonder if the restriction of this phenomenon to the Mediterranean world is an accurate one. As you said, codes of honour can be found in geographic locations well outside the Mediterranean world, like the Samurai bushido, and so forth.

Furthermore, when reading famous Icelandic stories, like Njal's saga, one finds many paralells to the Albanian culture and perceptions of what is honour and what is shame. It is like a projection of the very old notion of being Albanian to another geographic context, with only the language and ethnic identity being different. The good evaluation of women warriors exists there also, mostly young women before they get married, e.g. Nora e Malesise in our northern highlands, compared to Brynhildr of the Norse (http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/medieval/saga/pdf/375-norrman.pdf). Maybe this sympathetic idea of women warriors also existed amidst the ancient Greeks who believed in the existance of women warriors, the Amazons, and venerated female deities with close affiliation to arms, hunting and war (Athena in the Iliad, Artemis etc). I wonder if this admiration for virgin warriors, existed beyond these shores of the Mediterranean, for instance, in Northern Africa?

[meltdown711]

Ancient Greece and Rome projected a great fear of women in power, and of the flipping of power structures. Women are continuously attacked and played down in satires and plays. Euripedes became infamous for the degenerate roles he gave his female characters (which was satyred in the play Thesmophoriazeusia, Women at the Thesmaphoria). In many ways the harsh restrictions placed on women represent part of this few and women who in anyway moved out of their particular societal role represented a degradation of morals. This repression (women in Athens were not even to look outside their windows and were ideally not to leave their homes without escorts) represented this fear. The only women in Roman society who had any significant say were the Vestal Virgins, who held powers similar to a man (in some ways parallel to the virgjinete culture in Albania).

The myth of the Amazon plays a part in this fear, a society of women completely free of men (and thus without sexual limitations and restrictions). It was the Greco-Roman worst nightmare. For an interesting satire of this read Aristophanes' play Assembly Women. In it, women takeover Athens and turn it into a communistic society.

Not simply power, but even independence of women was seen with extreme derision. Women were not to take control of property (exception in Rome, once again, being the Vestal Virgin, who could inherit).

One of the ultimate levels of misogyny is portrayed in the Against Neaira, where the Athenian prosecutor makes the (in)famous statement: We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs, and wives for child-bearing.

We do have some cases of admiration, but it is not even. In the Battle of Salamis, where the Persian force was defeated, Herodotus mentions Artemisia Queen of Caria, a woman who lead part of the Persian force with admiration. Yet the comparison is that she was the most manly in the Persian army... which seems a bit ambivalent (not to mention they were from the same region). Clearly, though, this was an exception. Overall the image of women is negative. They are seducers and, often, lead great men to their destruction. They are a negative influence.

[meltdown711]

An interesting case where this could come into play is when Enver Hoxha finally broke the Dibran resistance, which wanted Zog in power. To humiliate the men of Dibra, he had women disarm and arrest them.

[meltdown711]

Im going to post up some of the evidence for this as cited by people like Cohen when I get some more free time. He cited studies of Andalusian societies along with the Spanish 'machismo' culture.

This kind of culture has been cited as far back as Iliad and Odyssey. If you read the two, look at the responses Andromachi and Penelope receive from the males in their family. When both of them try to interfere in mainly situations, Hector and Telemachus pretty-much tell them to 'go back to the kitchen' and the two do so without question.

You can also compare the gunaikonitis of Athens to the division of floors that were assigned in kullas in Albania, where women were divided from the man by an entire floor and the man's guests would actually enter by a staircase that was entirely separate from the staircase the women used. In both cases it was a way to separate the woman and thus make it impossible for any 'horse-play' to occur... In both cases it shows strong levels of control on the part of the dominant male.

[meltdown711]

Some more terminology linked to this idea:

asymmetry, "asymmetry hypothesis". "Asymmetry" is lack of correspondence between two elements that go together. Thus if the two sides of the human face, right and left, don't match, that's asymmetry.

As for "asymmetry hypothesis," that is my reformulation (and attempt at clarification) of what Foucault presents as the ideological underpinnings to the ethics of male sexuality and gender in classical Athens. (See pp. 33 ff., 215 ff. of vol. 2 of History of Sexuality.)

That can best be explained in terms of approximate ideological equivalence between pairs of terms, each term "asymmetrically" paired to its partner, so that the second term somehow expresses deficiency or inferiority in relation to the first. According to this hypothesis, dichotomized pairings like the following did not so much impose certain patterns as much as commend them by appealing to a shame-honor mindset, one centered ultimately around notions of male normalcy and deviance:

male / female

~


masculine / feminine

~


penetrator / penetrated

~


active / passive

~


dominant / submissive

~


senior (in status) / junior

~


moderate (sophron) / immoderate

~


free / slave

~



And so on. Foucault would call that a discursive formation; he actually refers to the above scheme as "the principle of isomorphism between sexual relations and social relations" (HS2 p. 215).

Foucault notes that the status of underage freeborn citizen male beloved (eromenos) was not, strictly speaking, parallel to ("isomorphic" with) that of slaves or women. Yet even in Foucault's reading, it does appear to be at least partly "isomorphic," as the immature boy is at a stage between unambiguous subordination and a superior status.

Problems arise, though, when we consider that this scheme fails to account for

* Socially approved roles for women. Here, the scheme reveals Foucault's basically androcentric bias
* Issues of class: whether the poor were held to the same standards as the wealthy; how social or political prominence factored into the equation; where these protocols mattered and where they did not, and why. (Winkler in Constraints of Desire addresses that)
* The erastes ~ eromenos (lover ~ beloved) dichotomy in socially acceptable pederasty, which, if we try to fit it into the larger scheme, becomes deeply problematic for the junior partner, the eromenos

One can, therefore, understand the complexities of socially approved pederasty as strategies to reconcile fundamental contradiction within this larger normative scheme. On the other hand, Aristophanes' and Euripides' women's plays suggest both the strengths and weaknesses of Foucault's scheme in relation to classical Athenian women. His scheme links the privileging of masculinity to patriarchy at Athens, but obscures women's roles and how those were evaluated.

functional contructionism. "Functional constructionism" (my term) states:

* That categorizations having to do with things like sex and gender typically have a SOCIAL function
* That this function addresses the need felt by close-knit social units to construct evaluative categories expressing the shared self-image of the social unit in question
* That these categories are typically organized around normative, asymmetrical binaries (valorized v. devalorized), e.g.:
o Us v. Them
o licit v. illicit
o loyal v. disloyal
* That, with respect to conduct viewed as definitive of group identity, groups tend to analyze that conduct along such lines

This constructionism is "functional" because it describes how gender, sexuality, etc. are "used" by societies (how they function) for the purpose of group self-definition. It is "constructionism" because it suggests that, whatever the objective reality, categories like these are effectively produced by the social units that use them. Thus any truth regime or discursive formation, scientific or otherwise, can be viewed from a sociological perspective, one asking, in essence, "How does it function socially?"

"Functional contructionism" poses, then, a basic question: Can the ideologies framing group-definition remain stable in confrontation with the "Other"? Does the effort to make us into an "Us" separate from "Them," the process of group definition through differentiation, ever show signs of stress and strain — how hard it can be to rule out any connection with "them"? Is it ever subject to a self-subverting circularity: "better" defined in terms of "Us"; "Us" as, by definition, "better"?



A lot of the Med. Hypothesis has, in many ways unfortunately, been used to try and grasp how such an ideology as pederasty could have developed as in an anyway acceptable practice and the strong level of misogyny that exists in the same societies.