Chapter 7 (Part 3) Honor and Degradation, Debt The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
The dark side of honour was a movement against Mesopotamian temple sexual rites and practices. The outcome, patriarchy, thought to be liberating and preserving value from women, degraded them further.
Dear Reader,
I purposely omitted female sexuality and its relationship with honour last week. I felt it required a separate discussion on how it came to be tied with honour. This time, Graeber provides somewhat more satisfying answers than last week’s.
I am still thinking about my other travel post, don’t worry. However, I inadvertently lassoed myself into taking a refresher on Qualitative Research course under Gerben Moerman who is a fascinating teacher and an even more interesting individual. We always think of online school as easy but end up spending a lot of time completing requirements. I do dream of a new anthropology curriculum. Any suggestions are welcome.
By the way, I am also reading Care of the Species in my other book club which is another fascinating multi-species ethnography by another anthropologist who writes so simply and clearly, John Hartigan.
Stay cool,
Melanie
The origin of patriarchy
Of course, there is no origin to speak of. Graeber tackles these same origin mythos and our need to find roots of anything in his work, The Dawn of Everything. The gist is that both types pre-exist in the human condition, in our case, patriarchy and non-patriarchal practices. Human cultures develop against what they believe in and form values around them.
Take the case of female sexuality.
Temple sex in Mesopotamia
In Mesopotamia, the dominant culture views female sexuality with ambivalence.
Sumerian temple complexes powered the economy. People were expected to render labour to keep it running and some of its rituals were sexual rites and performed with and by the women.
This means that:
the approach to female sexuality is ambivalent (see below)
Sumerian religious texts interpret sex as a gift by the gods
Sex is sacred and divine
Procreative sex was considered natural (after all, animals did it). Non-procreative sex, sex for pleasure, was divine.
Aside from sexual rituals, temple staff (which might include transvestites and tavern keepers) also work as entertainers such as musicians, singers, and dancers. The temple staff were mixed. Many were slaves working off their debt, under debt slavery, under religious vows; those who worked independently or owned by the temple (and thereby benefited from money earned). It is no wonder that in Biblical accounts, temples were like marketplaces themselves mixing the carnal with the sacred in a cacophony of activities.
Rejection of the corrupt civilisation
This ambivalent practice of temple society, human sexuality, and profit was going to receive pushback who almost always were the poor. This sector would often be debt slaves and peons. The only way to escape paying debts and surrendering their possessions was to join the fringe rebel groups at the interstices of civilisation. These refugees would move to the cities in times of prosperity and recede from them during difficulties.1 They then would threaten these cities as conquerors and so the cycle continues of city prosperity and decay.
Though we would have little information (but check Chapter 8 of The Dawn of Humanity), we know that counter-cultures formed outside of these cities. These were groups that identified against what they perceived as the corrupt urban life and more importantly the loose practices on female sexuality. The result is an intense practice of patriarchy.
It seems ironic that a counterculture perpetuated misogyny while urban civilisation promoted free sexual mores. The challenge posed by Graeber is how to distinguish between the two types of women.
Signalling purity through the veil
One visible solution is government intervention and the imposition of the veil. The earliest reference to veiling in the Middle East was unironically the military state of Middle Assyria during 1400 - 1000 BC. The tablets were found in the city of Assur, Qalat Sherqat in what is now Iraq.
These laws stipulate that slaves and prostitutes should not wear the veil with severe punishments for those who do. This was only reserved for those ‘respectable’ women who were under the guard and control of their men and were exchanged in other circumstances like perhaps marriage.
Now what?
As we have seen, tracing the origin of patriarchy has exposed the dilemma faced by women:
if you are poor, you are most likely to end up as a debt peon, debt slave, prostitute or servant
if you are well-off, you are still subject to the control of others and restricted
Despite our hypothesis of a counterculture, women on any side of the equation continued to experience degradation.
What does this all mean for honour?
We discussed the origin of patriarchy because Graeber wanted to trace where the dark definition of honour originated. The link between female sexuality and honour appears to originate from the following:
from a fringe counterculture that wanted to preserve the purity or control female sexuality for higher asset value (this post)
from a debt system that includes the sale and trade of women and children including their labour and bodies (previous post)
Honour intertwines with the control and degradation of women as the root of its integrity. When and how it happened cannot be seen in the Early Medieval Irish laws or Mesopotamian periods. By these times, women were already in dire straits and a low position. This would be the same story across different societies and periods.
Perhaps, Graeber can identify the point of transformation from another angle by looking at male honour in Greece and Rome.
Round-Up
Honour gains its dark association specifically from a monetary arithmetic of dignity targeting women’s degradation, in particular. It is no surprise that when we speak of honour, we usually refer to preserving or compensating male honour.
In this post, we learned how patriarchy is a reaction to the Mesopotamian temple’s freewheeling sexual rites and sexual payments performed by women from a multitude of backgrounds and situations. Graeber surmises that it is often the poor who are greatly affected by indenture and servitude. It is no wonder that it is often the poor who leave the cities, join the outsiders, and later on participate in re-conquering those areas carrying values such as patriarchy.
The system of patriarchy, though reliant on a form of honourable integrity for women, in practice degrades women through control and restriction. The veil is one of the oldest forms of recorded distinction of ‘value’ enforced by the Assyrian state. It defines women’s values based on bodily purity and control by their household. Ironically, in doing so, pushes the need for commercial prostitution.
When did honour require the degradation of women? We’ll get closer to an answer learning about the Greek and Roman male values next.
Review the previous post
Interestingly, they are called hapiru or habiru and may double as soldiers in Mesopotamia. One hypothesis is that this term is the origin of the term Hebrew a group who follow a similar pattern of exodus, living in the fringe, and later on coming in as conquerors.