Citation

Sanadjian M. Soc. Ident. 2008; 14(6): 717-738.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13504630802462828

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article examines female suicide among the Lurs of south-western Iran where the ethnographic material was gathered during 1979-1982. The Luri men's public reaction to their female relatives' and kinsmen's self-destruction is looked at as a refusal to authorize female 'voluntary' death either as a punishment or a protest. In taking poison and later setting themselves alight the Luri women were not punishing themselves for violating an honored rule such as sexual propriety. The 'voluntary' death, therefore, was not designed to restore a male-dominated social order. But at the same time within this order male excess was not recognized as violence to warrant the identification of its subject and object, the perpetrator and the victim. Hence the Luri men's refusal to confer on their female relatives' self-destruction the status of a sanction - a socially endorsed power. Notwithstanding this refusal, the equivocal position of the victim vis-a-vis the perpetrator in a voluntary death, the paper argues, was seized by Luri women as a last 'opportunity' to exercise power by calling for the testimony of witness, the agent whose mediation is essential for the establishment of the interconnected identities of the victim and the perpetrator of violence. Destruction of the body enabled the women to withdraw irrevocably from the increasingly oppressive relationships in which they suffered as a kinswoman and a relative. Concurrent with this withdrawal was the move by Luri women away from their contemporaries turning towards successors as their interlocutors and witnesses. By addressing their interlocutors in posterity the women were able to escape the spatial constraints on their action both in the repressive male dominated public space and in the increasingly privatised domestic domain. The fatal shift towards a temporal framework for action was mediated by Luri women initiating a risky game from which they were certainly to emerge as the loser. The deployment of the game was intended to highlight the inequality between the dead and the living, in contrast to a ritualistic representation of the dead as in funeral rites in which the inequality between the dead and the survivor was superseded in their equal membership of the community. Whereas the play enacted in a funeral rite over which Luri men presided was designed to gloss over the inequality between the dead and the living the deadly game introduced by women was intended to bring to the fore the inequality between the two. In their hopeless and humanly costly attempt to overcome the present limits on their action in order to make themselves heard in posterity as the victim of male excess, the Luri women left behind a muted request for an alternative social order.

Language: en

Keywords

public space; violence; suicide; Suicide; Iran; Middle East; Asia; gender issue; womens status; Eurasia; Domination and protest; Gender inequality; Perpetrator and victim of violence; Power and time/space; Risky game; Ritualized play; Unauthorized death; Voluntary death; Witnessing