Breaking free from ‘honour’: namûs, epistemic (in)justice, and the colonial politics of translation

Cetinkaya, Hasret ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0854-1576 (2025) Breaking free from ‘honour’: namûs, epistemic (in)justice, and the colonial politics of translation. European Journal of Women's Studies. ISSN 1350-5068

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Abstract

The concept of ‘namûs’ refers to a shared way of being and meaning that is central to Kurdish social life. Namûs, however, is most commonly known through translation as the concept of ‘honour’. In this article, I ask what happens when ‘we’ make a return to the vocabulary of namûs (not ‘honour’). What other meanings, frames, and ways of relating are opened up by the epistemic centring of namûs? The catachrestic operation that is namûs-as-‘honour’ is trapped within a colonial politics of translation, fixing the concept and its meaning in an injurious and epistemically unjust form. Reconstructing the meaning of what namûs entails, first by a return to its etymology, and second by exploring ethnographic encounters with subjects of namûs in Denmark, North Kurdistan, and Turkey, I argue that the conceptual non-equivalence of namûs with ‘honour’ in Eurocentric discourse requires a more rigorous form of translation which is attentive to the onto-epistemology, conceptual specificity, and historicity of namûs. To this end, I argue that openness and proximity to such lives are needed to capture the (un)translatability of namûs as a ‘life-worldly’ concept. This article, thereby, diversifies and interrupts the historicity of the concept of ‘honour’ by attending to namûs in its plurality. In doing so, the subjection of norms in the monolingual language-culture is challenged, and the aesthetic conditions that render such non-liberal lives as (un)intelligible are refigured. This makes possible a different mode of global feminist solidarity built upon openness, listening, and intimacy.