10 - The power of shame

Summary

Maduzai conceptions of gender inequality and the inferiority of women are intimately related to their notions of honour and shame and responsibility. Together the system of ideas and practices constitutes a more or less closed ideology of control whose premises are unexamined and whose contradictions and anomalies are unnoticed. To the outsider, the contradictions and anomalies are particularly evident in relation to gender categories and roles.

As we have seen, Maduzai interpretations of honour and shame and Maduzai social identity depend on a precarious balance between two things: first, the unity of Durrani as an ethnic group which shares collective responsibility for maintaining their superiority through endogamy, and second, the ideal of the equality and autonomy of each Durrani household which constantly competes for the control of women as objects of exchange in marriage and as reproductive resources.

Thus, both the Durrani ethnic group as a whole and the Maduzai household are defined explicitly in terms of marriage and the control of women. It follows then that because these areas are central to the construction of Durrani identity and society, women, who have so little autonomy or control over their lives or the resources of the household in which they live, nonetheless have a certain power to subvert the social order.