Making Hierarchy

Chapter 6, “Making Hierarchy: Garrison, Court, and the Structure of Jiankang Politics,” analyzes the contrasting political cultures of two functional/occupational groups: garrison and court. While garrison culture emphasized relatively fluid patron-client ties, personal honor, violence, and vengeance, court culture emphasized rigid status hierarchy, calm restraint, and skillful deployment of the Sinitic paideia. The imperial household played a key brokerage role between the two cultures, but the garrisons dominated the process of imperial succession, which did not follow the rules of primogeniture and was always contested. The chapter then uses the Churen group (jituan) of the early fifth century as a case study to demonstrate that the strong regional basis of patron-client cliques, though similar in many ways to the rise of military groups such as the Tabgatch Compatriots in the north, did not result in significant ethnogenesis. The chapter offers as an alternative the model, taken from studies of Southeast Asian regimes, of the “man of prowess.”

Disentangling Honor-Based Violence and Religion: The Differential Influence of Individual and Social Religious Practices and Fundamentalism on Support for Honor Killings in a Cross-National Sample of Muslims

Religion is seen as one of the main causes of honor violence; yet, empirical studies investigating this purported relationship remain scarce. Therefore, we investigated how individual and social religious practices, religious fundamentalism, and demographic variables contribute to support for honor killings of women and men. We analyzed multinational face-to-face interview data of Muslims with a final sample size of N = 25,723. Using multilevel ordinal regression, we found that increased support for honor killings was strongly predicted by the frequency of mosque attendance, religious fundamentalism, a lower educational level, and living in a rural area. Conversely, gender and the frequency of private prayer did not significantly relate to support for honor killings. Thus, different aspects of religion have differential effects: Individual aspects of religious practice such as private prayer seem to be not significantly related to support for honor violence, whereas social aspects such as mosque attendance and religious fundamentalism strongly predict an increased support for honor killings.