Karo kari (honor killing) in Pakistan: A hermeneutic study of various discourses.

Abstract

Honor killing is one form of extreme violence perpetrated on women by men. In Pakistan it is called karo kari (literarally: blackened man, blackened woman). It most commonly is a premeditated killing of a girl or woman, committed by her brother, father, or combination of male agnates in the name of restoring what they consider their family's honor by her behavior. The genesis of honor killing in human societies is deeply sedimented in history but has been linked by various scholars with ascendant patriarchal structures. A large number of honor killings are reported from Mediterranean, Latin American, and certain Muslim societies, but research suggests that it would be an error to view it as being peculiar to a certain geographical area or belief system.

Pakistan is one of the countries where the incidents of honor killing are among the highest in the contemporary world. There have been important scholarly contributions on the concept of honor and how it is behaviorally expressed and understood in various societies---particularly in the Middle East and around the Mediteranean---but little such work has been done in Pakistan. As a hermeneutic study, and borrowing from theorists and philosophers as diverse as Gebser, Foucault, Barthes, Riceour, Kramer, Gramsci, and Spivak, this dissertation contextualizes and analyses the various representative discourses in Pakistan in order to come to an understanding of the possible cultural, religious, and historical reasons that create the exigency for men to kill a female member of their own family. This work looks at this kind of killing as a message, a vivid rhetorical move, in several contexts of Pakistani national life and analyzes how these messages are communicated, and toward what rhetorical ends.