Honour Killing: Dilemma, Ritual, Understanding

9780195476316

019547631x

Honour killing is one form of extreme violence perpetrated on women by men in certain societies. Most commonly, it is a premeditated killing of a girl or a woman who is perceived to have besmirched her family honour by her sexual conduct. It is committed by the accused womans brother, father,or a combination of male agnates in the name of restoring their familys honour. The genesis of honour killing is deeply grounded in history and has been linked by various scholars with ascendant patriarchal structures in human societies. During the course of history, and in more contemporary times,a large number of honour killings have been reported from the Mediterranean, Latin American, and certain Muslim societies. However, research suggests it is an error to view the practice as being peculiar to a certain geographical region or belief system. Pakistan is one of the countries where theincidents of honour killing are among the highest in the contemporary world. And, although there have been important scholarly contributions on the concept of honour and its behavioural expressionparticularly about the area around the Mediterraneanconsidering the pervasive nature of honour killingin Pakistan, scholarly work on the subject has been of a limited nature. As a hermeneutic and critical study, this book borrows from theorists and philosophers as diverse as Gebser, Foucault, Barthes, Riceour, Gramsci, Said, and Spivak. Contextualizing and analysing the various representativediscourses in Pakistan, this work comes to some understanding of the possible cultural, religious, and historical reasons that create the exigency for men to kill a female member of their own family. It looks at honour killing as a message in several contexts of Pakistani national life and analyzeshow these messages are communicated, and towards what rhetorical ends.