dc.description.abstract
This study is a long due response to unsustainable evaluations based on dichotomies such as traditional-rational or local-state, and the presumption that people in Pakistan are too oppressed or to uneducated to know what is best for them. My research has been a path riddled with negative evaluations of Pakistan, not of the people, but of their capacity to 'do things right'. What satisfies me is to have been able to maintain the promise of a positive reading, to establish an argument that explains how the political and social functions in Pakistan work, and not how they are misused, misguided, corrupted, or distorted.
The thesis has been written, in its method, style, language, and analysis, to build up an understanding in the reader that is useful, not only for the well informed academic, but also for those who might have never heard from Pakistan before. It is an honest study aimed at changing people's minds, away from the very basic assumptions that are normally made about Pakistan.
The introduction of this study contains the layout of the basic concepts and why and how the research has been carried out, leading to the hypothesis that the political and social functions in Pakistan are defined by the Soziologie of the traditional Herrschaft, with a legitimacy and an authority anchored in the past, fundamentally opposed to the legal Herrschaft with its legitimacy linked to law and a sovereignty placed in the nation-state. The presence of Vindicatory justice in Pakistan, based on reciprocity and collective consent, with no basic divides between the moral, the legal, the political, the religious or the social, further define the political and social functions, within their own logic and rational, as a collective process that produces the norm, contrasting with societies of codified law. The first chapter expands on those basic concepts, the significance of Vindicatory justice, the relevance of caste and biradari alliances, and the importance of continuity. The third chapter is focused on what is perceived that needs to be continued, which is not only the knowledge but how this knowledge is construed and connected to the past, expanding on the Islamic tradition. Having established that, the challenges imposed by colonial rule can be seen from a new perspective, as challenges, influential challenges, but not changes. This knowledge, with the logic and rationality of Vindicatory justice linked as it is to custom, has its own technique to incorporate the 'here and now' and allow for its continuity despite political, institutional, legal and social impositions. Chapter four till chapter seven are meant to vividly describe this technique with ethnographic material creating a more comprehensive and visual picture aimed at barricading preconceptions and giving way to the argument of this thesis. From the declaration of the Ahmadi community as non-Muslims, for which Pakistan has been shamed without any further research into the persistence of this law, to the frequent false accusations of blasphemy, not only against Christians but mostly against Muslims, an active approach is made to comprehend the process; a collective motion of social interaction that is unleashed through those accusations, capable of
incorporating social elements that oppose the old order by dealing with them in the traditional ways. This process also exposes the dim lines between the micro and the macro, the moral, the religious, the legal, the political and the social. How this is achieved is an expression of what is being protected, revived, and continued. What is being protected is a whole Soziologie with its legitimacy based in the past, with interaction based on reciprocity, and with a perception of the person defined within the collective.
The findings of this study not only clear the way to a more accurate evaluation of Pakistan's society, but by focusing on the legitimacy of the past and its preservation, they also lead the reader of the 'modern' world to question to what extend the legitimacy of the law is dominant, and to what extend personal alliances still count.
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