Workshop Abstracts
Panel 1 – Societal Dynamics: Past and Present
Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology in Afghanistan
Eva Meharry, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Since the advent of the modern archaeological discipline in Afghanistan in the early twentieth century, archaeology has been embroiled in national politics, at times helping to foment national identity, and at other times causing divisions between religious, ethnic and tribal factions. This paper presents the topic of my PhD Thesis, which explores how archaeology has been utilised in successive Afghan nationalist agendas from 1919–2001 by assessing archaeological sources, political sources, interviews and state-sponsored materials from national and international actors. In this talk I will focus specifically on the prominent case of Bamiyan, a Buddhist archaeological site in central Afghanistan, which was surveyed and excavated by French archaeologists in the 1920s. Tracing the history of this site, I will unpack how the successive Afghan governments embraced the excavations and discoveries made by archaeologists, and how the archaeological focus on the pre-Islamic past exacerbated tensions with local factions, leading to multiple iconoclastic attacks on the Bamiyan site and depictions over the course of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the case study underscores the inextricable connection between the country's archaeology and politics and provides valuable insights into the development of archaeological activities in Afghanistan today.
Contract as Trust: Transactions in Kabul's Money Bazaars
Nafay Choudhury, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Money exchangers (sarrafs) play an essential role in supporting the Afghan economy. Exchangers are responsible for currency exchanging, money transfers (hawala), deposit safekeeping, trade financing, holding funds in escrow, and controlling the money supply. Despite the precariousness of state institutions, security, and the economy, money exchangers have been able to carve out an integral space within society in which they conduct their financial affairs. At the heart of their transactions are trust relationships found within and extending from the money bazaar. Trust forges the ties between all those associated with the money bazaar - exchangers, customers, businesses, banks, and government officials. An imprecise science by its nature, assessments of trustworthiness are crucial for seizing new opportunities and building ties, but for also winding up relationships - and their associated transactions - that may be turning sour. In this presentation, I look at the contractual transactions carried out by money exchangers within their wider institutional setting to understand how personal and impersonal forms of trust between parties create opportunities, risk, and limits for money exchangers. My presentation is based in 11 months of fieldwork in Kabul from August 2017-June 2018.
Challenges and opportunities of prosecution of perpetrators of international crimes in Afghanistan
Latifa Jafari, International Criminal Law, University of Strasbourg
This paper examines challenges and opportunities to investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity committed prior to 2001 in Afghanistan. The status quo of impunity for wrongdoers of humanitarian law in Afghanistan is addressed here. Furthermore, the paper covers absence of accountability mechanism through exemption of punishment and condoning crimes by dint of amnesty. This paper analyzes that despite gravity of crimes and interests of victims, substantial collapse of the judicial system and lack of adequate legal provisions undermine ability of national criminal justice to end impunity for perpetrators of the most serious crimes in Afghanistan. Moreover, it focuses on opportunities of investigating and prosecuting alleged crimes and conducting a genuine national criminal proceeding.
Panel 2 – Transnationalism, Agency, and Identity
States of Honour: Sexual Ethics and the Politics of Promiscuity
Sonia Ahsan, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
This paper argues that the literary transformations undertaken by the Afghan state in the early part of the twentieth century influenced a concomitant heterosexualization of social life whence a heteronormative Pashtun masculinity was mapped onto the social, cultural, and religious ethos of the public. This deliberate redirection of Afghan literature toward Pashto, away from Persian, coincided with the cultivation of a particular Pashtun masculinity in the public that eclipsed other historical forms of being Afghan. Pashtunwali became an influential discourse in this era that predominantly shaped the ethics surrounding gender and sexuality. The paper uses primary sources in Pashto and Persian to conclude that the modern Afghan woman produced through the literary and cultural transformations of the first part of the twentieth century was central to an Afghan modernity that relied on the centrality of Pashtun nationalist heterosexuality.
Migration, gender and marriage within the Shiite population of Afghanistan
Azita Bathaie, Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative (IDEMEC)
My research deals with migration and social change within the Shiite population of Afghanistan in Iran and Europe. A generational analysis of Afghan migration shows that parents have developed skills to circulate between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, which facilitates the mobility and settlement of newcomers. Still the descendants must migrate to a new space distinct from that of their elders and acquire skills for international mobility.
My study of Afghan transnational families focuses on siblings. Within the same family, some “are returning” to Kabul; others are trying to reach Europe or Australia illegally, while their parents continue to reside in Iran. The life cycle of the siblings is intimately linked to the mobility of the brothers and sisters. In the new spaces of migration, young Afghans are developing new networks and initiating family reconfigurations. The displacements enable the siblings who have emigrated to transform kinship and gender relationships.
Based on my fieldwork in Afghanistan, Iran, France and Greece, I will discuss the reshaping of the interpretative modes of the relations, positions and statutes of the siblings, related to different sequences of migration.
Return Migration, Rights Perceptions and (Re)definitions of Identity in Afghanistan
Lucile Martin, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University
Afghans who migrated to Iran and Pakistan in the late 1970s to early 1990s, and returned in the period that followed the fall of the Taliban in 2001, came back with references and experiences different from those who remained in the country throughout decades of war. On return, these references and experiences and their translation in the Afghan context have given rise to new rights entitlements and new forms of civic mobilization. The interface between these references, experiences, and expectations dominate debates about identity, citizenship, and exercise of rights.
The research examines how exposure to new ideas, values, elements of lifestyle and behaviours while abroad results in the formation of new sets of normative behaviours, associations, and social institutions and contributes to a process of re-definition of identity and, ultimately, social norms, particularly as they relate to gendered identities and roles.
The paper argues that conducting a multi-level institutional analysis is essential when considering the complex issue of return migration. This includes looking into political, social, and family institutions that shape norms and values in the host context, the country of origin, the return phase of the migration process, and how these processes shape new social practices.
Panel 3 – Historical Perspectives on Nation and Culture
The Afghan and Pashtun Baj of Tabla
Michael Lindsey, Department of Music, University of California Santa Cruz
Ethnomusicological scholarship on the tablā has been dominated by discussions of the drum’s solo repertoire and its status within the elite genres of Hindustani music, which comprise a small portion of the instrument’s use and personality. Little attention has been given to the set of drums and the musicians who play them within the myriad of other musical genres throughout South and Central Asia. My paper situates the tabla outside of elite genres and discusses the instrument’s position within Afghan ghazal, traditional (mahali), and Pashtun musical genres. By doing so, my paper develops more clearly the history and character of the tabla as a multi-national and multi-musical genre instrument. An analysis of the tabla within Afghanistan introduces new musical histories, frameworks of musical information, and performance practices. In my paper I argue that these narratives and practices help inform and shed light on current debates regarding the tabla’s early and formative years. This paper draws from research conducted for my dissertation, which investigates the use of the tabla outside of the classical Hindustani stage. It includes research conducted in Kabul, Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in Fremont, California.
Medieval Afghanistan: Muslim Conquests of Balad-e Ghur, 9-11 Centuries, CE
Jawan Shir Rasikh, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
This paper, part of an ongoing work, examines how early Islamic textual and cartographic sources in Arabic and Persian imagine the medieval region of Balād-e Ghūr in northwest-central Afghanistan during the ninth and eleventh centuries, CE. The extant early Islamic sources, such as the universal histories and geographical manuals, have produced a variety of political and spatial pictures of the region of Ghur, including its representation as the ‘only kafir/pagan land’ surrounded by Muslims in the eastern Islamic empire. However, the same sources have enthusiastically also discussed Ghur, mapped it, and linked it politically and geographically to its various Muslim neighboring regions, such as Herat and Sistan, which were some of the major urban centers of the medieval Islamic worlds. Moreover, the paper’s cross-examination of the early Islamic sources regarding Ghur shows more epistemological ambiguities about how to consider Islamic authority in rural areas, such as Ghur, and the complex ways that early Islamic historians and geographers had deployed in mapping them within or beyond the new Islamic empire than about the region of Ghur per se. The preliminary findings of the paper challenge the prevailing historiographical arguments that portray Ghur and Ghuris as an ‘obscure’ place and people within the eastern Islamic empire. However, presenting Ghur as a case here, this paper hopes to raise several following epistemic questions about the problems of temporality and geography in Afghanistan historiography: How is premodern Afghanistan understood in academia? Are temporal categories, such as premodern, medieval, modern, and contemporary are used by historians of the country? What are the local terms in Persian and Pashto for these analytical conventions? Are they linguistic or disciplinary? Indeed, can or should we even speak of an independent field, Afghanistan Medieval Studies?
Visual Propaganda in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan – work in progress
Mateusz M. Kłagisz, Jagiellonian University
In my contribution to the SOAS workshop on Afghanistan I would like to present my work in progress—Visual Propaganda in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan—on posters published by the DRA (1978–92). It is an interesting fact that shortly after the April 1978 takeover, the would-be Afghan communists decided to make maximum use of all means of propaganda—i.e. radio, press as well as images. To elaborate the role of visual propaganda I have created the term Bildkultur. Bildkultur is an open-access, culturally-constructed semantic system made up of pictorial signs used for mass (re-)creation, (re-)transfer and (re-)storage of common memory on the same (or similar) terms as the high or popular Afghan poetry had been operating for centuries. Barthes wrote that: ‘[t]here are those who think that the image is an extremely rudimentary system in comparison with language and those who think that signification cannot exhaust the imageʼs ineffable richness.’ Therefore, the picture plays a more complex role than merely aesthetic and embraces in Afghanistan, inter alia, the takbir sentence, the basmala one, or the name of the Prophet Muhammad. They can be ‘read’ by illiterates who recognise their complex calligraphic structures rather than particular letters. Taking into account the traditional Islamic approach towards the image, one should emphasise here that in Sunni Afghanistan, the Bildkultur, represented by Bollywood/Lollywood posters, religious pictures, paintings on trucks, in teahouses, schoolbooks and bills, flyers, hoardings, photography and television is, contrary to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, still in stadium nascendi.
Panel 4 – 18th to 20th Century Political Entities
Understanding Afghanistan through British Archival Sources on the Early Durrani Period
Sajjad Nejatie, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
The scholarly literature on Afghanistan too often overlooks the wealth of locally-produced primary sources, investigation of which could contribute in substantial ways to our understanding of the country. The present paper considers the role of examining such underutilized primary sources in furthering knowledge about Afghanistan’s history. Special attention is given to a selection of Persian-language research materials composed during the formative era of Durrani-Afghan rule (circa 1747-early 1800s) that are currently located in Britain (e.g., British Library, British Museum, Bodleian Library). This paper shows that while the country’s encounter with colonialism had disastrous consequences that are still felt today, a silver lining has been the preservation of several important primary sources from the early Durrani period in British archives. Moreover, analysis by academics of these understudied sources has the potential to produce new and informative research projects that advance the field of Afghanistan Studies.
The reluctant princely state: reconceptualising Afghanistan within the British Indian empire, 1869-1878
Francesca Fuoli, Historical Institute, University of Bern
In the decade that preceded the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-81, the government of India’s policy towards Afghanistan underwent fundamental changes that would influence Anglo-Afghan relations well into the twentieth century. This paper argues that in this period the government of India started to understand Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of Indian princely states and actively sought to bring the region within this orbit. In particular, it put increasing pressure on the amir Shere Ali Khan for access to his territories and the establishment of an Afghan residency system on the Indian example. In this logic, his paper questions the second half of the nineteenth century as a period of non-intervention in Afghan affairs and shows that the government of India continued to use annexation and intervention as instruments in empire building along its north-western frontier. It also shows that geopolitical concerns over Russian competition were not central to the government of India’s policy. On the contrary, amir Shere Ali Khan’s efforts at centralising and strengthening his rule were seen as a more immediate threat to British India’s security and his reluctance to comply with British requests for greater access directly triggered British military intervention.
Conflicting Visions of Progress in Political Ideas of Students at Kabul University, 1964 – 1992
Kyara Klausman, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin
By focusing on political parties and labeling them “communist” or “Islamist, “Soviet agent” or “Muslim Brotherhood”, scholarship on the contemporary history of Afghanistan has missed the complexity of the development of political ideas in the country. This rhetoric is used to blame certain groups for the conflicts in Afghanistan and reinforces mistrust within the society. In my paper, I show how oral history can challenge the existing narratives and shed light on the diversity of visions of progress held by students at Kabul University between 1964 and 1992. Exemplarily, I present the story of a student of Kabul University from 1970 to 1978 and a member of Hezb-e Demokratik-e Khalq-e Afghanistan. I discuss how personal experiences, transnational ideologies, as well as international and local politics shaped his ideas of progress. This analysis shows how a person can be “pro-Soviet”, an admirer of “Western” living standards, and a nationalist at the same time. Considering this apparent incoherence of ideas helps to go beyond stereotypes and understand how different visions of a future for Afghanistan emerged among the students at Kabul University.