Panel 059, sponsored byThe American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The goals of this panel are to: a.) articulate an historical and ethnographic framework for the analysis of social classes in Afghanistan, b.) provide specific historical and contemporary examples of class-based power relations in Afghanistan, and c.) examine the institutional mechanisms that reproduce class-based inequalities in Afghanistan.
The panel will include economic and social historians, cultural and social anthropologists, area study specialists, and political scientists. The papers are planned for publication after their delivery at the MESA conference.
The introductory presentation will outline the historical and cultural variables underpinning class relations in Afghanistan. State structures, urbanization, ethnicity, multilingualism, distributions of literacy, mobility in the rural zone and migration patterns more broadly will be considered.
The second paper will frame class conflict in the context of nationalist developments in Afghanistan during the inter-war and Cold War periods. This discussion centers on the biographies and writings of key intellectuals who situated an emerging Pashtun ethnic consciousness within a rapidly evolving sense of Afghan nationalism.
The third presentation deals with the expression of class identities among the Taliban and Neo-Taliban. The transnational class dynamics of these social movements and those movements’ impact on class relations in and around Qandahar are the foci of this presentation.
The fifth paper will provide an ethnographic and historical overview of the roles of Sufis, Sayeds and Shi'as in the construction of relations of power in Afghanistan.
The fifth paper will discuss class relations among Hazara communities in and between Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. The point of emphasis in this presentation lies in the transference within a single ethic group of multiple class-consciousnesses across three distinct national terrains since 1978. Four types of transnational networks will be identified in this context.
The labor-based migrations directed to and emanating from Peshawar are the subject the sixth paper. The ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ trajectories of movement in relation to Peshawar entail multiple sets of class dynamics that will be outlined and integrated in this presentation that will take a long-term view of these historical processes.
The labor-based migrations directed to and emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas are the subject of this contribution. The 'inward' and 'outward' trajectories of movement in relation to Pashtun homelands as well as the urban centers of Kabul and Peshawar entail multiple sets of class and social dynamics that will be outlined and integrated in this presentation taking a long-term view of these historical processes.
Since the Communist coup d’état of 1978, Afghanistan has experienced dramatic events, which have brought deep social changes. The massive departure of the urban middle class, especially after 1992, and the rise of a military class of commanders as well as of human rights activists have modified the structure of society. Afghanistan can be seen as a political arena where different actors struggle to prevail. With different strategies and means, they all seek to increase their influence and constituency in tapping the resources available, in large part from originating from outside.
In an exploratory way, I distinguish four types of transnational networks that bring material and immaterial resources in Afghanistan, resources that will be used in the power games. First, trading networks, which include illegal activities, smuggling of manufactured goods, but also – of course – drug trafficking. Secondly Islamist networks, bringing weapons and money, fighters and logistic support from a global nebulous world of supporters. The migration networks, then, by which the money of millions of Afghans living in Pakistan, Iran, but also in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula or in the West, is sent to Kabul, Ghazni and Herat. The humanitarian networks, finally, which carry out projects and provide training and employment to an emerging class of activists who occupies a growing place in the public arena in Afghanistan. Ministers or MPs, traffickers or commanders, defenders of human rights or Islamic militants, farmers or shopkeepers, fathers or mothers of large families, all Afghan men and women – or almost – are connected in one way or another with the outside world. These actors do not deploy, of course, strategies equally acceptable. But they all share the characteristic of promoting their visions and interests relying on transnational links.
How did the rural poor in this heavily populated, agrarian Pashtun
region view their social position and scope for social agency? What
demands did they make of the future, and of people more powerful than them? We have few records for the subjectivity of rural subaltern populations of Afghanistan much before the 1970s. This paper uses oral Pashto poetry and biography in order to attempt to draw a
picture. On one hand, metaphors and practices of kinship and
patriarchy often appear to have defused class conflict; and much class conflict revolved around demands that the powerful fulfill their honorable duties to the poor, not that they be "leveled". On the other hand, some subaltern intellectuals directly challenged personalized exercise of patrimonial power through structural critiques of society;
while others used itinerancy and asceticism to exist along Deleuzian
"lines of flight", and questioned all social structure.
The state apparatus of Afghanistan and the periphery it attempted to dominate have received inadequate scholarly attention for the understanding of relations of power in general and for the dominant status of Sayeds, Sufis, and Shi'as in particular. For a complex set of historical and ideological reasons Western scholars have glossed over all forms of social inequality in Afghanistan with various formulations of Afghanophilia and Paxtunophobia in which distorted and paradoxical representations are offered about political tensions between the Kabul-centered state machinery and Paxtun tribal society and the Paxtun domination of Afghanistan. The essay will speak to this defining feature of Western scholarship of Afghanistan and offer an alternative anthropological and historical analysis of pre and post-state Afghanistan in which Sayeds, urban Qizilbash Shi'as, and Sufi leaders and networks dominated virtually all locations of power. Over the past three decades this triangle of domination has been eclipsed by a pattern in which Hazara Shi'as, Sayeds, and Ghalzi Paxtuns enjoy and jostle for prominence. The power of Qizilbash Shi'as and Sufi leaders and networks appears to be on the wane.
