Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say
'..Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code.
The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country. Noah Coburn’s “Bazaar Politics” is the first extended study of an Afghan community to appear since the Taliban fell. It follows an ambitious history of Afghanistan by the Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, and an impassioned essay by Rory Stewart, the Conservative M.P., author-adventurer and Kabul preservationist, that faults the international effort in Afghanistan for its neglect of ethnographic insight. Whatever anthropology has to say about America’s longest war, it’s saying it now.
Anthropologists who studied Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979 described a complex country at the crossroads of Persian, Indian and Central Asian civilizations where nomads, farmers and traders of disparate cultures jostled against one another. In the 1950s and ’60s, the tens of millions of Pashtuns straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border drew particular interest for illustrating a favorite anthropological concept: they were said to compose the world’s largest “segmentary lineage society,” in which all members claimed a single male ancestor and allied with relatives in groups of variable size depending on the conflict at hand; one might enlist a first cousin against a second cousin, or a first and second cousin against a third cousin, and so on. While anthropologists like Fredrik Barth and Charles Lindholm stressed the chronic instability and feuding among Pashtun mountain clans, they also noted the strong value placed on equality among all male members of a tribe; indeed, the Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed suggested that the Pashtuns opposed the British Empire on certain occasions because it attempted to introduce unwanted ranks and titles.
The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country. Noah Coburn’s “Bazaar Politics” is the first extended study of an Afghan community to appear since the Taliban fell. It follows an ambitious history of Afghanistan by the Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, and an impassioned essay by Rory Stewart, the Conservative M.P., author-adventurer and Kabul preservationist, that faults the international effort in Afghanistan for its neglect of ethnographic insight. Whatever anthropology has to say about America’s longest war, it’s saying it now.
Anthropologists who studied Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979 described a complex country at the crossroads of Persian, Indian and Central Asian civilizations where nomads, farmers and traders of disparate cultures jostled against one another. In the 1950s and ’60s, the tens of millions of Pashtuns straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border drew particular interest for illustrating a favorite anthropological concept: they were said to compose the world’s largest “segmentary lineage society,” in which all members claimed a single male ancestor and allied with relatives in groups of variable size depending on the conflict at hand; one might enlist a first cousin against a second cousin, or a first and second cousin against a third cousin, and so on. While anthropologists like Fredrik Barth and Charles Lindholm stressed the chronic instability and feuding among Pashtun mountain clans, they also noted the strong value placed on equality among all male members of a tribe; indeed, the Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed suggested that the Pashtuns opposed the British Empire on certain occasions because it attempted to introduce unwanted ranks and titles.
In wartime Afghanistan of the 1980s and ’90s, anthropologists were scarce. But with the Taliban’s fall, a few returned, along with other professionals of Afghan and Western extraction..
