Category: Anthropology

An example of a problem and a frame of reference:  structure in practice [incomplete].

Introduction

In 1966 – 1968 while doing field work among Hazaras in Shibar, Afghanistan, I discovered that in some places they were sharply divided between two kinds of Shi’ites, Ithnā `Asharīya (“Twelvers”) and Isma’ilis, even to the fracturing of small communities.  This is a memoir of the mare’s nest of disputes that came to light the more I probed into this society.  The explanation for the original division that drew me into these affairs will entail recounting the narratives about why and when various disputes took place, not only between the two sectarian groups but in particular within the Ismaili community.  In order to explicate these narratives I will rehearse the conventions of social practice that endowed these events with significance.

The Problem

The locality

The circumstance that prompted this cultural study existed in Shibar, Bamian Province, Afghanistan.  Shibar is a marginal area in several ways.  Topologically, it is a highland plateau at the extremities of three great riverine systems.  At the northeastern end of this plateau resides the Shibar Pass which divides waters flowing east and west.  To the east is Ghorband whose waters flow into the Kabul River, which eventually reaches the Indus and the Indian Ocean.  To the west of Shibar Pass water flows toward the center of Bamian where it joins the Bamian river then veers abruptly northward to race through the Shikari gorge, a great rift in the Hindu Kush Range, and then joins the Qunduz – Oxus river and the Aral Sea catchment basin.  On the southwestern end of the Shibar plateau lies another pass into Bamian, the Unai, which divides the water along another axis.  Northward the streams flow into Kalu a tributary of the Bamian valley.  Southward the water flows off the Unai Pass to form the headwaters of the Helmand, the great river that once nourished the famous Persian civilization of Sistan but now dies in the deserts of Registan and Dasht-e Margo.

Shibar is also a marginal area politically as it lies along the eastern edge of the province of Bamian, demarcating its boundaries with the current provinces of Parwan, Wardak, and Ghazni.  It is thus marginal administratively, lying at some distance from the capitals of these neighboring provinces.  The capital of Bamian province, the Markaz (the “center”), was in the 1960s several hours drive away.  Late in the nineteenth century the Kabul regime had to crush a rebellion of the Hazara peoples, including those in Shibar, although mostly those further west in the Hazarajat, and the government has been advancing its writ over the region ever since.  A local alaqadar, a sub-sub governor, was assigned to Shibar in the 1920s but his leverage there was minimal for at least a decade.  In the 1960s he and a small staff were situated in Shumbul, relatively close to the Shibar Pass.  His office was the first point of government contact with local affairs.[1]  The judiciary was situated in the Markaz but was broadly distrusted, even feared.  In earlier times rarely did anyone from Shibar dare to bring a dispute before the official courts; whatever redress a defrauded individual could have, if any, within the community was to obtained by appeal to the local notables.  But by the 1960s it was becoming more feasible to take one’s quarrel to court at the Markaz, even though that option was broadly condemned within the community.  Everyone believed dealing with the government was expensive and time consuming and in any case uncertain.

People survived in Shibar by irrigating wheat (rotated with fava bean) in the lower elevations and barley and rye higher up, and by keeping a few sheep and goats, which they protected indoors in winter and released to pasture the rest of the year.  Some parts of Shibar received enough rainfall for dry land farming of wheat and barley.  Households that dwelt along the main roads supplemented their subsistence by selling cash crops, wheat, potatoes and poplar trees.  Besides the peasants there, in those days (but not since about 1980) pastoral nomads climbed into the plateau in spring, bringing large flocks to pasture on the highland meadows and hilly slopes, and retreated in the fall.[2]

Survival here was a social and communal affair.  Truly, it was difficult if not impossible to live in these highlands without communal support, the environment being severe and the technology relatively undeveloped.  In winter, snow drifts could pile up as high as twenty feet.  Many of the valleys are oriented north and south and bounded by abrupt hillsides and cliffs, so they enjoyed sunlight for only a few hours of the day, except in high summer.  In spring, streams raced precipitously unless undammed for irrigation.  Agricultural means were pre-industrial:  the steep hillsides, if planted to benefit from rainfall, could be plowed only with oxen.  Until as late as the 1950s horses were common vehicles of transport.  The passes could be impassable for days in winder; vehicles were often stuck in snow and sometimes they slipped off precipices.  The main road was unpaved.  There was little cash; many transactions were in barter.  Matches, tooth brushes and other personal goods were being walked in by a trader.

In such a setting folks took it for granted that friends and neighbors should cooperate.  Neighbors and relatives sometimes shared oxen for plowing in spring (although the rush to plant as early as possible limited sharing) and threshing in fall.  They helped in construction of houses and walls.  They loaned each other money – a group of them collecting enough cash and goods for one of their number to pay the huge expenses of a bride and a wedding.  Relatives and neighbors attended each other’s special events — circumcisions, weddings, funerals – when food was served by the hosts.  On such occasions the women gave gifts to each other, to be reciprocated later, even years later.  Among the most critical activities of the community, which demonstrated and iterated their close interdependence, was the cleaning and refurbishing of the irrigation channels in early spring.  Many channels extended for miles up into the mountains and every meter needed attention after the winter snows; the task demanded many hands.  And after the channels were cleaned, their waters had to be shared by turns, a circumstance that required cooperation, agreement on water rights, and consensus as to responsibility and leadership.

Folks sought ways to reinforce their connections, one of the most important being through marital ties.  A sister or a daughter would be given in marriage to a neighbor or his son; brothers sometimes married sisters of a friendly family; or families arranged for an exchange of sisters.  Of course one marriage begat others; it could be replicated in the next generation; first-cousin or second-cousin marriage was common.  The obligations to help and share were thus reinforced and reduplicated among neighbors and relatives, enforced by the austere conditions.  Among these communities, and indeed throughout rural Afghanistan, the bonds that tied neighbors and relatives together were extensive, elaborate, and reduplicative.

This was a society that by every appearance seemed to be a typical peasant community of the sort familiar to sociologists.  Max Weber (1968: 37) would have described it as united by the “the sacredness of tradition,” even by “[t]he fear of magical evils” that reinforced “the general psychological inhibitions against any sort of change in customary modes of action”.  Emil Durkheim (????:  p.100) would have emphasized the common moral sensibility, a likemindedness that has “exceptional force” among these people because it is collectively embraced, conceived as universal, permanent and intrinsic.  The Marxist sociologist Raymond Williams (1994: 596-7) would have said that the economic, political, and cultural relations in this society were so mutually reinforcing as to constitute an integrated “sense of reality” for its members.

The fracture

So I was surprised to discover an awkward pattern of actual social relationships.  There were two religious sects, Twelver Shia (henceforth “Shia”) and Ismaili, in this area, and relations among them were not good.  It was, in practice, a major fault line.[3]  Shias and Ismailis, even if living nearby, did not speak to each other.  They did not greet each other when passing on solitary paths in the mountains.  (“They are silent with us,” said an Ismaili man from Bolola, speaking of his Shia neighbors.)  They did not help each other in the fields or combine their flocks under a single shepherd, the normal practice among friends and neighbors.  They did not share food:  a bitter quarrel took place when a Shia family threw away food given to them by an Ismaili family.  As an Ismaili elder put it, “If we want to borrow from them, they would send us away and tell us to go to our own kind.”  If a Shia man went looking to buy wheat in another neighborhood, as folks were sometimes obliged to do, he would buy from Shia, and if he had to stay overnight he would stay in a Shia household.  An Ismaili would buy from Ismailis and stay with Ismailis.  Craftsmen served one community or another:  Stone masons in the hamlets of Iljānak and Ghojurak served Ismailis; a stone mason for the Shia lived in the valley of Jowlā.  Blacksmiths for the Ismaili were located in the valleys of Iraq, Shumbul, Daki, Birgilich and Sheikh Ali; Shia blacksmiths were in Jowlā and the hamlet of Gholam Ali in Shumbul.  The sectarian division between Shia and Ismaili seemed to reified the ancient quarrel over rights to leadership of the Islamic community in their social practice, as if the dogmatic argument over succession and dogma had acquired contemporary social and political implications in Shibar.

The spatial distribution of these sects in Shibar did not always match the pattern of house construction.  As one might expect, most of the valleys, alluvial plains spilling down from the high ground, were occupied by one or another sect group.  For instance, the valley of Lajow was occupied by Shias; the valley of Lida was occupied by Ismailis.  And in some valleys both sects were represented.  For example, as one person explaining it to me, put it:  “The valley of Ashur is half Shia and half Ismaili; the valley of Kaaka is one third Shia and two thirds Ismaili.”  Labmushak and Lablabu were similarly divided.   But in some places the division was surprising.  The houses built on the alluvial planes were clustered roughly in groups of four to a dozen houses.  These were agnatic kinship groups, qawms, but they were not always of the same religious sect.  The extended family of Gholam Ali occupying a hamlet high up in Labmushak was divided; the extended family of Kida occupying a village just off the main road near the Shibar pass was divided.   That is, even though many of the the hamlets appeared to be communal units, recognizing obligations to help and share, some of them fractured.  The hamlet of Rezagâ in Labmushak was divided:  “ten or twelve” of its households were Shia, I was told by an Ismaili elder; he could be more specific with respect to the number of Ismailis there:  eight.  “These are all related,” he said.  “The Shia changed from Ismailia about 15 years ago.”  In one hamlet I met a woman who denied any relationship to the family living in the adjacent house.

The configuration of sectarian loyalties throughout Shibar, in some places dividing hamlets as well as neighborhoods, suggested that Shibar had been rent asunder by a major social cataclysm, a rupture in the social fabric.  It was as if a great earthquake had fractured the whole plateau of Shibar, dividing neighborhoods, breaking through valleys, ripping hamlets apart, leaving a dramatic ideological scar across the plateau.[4]  Whatever commuity life existed in which traditional bodns of solidarity and mutuality were effected by an economic and social interdependency that might have constituted  an “absolute” social reality, as Raymond Williams would have put it, had little resemblance to the appearances on the ground.  What once was the basis of communal solidary at the time these houses and hamlets were constructed had by all appearances been refigured.  This society had been reconstituted in a sharply different pattern of loyalty, cooperation, and solidarity.

The obvious contrast between actual social practice and the shape of the built environment prompted me to ask many questions.  My quest for an explanation of the situation and of his comments drew me into history, the series of events that produced this peculiar situation.  It led me into a study of the relationships that constituted the social world of folks in Shibar.  Eventually I would hear stories about what had happened in Shibar, how the unthinkable in fact took place.  Social practices, statuses of authority, strands of influence, marriage and inheritance patterns – all these were disrupted by a social cataclysm.  Unsurprisingly, the events that produced this great fault line was a topic of public interest all over the eastern-central region Afghanistan.  Shibar was the epicenter.

These affairs took place in a region relatively distant from the mechanisms of state control.  These folks preferred to deal with their problems without involving the government.

The events that produced this fracture were in every sense public and political.  That is, this society – somewhat marginal to the effective reach of the government — had a public sphere and a politics.  Reputed authorities have claimed that apart from the royal family and a small urban elite Afghanistan had “no politics.”[5]  The reality of course was otherwise:  Folks in Shibar were highly politicized.[6]  In this environment they had to cooperate to live, as they were obliged by their setting and resources to enlist help from each other:  to build a house for themselves or a wall around it, to construct and maintain an irrigation channel, to resolve disputes and enforce agreements – and without involving the government whenever possible.  They managed their social concourse, their conventions of practice, and their means of enforcement on their own – activities that were essentially political and ideological.  In fact, as I would discover, there were, in a sense, two parallel networks of social concourse, that among the women and that among the men.  The social intercourse of the men stood somewhat apart in that among the men there were leaders who interacted with the wider society.  Notably there were mirs (also called maliks by the government) who acted as intermediaries between the local community and the government.  Mirs normally entertained the men of the community fairly often, when issues of broader interest had to be discussed, and they of course fairly often trecked to the offices of the Alaqadar, the local official ensconced in government buildings at the mouth of Shumbul, in Shibar, and sometimes also took a bus or truck to the provincial offices in Bamian.  The men, that is, men occasionally in the guest rooms of the mirs and other notable figures in the community and so constituted an active communication network.  Among the women there were networks of communication that functioned in the form of gossip in the hamlets and in the social convocations that took place among relatives on the occasion of weddings, circumcisions, or funerals.  On those occasions the men and women gathered separately, objectifying the different communications of the two sexes.  There were, that is, even in this relatively isolated rural neighborhood, “public spheres” where information was broadly shared, mainly through informal means.[7]

To understand the political affairs of these people I had to examine the conditions in which their informal relations established grounds for cooperation, and the exercise of power and influence.  I was forced to ask more general questions about how this society was constituted: how social control and influence were effected, how social affairs were given order where the institutions of the state were feared and avoided, how the conditions under which a fracture of the sort extant in Shibar could take form as a sectarian division.

Conceptual issues:  History and theory

The case obliges us to reflect on how to explain events culturally.  The events that created this peculiar configuration of alliances in Shibar and the wider neighborhood raise the question of what a culturally necessary and culturally sufficient explanation for an event or series of events should entail.  Whatever took place in Shibar must be explained culturally as well as historically.  An event such as the disputes that fractured society in Shibar was an actualization of a “structure,” a cultural system, that preceded it, a structure in place.

We have to distinguish here between event and structure.[8]  Meaningful communication (as in speech, Saussure’s parole) is made possible by the existence of a invisible code (his langue) that is understood by members of a community.  The signs that constitute the code are mutually defining, conceptually integrated according to a logic that is internal and unique to itself.  They are arbitrary with regard to the world they reference:  different languages terminologically index different sectors of the color continuum, for instance.

The disorderly flow of human affairs — speech, writing, behavior, social event — is given significance by the system of mutually defining signs that people employ in order to make sense of their experience.  Their conscious use of symbolic resources in practice makes social life referential; behaviors become “actions” and specific happenings become “events” as they are given significance by general concepts (Sahlins 1985: 145).[9]  Events are thus overt manifestations of a structure in place, and thus logically are its product (Bourdieu 1968: 24).  Explaining an event entails identifying the cultural resources that informed the understanding of the participants and shaped their response to it.

But if structure gives meaning to events, events can reshape structure (Giddens, Sahlins).  As human life takes place in a world that has its own properties, its own caprice[10], the use of certain signs to characterize a situation constitutes a certain risk to the system and to those who deploy them, for the categories deployed may not apply:  people may misinterpret each other’s intentions, or the situation may in fact contradict the presumptions of those who sought to characterize it.  The deployment of a sign in real situations thus subjects it to possibilities of change.  When a turn of affairs surprises, producing unforeseen outcomes, the signs deployed to inform them can be forced to take on new implications.  When used to encompass situations in a world that escapes human presuppositions signs take on new meanings – a revaluing of the signs that can ripple through the system, the signs being systematically related in according to the logic of the system.  So in practice “event” – parole – can determine “structure.”

As happenings become events, and behaviors acts, when they are perceived in meaningful terms, events and acts become history.  Events and actions produce history,  and history — the memory of events past – become structure.  Events and actions remembered join the elements of structure, both to modify and be modified by the structure in place (Giddens ????).  Human action repeated and reiterated in practice becomes a habitus, a “product of history [that] produces individuals and collective practices, and hence history in accordance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]:82).

Moreover, besides the revisions in structure imposed by events in a world that has its own relationships there are the strains imposed on it by the ways that folks make use of it.  Individuals make use of the cultural resources at hand in order to fulfill their own purposes.  And they act from different positions and with “widely varied interests, capacities, inclinations, and knowledge” (Sewell 2005:209).  In social interactions individuals with personal agendas and personal perspectives deploy cultural devices – speech, gesture, objective creations – to define the situation in their own terms, so encompassing it with their own presuppositions.  Their actions in turn become objectifications of the presuppositions that can become a public possession, a social fact that can be deployed by others for their own purposes with their own meanings.  The attempt to control how a situation is defined is a political act, and the struggle to make one’s own formulation of the situation accepted by the wider community is a political struggle.  A definition of the situation that stands in ebb and flow of public dispute is of course the dominant one.  As people set in motion new meanings by bending categories to fit their own ends (cf. Sewell 2005:204) they create possibilities that escape their control.  For the signs put to use in defining situations are public and what becomes public has its own life, with implications that deployable for new purposes, to fulfill individual intentions.

Our project is to produce an “eventful account” of what took place in Shibar, an endeavor that will entail merging history with its social and cultural context, a linking of adventitious affairs with the meaningful contexts that gave them significance.  If contingency is one (not the only) principle of all history (cf. Gould 1989: 283)[11], and historical accidents continually deflect the course of events (Mann 1986)[12] , the affairs of human beings (unlike other creatures) are informed by and directed by frames of meaning that have properties of a different order from the caprice of events.  Life for human beings is never a haphazard series of accidents, for humans perceive each happening as an instance of an imagined order of reality.  An explanation for a particular event such as the conditions that broke these communities apart must place the contingent and the incidental within the idealized “realities” of those who lived it, and within the historic trends that the events displayed.

THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK

But this view of the human condition necessarily confronts the problem of how human beings can act willfully and creatively within a system of conventional practice.  If idealized “realities” define human experience and shape human action, how can human beings, as sentient agents, be acting on their own volition?  The events examined here were a product of humans acting intentionally as agents; human actors produced this configuration of relations.  What is the relation between the structures that inform human experience and human creative action?   A cultural explanation of an event or series of events depends on the relationships among three entities:  event, the imaginative structure within which it takes place, and the agents acting willfully in the event.  Here I offer four propositions about these relationships preliminary to proposing how an event or series of events may be explained culturally.  Each proposition is given in abstract terms and then emended to clarify its relation to the irregularities of actual social life.

1. Events are actualizations of “structures” that the participants bring to the events

By “structure” we mean a system of mutually defining symbols – language, codes of behavior, conceptions of the material world and its mechanics – through which people make sense of their experience.[13]  These symbolic systems, invisible except in their overt manifestations – as in speech, behavior, social conventions, mythical narratives, monuments, emblems and the like – are constituted according to their own internal logics, logics that are arbitrary with regard to the world they reference:  different languages, for instance, terminologically index different sectors of the color continuum, and different cultures recognize different causes of disease and death.  It is of these symbolic systems that human conceptions of reality are made; through such cultural forms humans understand and respond to what happens to them (Geertz 1973: 216).

The human dependence on symbolic resources makes social life referential; behaviors become “actions” and specific happenings become “events” as they are given significance by general concepts (Sahlins 1985: 145).[14]  People read situations and react to them in terms of the cultural resources, symbolic frames of reference, available to them.  “The significance we impute to the observed events of life is always affected by the frame in which we place them and the keys with which we read them.  …[p158].  [W]hen observing human interaction we must identify correctly the keys that the parties to such interaction themselves are using, as the events unfold” (Barth 1993:157-158).  As events follow upon one another, people are continuously reading and reacting to them in terms of imagined orders of reality.  Events are in this sense products of structure, overt expressions of conventional practices in a society.

Event Analysis in Practice.  Such is the relation of event to structure in the abstract.  The complication in this abstract notion is that in actual affairs of course individuals can hold different views of an event.  They can bring different frames of reference to a happening and so define its significance in contrary ways.[15]  And so in the course of events folks can misinterpret each other.  As the significance of the event is disputed, the event can acquire new properties depending on the frame of reference accorded it.  So the human process of imaginatively encompassing events in terms of idealized notions of significance may yield little agreement or conherent behavior (Barth 1993:7).[16]

A cultural explanation for an event must expose what the participants see in it and how they do or do not share a common understanding of its significance. It must identify the cultural resources that constituted and informed the “realities” of the participants and shaped their responses to it.  And it must note the different ways that the various participants interpret and respond to situations.

1. Structures are also shaped by events.

Human life takes place in a world that has its own properties, its own caprice.[17]  Whatever conventional understandings we bring to events, the events need not conform to our idealized notion of it (Sahlins 1981:6).[18]  When used to encompass situations in a world that escapes human presuppositions the symbolic elements of a code may take on new implications, creative nuances:  “[E]very use of a word in and for a world we do not control is a risk to its meaning” (Sahlins 2004:146).  And not only words but every meaningful social convention.  As symbols are deployed to bring meaning to situations they take on fresh nuances according to the circumstances of their deployment (cf. Sewell 2005:204).  In practice, if structure can inform event, event can shape structure (Giddens, Sahlins).  Even more, events produce history, and history – selective remembrances of events past – becomes structure.  Events as they take place are sedimented in conceptions of reality that are being continuously revised by experience.  “If the culture … reproduces itself, it reproduces itself in an altered state” (Sahlins 2004: 292).  As events reproduce the structure in place they also revise it through continuous flow of idealized enactments.

And as there are multiple readings of what is taking place, there are multiple concepts of what has occurred in the past.  Disputed events lead to disparate memories and disputed histories, and to disparate notions of the importance of particular events.  And beyond the diverse readings of events by participants in an event there are the properties of the world – that is, the empirical nature of the situation itself, which exerts an influence that is extraneous to the imaginations of those present.  So the parameters of the event, the conjuncture of persons and viewpoints and agendas and positions, are conditions that can escape immediate recognition and nevertheless endow it with a significance that becomes important in subsequent settings.  Events considered insignificant at one time can in other contexts be accorded critical significance.

An adequate cultural explanation for an event, therefore, must also include not only the conditions that gave the event significance but also the revisions in the structure that the event created.  It means identifying the way human beings through their collective and separate activities creatively produce the realities they live in (Barth 1993:8, 6-7).

III.  Human beings are agents and creators of the structure in place.

The cultural frames within which humans act, the keys by which they interpret events are never singular; multiple readings and reactions to them are possible.   Moreover, individuals have “widely varied interests, capacities, inclinations, and knowledge” (Sewell 2005:209) they pursue particular agendas, making use of the cultural resources available to them in order to fulfill their individual purposes.  People are creative agents in the world, making decisions about how to understand their experience and how to react to it, deploying the resources of culture in respect to their individual agendas.  In the process of creating their cultural realities people elaborate or discard their customary practices according to the exigencies of their everyday affairs (Barth 1993: 1993:8, 6-7).  Structure is in this sense a repertoire of meaningful forms — categories, images, ideals, narratives – that folks deploy with a view to giving significance to their experiences.  They are in effect sifting the cultural resources available to decide what are most workable in their immediate contexts (Barth 1993:5).

1. What humans create reflects and reproduces the cultural conventions in place. Humans are products of structure as well as its creators; the relationship is reciprocal.

The form a certain action takes and the significance it acquires derives from social conventions already established.  As people deploy the cultural resources familiar to them so as to encompass their experiences, they act according to conventions already familiar to them.  In their behavior they exemplify presuppositions already inherent in customary practice.  As folks read situations and react to them in terms of conventions already established they reinforce and reiterate those practices.  The habitus, cognitive and motivating structures of “regulated improvisations” are a “product of history [that] produces individuals and collective practices, and hence history in accordance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]:78, 82).  The pattern of behavior is in this sense “unconscious” in that it is shaped by and informed by scenarios already in place, scenarios that suggest ways of behaving and typical ways that affairs may proceed, or ways that natural phenomena relate, and that people typically react to particular circumstances.  Such unexamined practices have been called the “doxa,” ways of life and thinking that are taken for granted, considered “natural” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]: 164; Amossy 2002).[19]

So the culturally constituted “realities” that creative actors produce authorize not only the events but also the individuals who produce them.  Sentient agents, acting on their own volition, carry out and behaviorally display patterns of social behavior already immanent in their ways of life (Sahlins 2004:157).  Sahlins 2004: 155 “… persons can be empowered to represent collectivities:  to instantiate or personify them, sometimes even to bring them into existence, without, however, losing their own individuality.  … history makes the history-makers.  Sahlins 2004: 291.  “The event was contingent, but it unfolded in the terms of a particular cultural field, from which the actors drew their reasons and the happening found its meanings.”  “… the structural coherence of a contingent outcome …  ”   Sahlins 2004: 292.  “Who or what is a historical actor, what is a historical act and what will be its historical consequences:  these are determinations of a cultural order, and differently determined in different orders.  No history, then, without culture.  And vice versa, insofar as in the event, the culture is neither what it was before nor what it could have been.”

We then presume that a cultural explanation of an event then entails recounting

• what individuals did in culturally constructed situations,
• how their action evinced the structure in place, and
• how it also deflected affairs according to the specific styles/ actions/agendas of the actors involved.

It is possible to say of an event, as Sahlins did about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic hit ??? in “The situation put him in a position to make a difference, and the situation constituted the significance of the difference he made” (Sahlins 2004: 157).

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Our frame of reference for examining and interpreting the course of events that created the fractured community of Shibar includes, therefore, the following terms:

• structure (the categorically constituted system of meanings in place),
• event (the exigent, discursive, jumbled, even tumultuous flow of human affairs),
• world (the materially constituted conditions of place and circumstance, including other animate beings),
• and agents (actors with individual purposes wielding cultural forms to cope with the practical exigencies of life),
• habitus (the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of acting that are taken for granted, acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life).

Notes

^[1] The British make no mention of an alaqadari (a sub-governor) in Shibar in the 19th century (Adamec.  ??? Gazatteer, Bamian).  The first alaqadar was not well received.  My notes:  [8-78] Mir Ali Ahmad Beg and Arbaab Kabir [of Bolola] said the first Alaqadaari was set up in Bulola (I think first by Amanullah).  The Saqaw sent a man whom they did not accept (some trouble with him at least) and the real alaqadar was set up finally by Nadir Khan [r. 1929-1933].  This was first in Bulola.  He stayed in the guest room of Bulola.  He fought with someone (over what?) and finally he left and went to house of Mir Mowladaad [in Shumbul] for a while, then moved back again to Bulola.  He was for a while in the house of Sayed Taalib Shaa (in Shumbul) and then back to Bulola, etc.  People didn’t want him.  Eventually a place was made for him and his staff in Shumbul.

^[2] The number of pastoral nomads holding land in the region was increasing as they often loaned money to the peasants with the land as collateral; failure of the borrower to pay could entail losing his property (cf. Ferdinand 1962 [Nomadic expansion]).

^[3] I here use the term “Shia” as that is the usual term for the “Athna’asharia Shi’a” in the region.  To keep my narrative clear I will avoid using the more the more presice term.

^[4] I avoided answering this question for many years because telling that story required giving information that could have been used against the various parties involved, for the precipitating issues were still alive.  All the figures in this affair are no longer on the scene:  most have passed away.

^[5] Paul, Jim.  1980.  “The Khalq Failed to Comprehend the Contradictions of the Rural Sector:  Interview with Feroz Ahmed.”  Middle East Research and Information Project Reports, No. 89 10:6 (July-August), pp. 13-14.

^[6] The political situation in Shibar seemed to exemplify the pervasive mechanisms of social control that Foucault emphasizes in his work.  He sees power as permeating all of social life, acting in a plethora of small and insignificant contexts.  Rather than deriving power and influence from large institutions such as a state or the influence of certain classes, he stresses the informal relations and encounters of social life, which work in disparate and conflicting ways to solidify conventions of practice.  Power for him is manifest “through ceaseless struggles and confrontations” that form “a chain of connections, a system.”  “[L]ocal conditions and particular needs” give form to the flow of events “in piecemeal fashion” to create larger aggregations of the collective will.

Foucault, Michel.  1978 [1976].  The History of Sexuality:  An Introduction, Volume I.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York:  Vintage.  Pp. 92-93; Foucault, Michel.  1972. Power/Knowledge. New York: ????, p. 159.

^[7] It seems unnecessary to derive the contrast between family life and public life from the Greeks, as Habermas does.  Rather, we see in the Greek categorical distinctions that Habermas adduced a particular instance of how societies develop social controls even in the absence of a state.

^[8] The original formulation was articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure for the study of language and extended and elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss for the study of all cultural products, and later emended by other social scientists (Sahlins, Giddens, Bourdieu, Ortner).  Saussure’s primary interest was in exposing the structure of the code that informed speech; Levi-Strauss’s interest was analogous, only on a cultural level:  he sought to elucidate the “unconscious” patterning of meanings in the products of the human mind, as in (the topics of his own work) kinship systems, patterns of economic exchange, and the construction of myth (cf.  Crick, Malcom.  1976.  Explorations in Language and Meaning.  London:  Malaby).

^[9] Sahlins, Marshal.  1985.  Islands of History.  Chicago:  University of Chicago.

^[10] Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism, as well as Marxism, is that they obscure the essential uncertainty of the human condition (1977: 5 ff.).  Sahlins’s critique (1981, 1985) seeks to correct the emphasis by noting how categorical systems are revised in practice:  “The world may not conform to the presuppositions by which some people talk about it” (1981:6)..

^[11] Gould, Stephen Jay.  1989.  Wonderful Life:  The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.  New York:  Norton.

^[12] Mann, Michael.  1986.  The Sources of Social Power, Vol I:  A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1720.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University.

^[13] The fundamental distinction between event and structure was articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure for the study of language, famously extended and elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss for the study of other human products.  Saussure’s primary interest was in exposing the structure of the code that informed speech; Levi-Strauss’s interest was analogous, only on a cultural level:  he sought to elucidate the “unconscious” patterning of meanings in the products of the human mind, as in — the topics of his own work — kinship systems, patterns of economic exchange, and the construction of myth.  Structuralist thought has been emended in different ways by other social scientists (Sahlins, Giddens, Bourdieu, and others).

^[14] Sahlins, Marshal.  1985.  Islands of History ….????

^[15] Sewell (2005:205 ff.), in an effort to make Sahlins’ frame of reference more usable to historians, emends Sahlins’s frame of reference in ways that seem fully compatible with the original intent.  Sewell notes (what Sahlins well knew) that actual societies are never informed by a single structural system; societies are instead “sites of a multitude of overlapping and interlocking cultural structures … [that] are only relatively autonomous.”  Because these disparate “cultural structures” “contain common symbols, … [that] refer or lay claim to common objects, and … coexist in and hence inform the subjectivities” of the members of a society ?? (Sewell ?????).

^[16] We do not insist that imagined structures of significance are perfectly consistent, only that as the elements of a system are elements of an idealized order they more or less “seek” consistency.

^[17] Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism, as well as Marxism, is that they obscure the essential uncertainty of the human condition (1977: 5 ff.).  Sahlins’s critique seeks to correct the emphasis by noting how categorical systems are revised in practice.

^[18] Sahlins, Marshall.  1981.  Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities.  …???

^[19] Amossy, R.  “How to do things with doxa: Toward an analysis of argumentation in discourse”  Poetics Today [fall, 2002] Vol 23 no. 3: pp 465-487.

For the Conference on

“The Establishment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan

and the Development of Modern Diplomacy:

The Influence of Mahmoud Tarzi and Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi.”

Robert L. Canfield

Washington University in St Louis

The task and the approach

During the reign of King Amanullah, as Mahmoud Tarzi was developing progressive policies and Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi was establishing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul, affairs in Bamian were proceeding along similar lines; and in the later Amanullah period, when the government lost control Bamian was similarly without effective social order.  In the early period, both in Kabul and in Bamian the institutions of government were gaining strength and becoming ever more effectively enforced, while in the later period in both places certain elements of opposition disrupted public affairs.  As our information on affairs in Bamian during the time of King Amanullah is fairly limited, I offer here some notes on the topic based on information collected while I was doing anthropological field work in Bamian during a twenty-two month period in 1966-1968.

Anthropological field work entails participating in the lives of people in order to understand the issues and concerns that preoccupy their lives and affairs.  We look for the customary activities and perceptions that are natural to them, through which they understand and deal with their problems.  That is, anthropologists are interested in culture, the everyday perspectives and activities of human beings.  But this interest in customary behavior confronts the problem of how individuals can practice their customs and also act in original ways:  How can folks reflect the ways of thinking and acting of their times and at the same time be creative agents?  The way individuals act as independent agents in customary ways is a fundamental problem in anthropology, for we regard individuals as carriers of “culture” and activators of “culture” even as they are creative agents acting according to their own lights.  Human beings are creative agents as they also reflect and reproduce the perspectives and practices of their times.[1]

No individuals better illustrate this point than the main figures in our conference.  King Amanullah, Mahmoud Tarzi, and Muhammad Wali Khan reflected the progressive movements of their times, and yet nothing about those movements stipulated that these eminent leaders should take the decisions they took or develop the policies they developed.  In the way that they carried on their affairs they reflected the influence of the great movements of their times – the Islamic modernization project of Al-Afghani, the radical reforms being instituted in Turkey, the constitutional movement in Iran, the independence movement in India, and so on — but at the same time they were creative agents of their own, acting in distinctive ways to deal with the particular situations they confronted in Afghanistan.  By dint of their own imaginative responses to specific situations they deflected the course of affairs, and so created history.

This is why anthropologists find specific events to be of special interest, for events reveal trends and developments even as they are animated by individuals playing out their own interests.  Individuals exercising their own imagination shape the course of affairs in culturally significant ways.  In this paper I recount some of the events and developments in the province of Bamian during the Amanullah period.  These events and developments were recounted to me by people I came to know in Bamian in the 1960s.  Some of the events expose some social conditions of the time and others suggest trends and developments at work in the region more generally.  Even if these stories cannot be taken as historically perfectly accurate, they can be read as narratives of what my friends thought was significant in their own past, in this case in the Amanullah period.  The events were various.  Some obviously marked important turns of affairs; others were less significant but nevertheless revealed the nature of social conditions at the time.  The stories indicate that as the regime in Kabul, led and animated by visionaries like King Amanullah, Mahmoud Tarzi, Abdul Wali Darwazi was gaining strength, the provincial government in Bamian was being more firmly ensconced there.  And later when the government’s control broke down in the capital, Bamian was being similarly wrought by internal strife.

Advance of state institutions in Bamian

Let us consider first the rising presence of government institutions in Bamian.  In the Markaz of Bamian I met a man who claimed to be the grandson of a famous arbāb of the Fuladi valley.  Fuladi is a large fertile tributary debouching into the southwestern end of the Bamian Markaz.  According to my friend, his grandfather was so powerful that “wherever he went he took a hundred men” with him.  Whatever the actual number of those associated with him – we needn’t take the number literally – he must have been the paramount figure in a notable coalition.  And this was not just a lot of men; it was a lot of men with their horses, for at this time travel was largely by horseback.  Consider what the movement of such a force across the landscape meant to the local inhabitants.  Wherever they went they and their horses had to be provided for:  food and shelter for so many men and horses would have been a severe burden.  This was, that is, a ranked society, highly stratified, one person, the arbāb, being preeminent, with a substantial body of allies, and a subject population that had to provide for them; those at the bottom of the hierarchy would have been grievously repressed.

Social stratification of this sort among the Hazaras was not new:  about as far back as we can go into the past notable figures, usually called mirs, held commanding positions over the population of an area.[2]  They collected tribute, provided protection, led in war, if necessary.  What makes the arbāb story interesting is that as of the early twentieth century such dominant figures should not have existed, for three decades earlier the great mirs, the paramount leaders of the Hazara “tribes,” had been crushed in the Hazara-Afghan war (1891-1893).[3]  Any Hazara leader who could have been even a minor threat to the state were dealt with:  some were killed, others imprisoned in Kabul; many Hazaras were enslaved.  By 1900 the formidable coalitions of the Hazaras had been broken, their hierarchies of power emasculated.  So, the news that a powerful arbāb was in place again in Bamian in the 1920s is significant.  That an eminent political figure was able to mobilize such a large force indicated that the hierarchy of pre-war times had been reconstituted.  A dominant political leader was again operating in Bamian.

Elsewhere in the province, on the eastern extremity of the Bamian basin the situation was apparently similar, according to another story recounted to me.  An older man from a line of eminent mirs was listing for me the names of the previous notable figures of the region.  A Mir Abbas of Kalu, he said, controlled all of the region from Kalu to the Shibar Pass in the Amanullah period.  He was notoriously cruel.  Indeed he was eventually killed by an angry mob of his own subjects.  This reference to a mir notable for his cruelty and his demise at the hands of his own subjects suggests that Mir Abbas had a strong grip on the eastern regions of Bamian, perhaps comparable to that of the arbāb of Fuladi.  He appears to have an impunity to act as he chose with little regard for his subjects.  It was a thousand men, my friend said, that rose up against Mir Abbas; they surprised and overpowered his bodyguards and stabbed him to death.  Such a number suggests, again, how large was the community of subjects under him.

Such was the situation in Bamian in the Amanullah period according to these stories.  But something else was going on:  The great Hazara coalitions were in fact giving way to a new political presence in the region, the government.  We know this from what happened to the two powerful men already mentioned.  My friend from Fuladi said his grandfather, the arbāb who could muster “a hundred men” to his side, had occasion to meet King Amanullah.  But when he met the King he was insolent; he refused to show proper deference.  This may have been early during the King’s reign, a time when Amanullah had not yet consolidated his position; we know that early on some groups were slow to accept the new King.  Whatever the specific context, the great arbāb of Fuladi seemed to feel no need to demonstrate due respect to the new king – another indication of his supposed power at the time.  It was a fatal mistake.  His insolence angered the king, and he was clapped in prison.  There he remained until his death.  The arbāb’s power, however great it seemed to be in the early 1920s, did not measure up to that of the King.

And that is a situation worth noting.  For no similar locally powerful figure ever arose again in Fuladi.  Likewise, on the other end of Bamian, the demise of Mir Abbas in Kalu marked the end of great mir dominance there.  The mirship as a local institution of social control was forced to give way to the rising power of the state.  The state was taking more responsibility, exerting more influence, on local affairs.  From the time of Mir Abbas on the leaders of local communities in Bamian had to deal with the government.  They in fact gained their positions of influence by the authorization of the government.  So the “mirs” of Bamian (whom the government preferred to call maliks) became weaker and the communities they led were smaller.  The trend was toward ever weaker “mirs” each of whom represented an ever smaller number of households as the government grew in strength in the province.  The demise of the Fuladi arbāb in the west and the mir of Kalu and Shibar in the east represented an ineluctable trend:  the state was exercising its writ over the province with ever greater effect.

It was an advance of the rule of law.  The government was establishing, advancing, and enforcing its claim to rule.  A governor had been assigned to Bamian for many years, but now, in the Amanullah era, a governing body was forming around the governorship.  Other officials, military and administrative, were now assigned to the province, bringing a more effective system of administration and social and political control.  The establishment of the rule of law meant more than an increased number of government personnel on the ground:  it meant the more effective and consistent application of rules, regulations and policies established in Kabul, rules that were encoded in written directives that were to be applied without prejudice to all the citizens of the region, as elsewhere in the country.  Personnel to apply and enforce directives, written rules and regulations to guide their administrative activities – these were effectively bringing Bamian under the authority of Kabul.

This was the time, during Amanullah’s reign, when the first alaqadār of Shibar was established.  He came alone.  And he was not welcome.  At first he took a room in Shumbul but then after a while relocated to Bolola, again in only one room.  Eventually, he established himself with some support personnel in Shumbul.  The government would finally build a compound where he could bring his family and where the gendarmes and other support personnel could be housed.  In the 1960s the alaqadāri consisted of a house for the alaqadār’s family, and other buildings for the gendarmes and the two clerical assistants assigned to alaqadāri.

This was the government’s first line of contact with people of eastern Bamian.  It was the only alaqadāri in the province Bamian in the 1960s and presumably was the only one in Amanullah’s time.  The reason for locating it at the top of the Shibar pass was presumably to facilitate traffic through the pass, for in that time it was the critical link between Kabul and the territories of northern Afghanistan.[4]  And it was, and still is, a difficult pass, especially in winter when snows make it often impassable.  Also on the lower side of the pass restive Sheikh Ali tribesmen were famous for interrupting traffic.  Such was the burden of the alaqadār in Shibar – to make sure the pass was kept open.

For the local population, however, the presence of the alaqadār opened up new possibilities.  Here was a government official who could be approached for help on many kinds of issues.  Disaffected individuals frustrated by their inability to gain redress through traditional means could now approach government officials for help.  Admittedly, to do so constituted a sharp break with the local community.  It entailed a huge risk, for the outcome of such a strategy was always problematic and in any case one faced ostracism from his family and neighbors.  Even in the 1960s virtually everyone in Shibar opposed any attempt to bring the government in when there was a dispute:  close relatives, neighbors, in-laws, virtually everyone around would be offended by such a move.  But the very presence of a government officer in Shibar and a large contingent of officials in the Markaz of Bamian effectively announced the readiness of the government to be involved in local disputes.  They constituted a new and different route of redress otherwise unavailable to a person seeking help in a dispute.  So some folks took advantage of it.  For them the government constituted a alternative, another possible avenue of political leverage.  The new presence of the government, then, was a vehicle of change.  My impression in the 1960s was that growing numbers of people were turning to the government for help in disputes.  It was a trend already set in motion in the time of King Amanullah.

The breakdown of order during the Kalakani period[5]

Such were the indications of the growing strength of the Kabul administration within Bamian, a growth in control that reflected the deliberate attempts of the Amanullah regime to develop more effective administrative institutions throughout the country.  But as we know, there were other trends, ones that would eventually overturn Amanullah and frustrate the ambitions of Tarzi and Darwazi.  Fissive trends were likewise at work in Bamian, but to a different effect, for the Hazaras of this region, unlike some other elements within the country, were loyal to Amanullah, even in the worst times.  With the ascension of Habibullah Kalakani to power in Kabul an internal struggle was created in Bamian because the government forces came under Kalakani’s control.  My contacts from Fuladi told me that because the Hazaras refused to accept Kalakani many of them were forced to flee into the mountains.  In Fuladi, however, one person stayed behind and tried to negotiate with the forces of Kalakani.  Eventually he persuaded them that the people of Fuladi would consent to their authority.  It was a kind of surrender under duress and his behavior subsequently created much discussion and division among the Fuladi citizens.  In the opinion of my source this one man saved Fuladi, as it could have been disastrously ruined by the Kalikanis.  Eventually, when Nadir Khan came to power he was punished, but only minimally, as it was understood that his action was taken under duress.  In this event we have an example of how one person’s ingenuity, acting as a creative agent, shaped the course of affairs for the residents in his community.

Another event, less socially momentous, took place in Shibar during the Kalakani period.  Khan Jan was an elderly man I met in Shibar who had actually gone to fight on behalf of Amanullah during this period.  He and several other men were dispatched by the pir of the Ismailis, Sayyed-e Kayan, to help the forces of Amanullah in the Kabul area.  They were given a large amount of money in the form of silver coins – those minted by the czar in Russia – which were sewn into several belts worn under their shirts; altogether the silver weighed as much as thirty pounds.  They set off by horseback.  In the area of the Unai Pass they stopped for tea, but while they were there several men started leading off their horses.  Khan Jan and his friends ran after them but because they were so weighted down with silver they could scarcely run.  Unable to recover the horses they turned back to the tea house and discussed what to do.  Soon someone else came along who said they knew who had rustled their horses and for a price would bring them back.  This caused more discussion because they were unsure if they could trust these strangers.  Eventually they agreed, and so followed the men out side of town.  In an isolated place, however, the men turned their guns on them and demanded their money.  The result for Khan Jan and his friends was that they lost everything.  They lost their horses and their silver, and they missed the war.

Humiliating as this event was for them, it may have saved them from an even worse disaster, because the pro-Amanullah forces in Kabul were forced to flee.  Folks in Shibar heard that as many as 600 soldiers were coming to Shibar but in fact far fewer ever reached the area.  When the Kalakani forces forced their way into the area the people of Shibar had to flee into the mountains.  It was a difficult winter.

This event, however momentous for Khan Jan’s and his friends, was nevertheless of little consequence to the war, but it reveals something of the social situation in Bamian during this unstable period.  Local populations, owing to the pressures put upon them, were in some cases – as in Fuladi – conflicted over how to deal with the looming issues of the moment.  And in the absence of government, of the rule of law, there was blatant lawlessness.  None of this surprises us of course, for not only was governmental control now absent but also missing were the customary local means of social control that might have contained lawless behavior in other circumstances.  But this was a time when most of the mechanisms of social control were without effect.

Conclusion 

The trends in Bamian during Amanullah’s time seemed to track with what was going on elsewhere in the country.  The rising power of government in Kabul under King Amanullah in the early 1920s was represented in Bamian in the form of an enlarging bureaucracy in the Markaz and in the establishment of a new alaqadāri in Shibar.  But there was also an evident loss of social order, in Bamian as well as elsewhere in the country, when the Amanullah administration was overturned under Habibullah Kalakani in 1928-1929; this was manifest in the experience of Khan Jan and his friends on the way to war.

In fact, those conditions, the attempt to foster a more effective central government, even as serious challenges to the whole system were lurking in the countryside, are familiar to all of us, for they are the conditions in place at this very time.  The world we have described in Amanullah’s time seems again to be as real and vivid now as it was then.  We pray that God will enable the country to avoid the course of events that marked Amanullah’s reign.[6]

[1] On the relation between culture and individual makers of history see Marshall Sahlins, 2004, Apologies to Thucydides:  Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago:  University of Chicago), and William H. Sewell, Jr., 2005, Logics of History:  Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago:  University of Chicago).

[2] The best general work on the Hazaras, which provides an extensive bibliography, is S. A. Mousavi, 1998, The Hazaras of Afghanistan:  An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study (Surrey, England:  Curzon); the major ethnographic reports on the Hazaras published since then are Kristian Berg Harpviken, 1996, Political Mobilization among the Hazara of Afghanistan: 1978-1992 (Oslo:  Institutt for Sosiologi, Universistetet i Oslo), and Alessandro Monsutti, 2005, War and Migration:  Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan (New York / London :  Routledge).

[3] M. Hasan Kakar, 1971, Afghanistan:  A Study in International Political Developments, 1880-1896.  Kabul:  privately published.

[4] When the Salang tunnel was completed in 1964 the Shibar Pass lost its strategic importance as the main route of access to the northern regions.

[5] A recent account of affairs in Kabul in this period is Robert McChesney, 1999, Kabul Under Siege:  Fayz Muhammad’s Account of the 1929 Uprising (Princeton:  Marcus Weiner).

[6] The reference here is to the Taliban who at the time of writing were interrupting traffic into Kabul from several directions.  The most important recent work on the Taliban is, Robert Crews and Amin Tarzi, editors, 2008, The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University).  It provides extensive guidance to the relevant literature.