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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Carnival of (Post)War
In September 2001, a few weeks before the first bombs were dropped on Kabul, I was sitting in a small nongovernmental organization (NGO) office in Paris, watching on my computer screen news releases announcing the formation of a coalition of Western nations preparing to launch a war against a country that few people had paid much attention to before. For many Westerners, Afghanistan kindled fantasies of deserted landscapes, bearded tribal warriors, and burkas. The NGO for which I worked was born with the Soviet-Afghan conflict and had remained in Afghanistan since 1979 when the first French doctors were sent to the Panjshir Valley to care for war-wounded “freedom fighters.” It was with a mixture of anxiety and sadness boosted by the adrenaline so characteristic of humanitarian work that the NGO’s emergency unit was now organizing the repatriation of the expatriate volunteers who worked in Afghanistan. But to my astonishment the Afghan staff would have to stay in the country and “endure freedom,” as the name of the U.S. military operations ironically phrased it. A page of history was being turned before my eyes, and I struggled to make sense of the flow of images and information I received. How to reconcile bombardments of already impoverished people and the war against terrorism? What was the rationale in the discourses that defended the war in the name of women and human rights? How could women be liberated through bombs and mass killings?
When the United States began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the oppression of Afghan women was the moral grammar mobilized to rally popular support for the military invasion of the country. This rhetoric, far from initiating a new trope, echoed the words of Georges Marchais—the leader of the French Communist Party—who, twenty years earlier, had justified the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan using similar arguments: “It is necessary to put an end to droit du seigneur and feudalism that prevails in the land of the Khans,” he argued in an interview for French television as the Red Army entered Kabul to come to the rescue of the Saur revolution. This classic form of colonial feminism was reactivated in a speech of American first lady Laura Bush, who triumphantly announced after five weeks of intense bombings: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Bush 2001). She was soon followed by Cherie Blair, wife of British prime minister Tony Blair, who launched a campaign using similar arguments to support her husband’s decision to go to war, despite massive demonstrations in the streets of London. This level of attention to the plight of Afghan women was in sharp contrast to the silence that had marked the years of civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989, reminding us of the opportunistic alliances imperial powers are sometimes able to forge with feminism.
Cultural Battleground
This book is an attempt to capture the nature of the “reconstruction” project in Afghanistan, using the category “woman” as an entry point into broader questions around sovereignty, state building, and democratization. Playing with the metaphor of the “carnival of (post)war”—on which I will elaborate later in this introduction—I reflect on its implications for theorizations of military-humanitarian interventions as well as for the comprehension of subjectivities forged out of these global encounters. I put “women” at the center of my analysis because of an arresting conjuncture: the fact that the international community’s interference into states’ affairs, especially in Third World countries, has historically coalesced around a state’s treatment of the “other” half of its population, namely women.
The literature documenting the consecutive wars in Afghanistan has generally focused on the transformations of ethnic, tribal, and religious allegiances from the jihad against the Russian occupying forces until the emergence of the Taliban. Its main objective has been to explore the limitations and potentials of the state, the tribe, and Islam for nation building and the formation of political ideologies (Roy 1985; Dorronsoro 2005; Barfield 2010). This literature has been particularly resourceful in identifying the various actors involved in the conflict, their source of authority and moral inspiration, as well as the transformations of Islam and interethnic relations through external interference. Tracing the life trajectories of three prominent characters from Afghanistan’s recent history, David Edwards (1996) has attempted to capture the deeper structures of the conflict. In his view, Afghanistan’s troubles have less to do with divisions between groups than with the moral incoherence of the country itself—an incoherence exacerbated by the imposition of a nation-state framework upon an unstable social fabric and a non-unified territory.1
This book builds on this important literature in its endeavor to understand nation/state building and conflict in the region, but also slightly departs from it. Indeed, the scholarship dealing with the Afghan wars has been mostly concerned with documenting formal political parties, tribal and sectarian groups, as well as broader geopolitical dynamics that have exacerbated the conflict. Its primary objective has been to trace the political, cultural, and religious roots of prominent political actors’ engagement and the modalities of their transformation through colonial and imperial encounters. Apart from a few anthropologists who have looked at the effects of wars on the everyday life of ordinary Afghans, either through the prism of religion (Marsden 2005), migration (Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont 2007; Monsutti 2005), or access to justice (De Lauri 2012a; Barfield 2008), representations that come out of this scholarship remain rooted in the Orientalist tradition, presenting Afghan “culture” as a “fact” with an essence that can be grasped. Afghans tend to be depicted as proud, heroic, and fearless fighters and Afghanistan as a chaotic and ungovernable country: “the land of the unconquerable” (Heath and Zahedi 2011), the “graveyard of empires” (Isby 2011), or “the kingdom of insolence” (Barry 2002). Analyzed from the perspective of those directly involved in the conflict, women are often absent from these descriptions, or when they are present, they are portrayed either as powerless victims (Mann 2010) or as rooted in tradition and rural life (Lindisfarne-Tapper 1991).
One of my central arguments is that the political category “woman” is largely the product of unequal interactions between institutions of transnational governance and local power entities, a category that carries specific cultural meanings and assumptions regarding the responsibilities of the state or the community toward its “second sex.” As much as I believe culture may inform structures of feeling and ways of inhabiting the world, I also want to pinpoint its primary relational, contextual, and contested nature. Indeed, the conflict in Afghanistan is not solely about warring factions competing for the control over a territory. It is also a symbolic battle in which the “woman question” acquires a specific salience and “culture” is articulated in specific gendered terms.
This book walks in the footsteps of postcolonial and subaltern scholars (L. Ahmed 1992; Yegenoglu 1998; Abu-Lughod 1986; Talpade-Mohanty 2003; Chatterjee 1993; Das 1988) by showing how “culture talks” are often enmeshed within broader power relations and reflect anxieties around national identity. It aims to contextualize both politically and historically the “woman question” in Afghanistan in order to identify the colonial continuities that persist in the current reconstruction effort. I choose to focus on urban women because their bodies, either covered or exposed, represent central sites of cultural struggles over identity and because urbanity offers a greater spectrum of possibilities and constraints. Indeed, because of the incapacity of the state to assert control outside the main urban centers, reconstruction efforts with their myriad of “women empowerment” projects have mostly focused on major cities, especially Kabul.
“Modernization” is not a new word in Afghan political culture. It refers to particular moments of the Afghan history when modernization theory exercised a powerful influence on the Afghan intelligentsia and political elite. As early as the 1920s, the presence of Afghan intellectual Mahmood Tarzi—whose family was exiled in Turkey during the reign of Abdur Rahman—in the close entourage of King Amanullah Khan (the leader of Afghanistan’s independence) was critical in initiating major reforms that would conduct Afghanistan on its long journey toward modernization (Gregorian 1967). However, unlike in Europe where modernization was the result of endogenous processes of industrialization, production, and class conflict, Afghan modernization was the result of exogenous influences exercised on the elite. As Nancy and Louis Dupree have well documented (L. Dupree 1973; N. H. Dupree 1984), for these early modernizers social engineering through women’s emancipation from the traditional Islamic way of life was pivotal in making Afghanistan catch up with more modern and developed countries. However, social reforms initiated by Amanullah Khan on his return from his trip around Europe in 1928 in a country still not united as a nation were received with great resistance in rural areas where tribal leaders felt challenged in their authority. For these segments of society “modernization” was synonymous with the corruption of the values, principles, and morals that were constitutive of Afghaniyat (Afghanness).
Despite the more careful manner with which King Zahir Shah continued the agenda of reforms initiated by Amanullah, the model chosen remained similar. Institutions, ideas, and manners that the king promoted were the reflection of his overt admiration for Europe (Cullather 2002a, 521). Kabul and, to a lesser extent, other cities became isolated islands in a society that remained predominantly rural. In the countryside, the government and Kabul inhabitants who received the greatest benefits from the reforms and the modest industrialization were seen as morally corrupt (Emadi 1991, 229).
The Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1981 was understood as the concrete evidence of the corrupt nature of the ruling class (N. H. Dupree 2001). Here, as in other countries under imperial domination, the Soviets used the argument of the necessity to civilize and modernize a tribal society to justify their military intervention. Afghanistan’s violent encounter with foreign occupiers revealed that its relationship to the “developed” world had never been based on equality and mutual recognition. Reforms conducted by the Communist government, such as secularization and women’s emancipation, placed the West as a reference point of modernity.2 The revolution’s objectives had to do with extracting the country from the inherent backwardness in which it had been kept by tradition and religion. Individual men and women’s forced enrollment in literacy programs and defense committees of the revolution while regime opponents were tracked, arrested, and tortured turned the experience of modernization into a painful experience of humiliation (Barfield 2010; Barry 2002; Roy 1985).
The resistance that emerged in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and in Afghanistan’s rural areas, and which was articulated in essentialized cultural terms, is to be understood in the light of these developments. Mujahideen groups were not simple “freedom fighters” supported by the United States in the context of the Cold War. Far from the romantic caricature of mystical holy warriors untouched by modernity that Western journalists made of them, the mujahideen were products of complex translocal assemblages. To get a greater sense of the insidious exchanges that existed between the resistant groups in Peshawar and the rest of the world, the work of earlier anthropologists such as Pierre and Micheline Centlivres (2007), Nancy and Louis Dupree, or David Edwards is worth rereading. In an article published in Cultural Anthropology in 1994, Edwards gives an interesting account of his first encounter with the mujahideen from the “interior”:
It is cool in the mountains, cool enough that the few people I pass wear their shawls wrapped tightly around their shoulders. Climbing a short hill on the outskirts of the village, I see a mullah with a billowy white turban seated in the chair of a two-barrel Dashika antiaircraft gun. The Dashika is a Soviet design, but markings on the gun indicate that it is of Chinese manufacture. These guns are shiny and new and only recently arrived by camel caravan across the Pakistani frontier. The mullah is young—late-twenties—and he scans the sky for signs of Soviet MiGs. Only a few weeks before, mujahidin gunners had brought down a MiG-23 not too far from here, and there is fighting going on not too far away; so the mullah is keeping careful watch. As he does so, he listens to a cassette on his Japanese tape recorder of an Egyptian muezzin chanting verses from the Qur’an….
Later in the day, I meet another ex-soldier, a Persian-speaking Tajik from the Kohistan region just north of Kabul…. Unlike most of the other mujahidin I have met, he has little time for Islam and openly admits to me that he had been a follower of a famous leftist guerrilla leader named Majid Kalakani who had been captured and killed by the government some years before. He talks proudly of his time with Kalakani and tells me of the American sniper rifle that he used to own. It had a scope on it, and once he killed four Soviet tankists as they drove in a convoy down the main road toward Kabul. The beauty of the American rifle, he says, is its small bullets and its silent action. (Edwards 1994, 347–48)
The Egyptian muezzin singing on a Japanese tape recorder, the Dashika antiaircraft gun designed in the Soviet Union and manufactured in China, the American sniper rifle—the material details Edwards provides in his description are revealing of the intricate translocal dynamics in which the resistance movement was entangled. Descriptions like these demonstrate that the mujahideen stood at the crossroads of modernity, technological innovation, and global conflicts.
The policies some of the most radical mujahideen groups implemented in the refugee camps they ruled were a direct reflection of the global interconnections that provided the background upon which an “authentic Afghan culture and tradition” were reinvented. Constraints imposed on women’s movements and public appearances in the camps directly answered state-sponsored women’s emancipation programs taking place in the country. In this sense their policies were performative, reinscribing in a dramatic manner a naturalized tradition in the social fabric in order to assert its difference with the Soviet project. As Homi Bhabha argues in The Locations of Culture (1994, 2): “Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.”
The current “reconstruction” project presents similar trends with “modernization” efforts conducted under the Communist regime: a focus on centralized instances of governance to carry out important social reforms with the military support of foreign troops. In this project, like in the Communist one, women’s public visibility is the benchmark upon which “progress” is measured. Despite the fact that the political jargon used to foster “modernization” is apparently less ideologically connoted, the neoliberal agenda associated with it is far from being value free.
In the Afghan postcolony, women are obliged to subscribe to norms and ideologies whose social effects further diminish their dignity and exacerbate their inequality. Women cannot make choices that do not show—at least partly—their adhesion to these norms without fearing the social sanction reserved for those who are considered as traitors. These norms take a variety of forms: some have to do with family honor and feminine modesty; others have to do with the glorification of motherhood and feminine virtue indexed on women’s capacity to endure. Reading in these norms the expression of a fixed “Afghan culture” is misleading simply because the terms of participation are constantly negotiated in everyday practice. It is through the ambivalent work of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005)—whereby aspects of Afghan cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort and ontological security—that women creatively transgress (and to a certain extent, reproduce) nationalist ideologies.
Women, far from being the powerless victims of identity politics, mobilize Afghan cultural imagination in order to render audible claims pertaining to their position in the family, the community, or society at large. They are neither simple dupes nor secret revolutionaries. What they often seek tactically (even without a theory to dress it up) is to optimize the terms of recognition in their immediate, local lives. As Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold demonstrate in their work on women’s oral performances in North India, if women frequently speak from within the dominant discourse, it is important to “begin to recognize the discontinuity, the interpenetration between the hegemonic and the subversive, and their varied deployments, from moment to moment, in everyday life” (1994, 16). In their quest for a “voice,” women have to express themselves in terms of actions and performances, which have local cultural resonance. Women’s “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004) is therefore not disconnected from the cultural regime within which their lives are entangled. And by taking part in the complex dynamics of identity politics—in often ambiguous and ambivalent ways—they also transform the dominant norms that frame the terms of culture.
Carnival of War
Let me now return to the metaphor of the “carnival.” Shortly after the bombings over Afghanistan abated, a humanitarian theater was added to the military one. The use of the term “theater” to describe such interventions needs to be further examined. In general, theaters are premises that host plays, which can be played and replayed in various locations. The theater provides a stage for the recitation of a scenario that has been written somewhere else. The theatrical dimension of the humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan is perhaps best exemplified by a project called “We Believe in Balloons,” an initiative aimed at promoting peace, which was carried out in May 2013. The U.S.-based artist Yazmany Arboleda, with the support of a half dozen internationally financed aid groups, set out to distribute pink balloons filled with helium and peace messages all over the capital city. His intention, as he explained to a reporter at the New York Times, was to “create a stream of shared instances of unexpected happiness” (Nordland 2013). This example together with a myriad of other projects conducted since 2001 (such as the Kabul Kids Circus, Skatistan, the Beauty Academy of Kabul, and others) demonstrate that the stage of the Afghan theater hosts a carnivalesque act in the sense that it provides a space where a world of utopian freedom can be imagined.
Here I am referring to the “carnivalesque” as defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary work Rabelais and His World (1984b). Bakhtin describes the carnival as a moment when rules are turned upside down and everything is permitted. It is shaped according to a pattern of play. It is a type of performance that is communal, without boundaries between performers and audience. The “Pink Balloons” project with its objective to bring happiness and peace to the war-torn country illustrates the inherent utopia that lies within the promise of postwar reconstruction.
The transition toward democracy in Afghanistan has triggered many apparent reversals that to a certain extent remind one of medieval Europe’s “carnival” as described by Bakhtin (1984b). During the carnival, ordinary life, rules, and hierarchies are temporarily suspended and overturned. Slaves may be “crowned” as kings just as kings are “decrowned” as slaves. The suspended moment and upside-down world of the carnival presents some commonalities with the transition period in Afghanistan where “masked games” hide the continuity of injustice. Even though the current context is immune from and devoid of the carnival’s liberating laughter, a number of inversions that work as leverages to reinforce the status quo can be identified in the same manner as the carnival offers a safety valve that ultimately sustains the dominant order.
First, in contrast with the religious edicts enforced by the Taliban, a new vision of “law and order” is being promoted, based on constitutional populism and a fetishized “rule of law” agenda destined to bring Afghanistan into the fold of “civilized nations.” But the blinding screen of the law poorly hides the endemic disorder that constitutes its twin and inseparable side. Second, “democratization” has meant the return to power of “military commanders”—alternatively labeled “warlords” or “mujahideen”—that had been ousted from the political arena by the previous regime. The “democratic” election of alleged war criminals, some of whom still own private militias and are involved in the narco-economy, has reversed the taken-for-granted telos of modernity, making the line between the licit and organized crime difficult to tell apart (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 40). Finally, women have been encouraged to become visible and access the public realm when the Taliban’s gender policies forbade them to do so. However, this visibility has become synonymous with danger and has obliged women to camouflage themselves in new ways.
This sudden inversion of the “old order” for a new one based on Western models of (neo)liberal democracies is marked by a schizophrenic state of uncertainty that has forced many Afghans to adapt and play roles in order to fit the dominant narrative of national reconstruction. For Mikhail Bakhtin, images of reversal twist through the folklore tradition of premodern Europe, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. In his view, such reversals express the creative energy of “a carnival sense of the world” (Bakhtin 1984a, 107). “Postwar” (which, in the case of Afghanistan, would be better described as “ongoing war”) is, of course, a moment that is in many ways deprived of the festive atmosphere of the carnival. However, the ambivalence of moral and social meanings produced by the “transition” limbo bears the disorienting and liminal characteristics of the “carnival.” The superposition and competition between various moral orders—Islam, international law, human rights, customary law—and the displacement of sovereignty into more concentrated forms of power and accumulation such as NATO troops, militiamen and commanders, and international organizations and NGOs as well as private contractors can be compared to the outrageous and contradictory images that make up carnival ambivalence.
(Post)war situations are often described as dramatic moments that involve violence, abuses, and a general state of lawlessness that necessitates prompt international support, especially in the legal field, to reestablish order. If this anarchic state of affairs is to a large extent a reality, the everyday experience of (post)war/reconstruction is also one that is marked by ambivalence, contradictions, and ironies that carry both constraining and enabling potentialities. The daily encounters between international humanitarian workers and Afghan aid recipients, reconstruction experts and Afghan civil servants, and Western feminists and ordinary Afghan women are often full of misunderstandings and divergent expectations that translate into a “dialogue of the deaf.” The necessity to master the dominant jargon of the “rule of law,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and “development” in order to access resources often creates ironic situations whereby Afghans are pushed to play roles and discipline themselves in certain ways. The story of Zahra, who decides to “become a man” in order to facilitate her access to the “public” illustrates the gender ironies of the reconstruction carnival. That transnational governance has opened new spaces for women contradicts the fact that many remain socially inaccessible to them.
Of course, it would be a gross exaggeration to detect in the current situation of Afghanistan the same utopian freedom that is enacted during carnival time. The daily NATO bombings made legitimate under international law and the state of destitution in which the vast majority of Afghans must live are concrete reminders of the violence that accompanies the “democratization” masquerade. What I want to emphasize here, using Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque,” is the new moral imagination born out of this violent encounter whereby the lines between the “good” and the “bad,” the “legal” and the “lethal,” to use Walter Benjamin’s terms in his “Critique of Violence” (1969), are blurred and displaced.
The “carnival of the (post)war” brings together actors with various subject positions, agendas, knowledge claims, and values and sometimes offers opportunities for subversion of the same kind as the ones deployed during the medieval carnival, absorbing its authoritarian other in a way that does not totally destroy but rather contains the threat it poses. Because Afghans have a long experience of foreign interference that has complicated their relationship to the state, they have developed a political consciousness and an instinctive sense of the “masquerade” that has allowed them to preserve a sense of continuity and personal autonomy. From this long history of resistance has emerged the reputation of Afghanistan as “Yâghestan” (the land of the rebellious). Historian Michael Barry (2002) has well illustrated the creative strategies of dissimulation Afghans have developed over the centuries to resist imperial domination, something he defines as the “yâghestan reflex.”
Because “democratization” efforts are accompanied by a sharp rise in crime and violence, with a more or less elected and representative regime that has brought with it a rising tide of lawlessness, Afghans’ mode of engagement with the “public sphere” has been marked by a general feeling of suspicion, mistrust, and resentment that defies dominant liberal conceptualizations of the “public” as a space for rational-critical dialogue. Indeed, in Jurgen Habermas’s view (1989), the “public sphere” is the locus of “communicative action,” that is, a site where cooperative action is undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. Individuals engaged in such dialogic transactions are making full use of reason in order to reach a consensus, which in turn guarantees the protection and defense of “the common good.” The formation of (inclusive and rational) public spheres in Western societies has been instrumental in establishing democracies and in producing citizens. Western classical liberalism has presumed the universal necessity of differentiated public and private spheres for the development of citizenship, civil society, and democratic statehood.
This idealized vision of the “public sphere” is in sharp contradiction with the social reality not only of those who have been excluded from the public in both the developed and the developing world (women, minorities) but also of the countries that must bear the burden of neocolonial/neoliberal domination. In the context of Afghanistan, the “public” domain, far from being a site of dialogical negotiations, is better understood as a stage for performance (Göle 2002), “poetic world making” (Warner 2002, 114), and carnivalesque expression. Commenting on the experience of voluntary “modernization” policies in Turkey, Nilüfer Göle emphasizes the performative dimension of non-Western public spheres, especially in countries where the process of state formation has been shaped by unequal interactions with the West. She writes: “Because the public sphere provides a stage for performance rather than an abstract frame for textual and discursive practices, the ocular aspect in the creation of significations and the making of social imaginaries becomes of utmost importance” (Göle 2002, 177). I would add to her analysis that the notion of the carnivalesque further highlights the regenerative potential of performances in the public life of occupied countries like Afghanistan. This is not to reiterate the common stereotype according to which Third World subjects would be stuck in irrationality. On the contrary, envisioning non-Western public spheres as “carnivalesque” underscores the creative, energetic, ambiguous (and often horrifying) forms of subversion and resistance that have emerged as a result of neoliberal or military occupation. Because the carnivalesque creates a sense of togetherness, a lived collective body that is constantly renewed, non-Western public life challenges the moral assumptions that underpin the liberal public, especially in the domain of gender relations where “emancipation” is often thought of in terms of a public “coming out” and a breakup with “tradition.”
Furthermore, the notion of the carnivalesque can help us rethink women’s agency, especially in contexts where women are confronted with the double burden of nationalism and imperialism. In this book, I attempt to explain how women from different walks of life, generations, and ethnic and social backgrounds use carnivalesque performances and repertoires to get around or accommodate norms and prescriptions that regiment their lives. I focus on women’s everyday practices and in particular women’s body work, emotional performances, and expressive genres because resistance to systems of domination is often taking place at the margins of these systems, in the interstices left uncontrolled or in spaces opened up at a specific historical moment (Cowan 1990). A study of women’s everyday practices demonstrates that “agency” is not only shaped by cultural systems of values that the occupation has radicalized but is also made more complex by motives and social imaginaries that inhabit a specific moral universe and in which women’s bodies have come to occupy a central symbolic role.
The feminine performances I analyze in this book allow the eruption of a feminine experience that is silenced in language but that receives validation through the mobilization of broader social imaginaries pertaining to the potentially threatening nature of women’s bodies. I push this idea to its limits by examining how the public visibility of women’s suicide, through self-immolation or poisoning, acts as a transgressive symbol of femininity excluded, rejected from existing fields of discourse, thus forcing an opening in representation. The nature of power relations in Afghanistan today is such that women cannot speak in many political contexts, which is precisely why women come to recognize that they must, as Veena Das puts it, “learn to communicate by non-verbal gestures, intonations of speech, and reading meta-messages in ordinary language” (1988, 198).
The study of Afghan women’s poetry and the cultural imaginaries that constitute their world helps us to better understand how an individual woman’s ability to access public life is dependent on her capacity to mobilize socially appropriate cultural expressions. I show how public women play with the polysemic nature of hegemonic political/religious repertoires (notions of jihad and martyrdom, for example) in order to assert their presence in male-dominated arenas. These covert reinterpretations, in spite of their inherent ambivalence, bring nuances to and marginally challenge traditional gender discourses. In the same way, women’s emotional performances, even under their most dramatic forms like suicide attempts, carry with them communicative potential in the same way as the grotesque and the exuberant in carnivalesque performances. These highly dramatic gestures that follow gendered forms of emotional expression strengthen realities of identity while bringing some legal validity to women’s demands. By creatively engaging with these well-known cultural repertoires, women do not only confirm their allegiance to the gender order but they also demonstrate its intrinsic fragility. These “polyphonic discursive formations within the tradition itself” (Raheja and Gold 1994, 25) do not function in my view as mere “rituals of rebellion” (Gluckman 1963), ensuring the continuity of the political and moral order of society. Their repetition, while reinforcing the “reality” of gender difference (Butler 1990), also allows for the shifting of meaning according to contexts and situations.
Fictional State Building
“Democratic transition” in Afghanistan has to be studied from the perspective of women because women represent a central catalyst of disputes and controversies. Indeed, as in other colonial encounters, women have become central subjects of public debates and political attention over the past ten years. The vitality with which the visibility of women in public life is discussed in contemporary Afghanistan by the international community, Afghan politicians and power holders, as well as ordinary people, underscores the centrality of women in symbolically shaping the future of the country. An analysis of reactions to and effects of their presence in public can help us unpack the political reconfiguration of public life in the “post-Taliban” period. Indeed, polemics that have emerged around women’s roles signal the broader moral anxieties around culture that have emerged as a result of the occupation. In a society torn by violence and war, women’s bodies have become the field through which statehood enacts its power (Aretxaga 1997; Das 1996).
With other academics who have attempted to theorize the state as a fantasy (Navaro-Yashin 2002), as a fetish (Taussig 1992a), as an idea (Mitchell 1991), or as a fiction (Aretxaga 2003), I want to underline the elusive, porous, and mobile boundaries of the state in a context where the “state” is considered as “failed.” In the context at stake a myriad of actors such as NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, private companies, and local militias and narco-traffickers assume a large part of the traditional Weberian functions of the state to the extent that the state mostly materializes itself through the use of violence, symbolic or real. In order to understand what “state building” may mean when the state is no more in charge or able to regulate many areas of social life, one needs to rethink the state beyond traditional categories of “structures” and “apparatus” (Navaro-Yashin 2002).
The reconstruction process has mostly focused on rebuilding state infrastructures: ministries, hospitals, schools, and courts, most of which have remained dysfunctional—and sometimes, even empty—for lack of security, personnel, and resources to pay civil servants’ salaries. Once the stage for the performance of statehood has been set, the state has largely remained a ghostly figure, a powerful fiction fueling popular anxieties and discourses of corruption, secrecy, and arbitrary violence. The “virtual reality” (Aretxaga 2003) of the state, its phantomatic presence, is nevertheless enacted in the relation of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that holds together its sovereign power. The state, therefore, is perhaps better captured in its margins (Das and Poole 2004) than in its supposedly transparent and rational bureaucratic forms. Veena Das and Deborah Poole argue that “the forms of illegibility, partial belonging, and disorder that seem to inhabit the margins of the state constitute its necessary condition as a theoretical and political object” (2004, 4).
But there is a more general point to be made. The uncertainty that surrounds the state is not specific to the Afghan context. Indeed, everywhere the state, as any institution endowed with the power to produce “the real in the world” (Boltanski 2008), is a semantic reality, a “being without a body” that can only speak through spokespersons. Ambivalence toward the state is inherent to social life since spokespersons who are supposed to translate the will of the state may in fact impose their own judgment. This tension between the need to have institutions in order to preserve a sense of stability and the impossibility to fully rely on them because of their fictional nature is what Luc Boltanski calls a “hermeneutical contradiction” (Boltanski 2008, 28).
In the case of Afghanistan, this fundamental state of suspicion is heightened by the fact that state representatives are less easily identifiable. They are to be found within a myriad of more or less formal organizations, with diverse and sometimes even contradictory political agendas, what Jane Cowan (2007) has identified as a “spectrum of sovereignties” in the context of the “supervised state.” Meanwhile, as much as the state is feared, nationalist discourses feed social imaginaries with expectations toward the state that often contradict the actual experience of disempowerment, violence, and marginalization (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). It is precisely in this tension that I want to think of the subjective and affective reality of the state as it unfolds in the everyday events of public life through desires, fantasies, rumors, and moral panics.
Following Yael Navaro-Yashin’s work on the psychic life of the state (2002), this book highlights the dialectic relationship between various social and political actors (Afghan civil servants and politicians, international forces, and citizens) that produces and refashions the political in the context of state-building efforts conducted under international supervision. My definition of the political is therefore informed by Michel Foucault’s definition of power as pervasive, relational, and productive and as a force that permeates bodies, shaping affects and subjectivities. Because political representation in contemporary Afghanistan remains highly contentious, an approach of the political that remains focused on formal institutions and political discourses is limited. A broader definition of the political is necessary to understand the psychic dimensions of state power and public life (Butler 1997b; Kafka 2012), especially in contexts where state institutions are emptied of their meaning. Because, as Navaro-Yashin (2002, 3) argues, “power is everywhere,” the political should not be “sited” solely in rationalized institutions but should rather be traced under its most “fleeting and intangible” forms. Metaphors of “no man’s land” (Navaro-Yashin 2003) and “ruins” (Navaro-Yashin 2009) powerfully illuminate the modern condition of confusion and estrangement embedded within transnational conceptions of the state, especially in contexts where, like in Afghanistan, international narratives of “liberation” and “justice” produce the actual experience of entrapment and immobility (Sanford 2003; Englund 2006; Mattei and Nader 2008; Castillejo-Cuéllar 2005).
The dominant narrative of the reconstruction is one of a “return to order” (“normalization”) that clashes with the actual state of emergency that continues to affect the everyday life of men and especially women, who have to bear the burden of a double occupation: one of international military troops and another of the state, enacted through military performances of masculinity attempting to assert themselves through the control of their bodies. Discourses of “freedom” and “liberation” reiterated by international actors have had the unintended effect of reinforcing a sense of urgency in maintaining communal boundaries along stereotypical gender lines with the nation imagined as an idealized desexualized maternal figure in need of “protection.” In the process of rendering the state legible, the “law” has been the main instrument for the enforcement of this ideal vision of the national community.
“Because my husband’s beating became so bad, I ran away from home and turned myself in to the police. The police sent me to prison. Nobody helps me! There is no government here to help! For the one who is poor, there is only God!” Bibi Gul’s story of repetitive abuse, by her in-laws and then by state laws at the very moment when her need for a caring state was the most urgent is sadly common among the inmates of the women’s prison in Kabul, recently rehabilitated with the financial support of the international community. Most of these women have been sentenced to jail for “moral crimes” such as zina (illegal sex) or elopement, both punishable by a twenty-year jail sentence. In reality, many of them simply tried to escape domestic violence, forced marriage, or forced prostitution. Some have made the unforgivable mistake of dishonoring their family by falling in love with the man of their choice. Others have been raped and have been accused of adultery. Since marriage is the only way to avoid prolonged jail time, much pretrial time is spent negotiating terms of marriage between their otherwise reluctant families. Paradoxically, since the downfall of the Taliban regime, the women’s prison population had risen to 600 in 2011, up from 380 in 2010 (Farmer 2011). The director of the prison observes disdainfully that the prison is full “because these days women are given too much freedom.”
The sexual violence so pervasive in “postwar” Afghanistan is the lethal labor that provides the state—and the people it is supposed to embody—with a semblance of sovereignty and legibility in the face of an occupation experienced as a source of moral pollution. To counter the hegemonic discourse of human rights that has accompanied the military occupation, “lawfare”—which John Comaroff (2001) defines as the judicialization of politics and the resort to legal instruments to commit acts of political coercion—has been the symbolic terrain upon which national sovereignty has attempted to affirm itself. It is through the language of the law that “brute power has been laundered in a wash of legitimacy, ethics, propriety” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 31), subjecting women to various forms of abuses ranging from virginity tests to sexual harassment and domestic violence.
The Anthropologist and the “Reconstruction” Business
What legitimacy does a white European anthropologist have to represent Afghan women? In her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Gayatri Spivak urges Western anthropologists to question their motives in studying non-Western peoples. She remains doubtful of their attempt, no matter how well intentioned, to “speak for others” unless they engage in serious self-critique and incorporate analysis of their positionality in the power/knowledge nexus that underpins their research.
Spivak’s distrust is all the more justified in that anthropology as a discipline is historically entrenched within the legacy of European colonialism. Talal Asad reminds us that anthropological knowledge may not have been that significant in the expansion of colonial domination; it remained too esoteric to be of practical use for the colonial establishment (1991, 315). However, the fact that anthropologists’ discourses and practices were part of particular imperial times and colonial places is precisely what renders anthropological knowledge worthy of investigation for anyone concerned with the practical workings of domination.
The fieldwork on which this book is based is not removed from the imperial dynamics that led to the occupation of Afghanistan. There is little chance that this country would have come under my consideration before 9/11 and the subsequent military intervention that made the resources of NGOs, international organizations, and other “Aidland” subcontractors multiply in a matter of a few weeks—hence providing career opportunities for young (and often naive) graduates who want to change the world, much like the one I was when I was first sent to Afghanistan. However, the objective of this book is neither to speak for Afghan women nor to represent the culture to which they are supposed to belong. Rather, this book endeavors to tell the multifaceted story of an occupation. While seeking to define the nature of the encounters occurring in one of the world’s most important humanitarian theaters, this book illustrates the intended and unintended effects of international supervision in the everyday lives of women and its impact on their capacity to speak.
Like any research conducted in highly unstable environments, this study has been accompanied by many constraints, which have deeply influenced the design and methodology of my work. Unable to settle in one single site location in the manner classic ethnographers traditionally work, I was forced to adapt and navigate in different circles according to the opportunities that arose out of my encounters. I became a “mobile ethnographer” (Marcus 1995, 96), pushed and pulled according to circumstances over which I had little control—an experience I share with other anthropologists who have worked under similar circumstances and whose texts bear witness to life’s inherent precariousness (Nordstrom 2004; Green 1994; Taussig 2003; Aretxaga 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992).
This research was for me a sort of embodied discovery of what living in a climate of fear exactly meant. The existential shock I experienced when I discovered the other side of the invisible border that separates expatriates from Afghans was a necessary step to start envisioning the dark side of humanitarianism. It is through the working of my “nervous system”—these “applied embodied thoughts” as Michael Taussig (1992b, 7) puts it—that I began to grasp the moral tensions in which the people around me were caught. I understood that the purpose of my work was less about finding the most efficient way of interpreting the deeds and thoughts of my informants than about having to face the existential problem of living in a constant state of emergency with no possibility to envision what tomorrow would entail (Hoffman 2003; Nordstrom and Robben 1995). Although there were many differences in our respective experiences—due to the simple fact that I could decide to leave and take the next flight back to Europe—I gradually started to share some of my informants’ anxieties as well as some of their coping mechanisms, in particular humor and irony, arts in which Afghans have an excellent reputation.
Research in an insecure context corrodes the founding myths of ethnography as a method that privileges social stability, bounded and coherent communities, and the possibility of engaging in significant human relationships. The fragmented nature of my fieldwork and the fragile relationships I managed to develop were somehow a reflection of the fragmented relationships the social landscape was made of. But more generally, the mobile disposition I had to adopt in order to follow the “pulse” of the field—or its “rhythm” to use Henri Lefebvre’s (2004) terminology—demonstrates that movement instead of stability is perhaps best apt to capture the changing and dynamic nature of modern human life. Like most Afghans who have become “exiles in their own homelands” (Stewart 1988, 235), I was there as an uprooted witness, manipulated, influenced by my emotions, always confused by rumors that circulated around me. This experience was crucial, however, to get an understanding of the nature of “postwar reconstruction” and to incorporate into my “witnessing” knowledge of causes and implications unavailable to observers who were not so immersed in the daily life of Afghans.
Most of my fieldwork was conducted in Kabul even though I traveled to other regions on several occasions. The city has often been the setting where changes in gender relations first occur. As much as the city also creates new hierarchies of power and domination, it also remains the locale from which women may experience new forms of mobility. My focus on Kabul as the center of power was informed by the fact that it represented a site of political possibilities for women, a site where modern citizen making was being processed while simultaneously notions of corruption and pollution remained deeply associated with that space in the collective imagination.
Because of the difficulties of conducting independent research in a country still at war, I had found myself a position in a communication agency specializing in social marketing and public information. I worked there as a project manager/researcher for a few months until I had managed to develop enough contacts in the women’s groups I was interested in studying to continue the fieldwork on my own. My position within the company allowed me to gain access to various institutions where my presence as a simple researcher may have otherwise looked suspicious. It also gave me direct insight into the “reconstruction” business and access to key development “brokers and translators” (Lewis and Mosse 2006).
At the same time, I had recruited a translator/Dari teacher, Lutfia, who supported me in conducting interviews, translations, and in building contacts among women MPs, students, and activists. Lutfia was a twenty-two-year-old university student originally from Kapisa Province where her family still lived. She boarded at the National Women’s Dormitory on Kabul University campus. Thanks to her intercession with the dormitory’s director, I was offered a room among female students in return for English and French lessons. I lived there for four months, sharing girls’ daily activities, improving my Dari while gaining insight into what made up their everyday lives: worries, dreams, gossip, Indian soap operas, poetry, music, makeup, and, of course, studies. My relationship to Lutfia gradually moved toward friendship. I did not only benefit from her linguistic skills but also from her patience and kindness in explaining to me the complex rules of Afghan etiquette.
I also volunteered for a few months at the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), a local network of women’s NGOs, assisting them with proposals, reports, and fund-raising. I taught English to the staff and in return for my services I was introduced to the women’s organizations working under the umbrella of AWN. Thanks to this new connection, I gained access to other women activists in Kabul and Herat where AWN had recently opened an office. I also followed for a few weeks two renowned women’s rights advocates who ran programs in Nangahar and Hazarajat.
Fieldwork in an environment where public figures in general and public women in particular were the targets of political assassinations necessitated a high degree of flexibility. My navigation in different circles was dependent upon the willingness of the women I met to open up and on the quality of the relationship I managed to develop with them. There was no guarantee that the doors that were opened one day would still be opened the next. I shadowed a woman activist in her activities for a few days here, conducted participant observation in a women’s organization for another few days there, eagerly jumping on each opportunity that presented itself. Planning was a useless exercise. I ended up following a metaphor, an idea, instead of the specific informants I had initially thought of. It is through my navigation among various circles of women enjoying different degrees of public visibility that I could start sensing the erratic nature of public life at a time of rapid and intense political change.
In spite of all my efforts to get some kind of insight into the spaces I was interested in, it is undeniable that my particular position within that space profoundly affected the nature of the work I could do. My informants had some valid reasons for showing suspicion toward my ultimate intentions: there were very few independent researchers in Kabul; I was not representing any particular institution and I was an unaccompanied French woman. As a result, it was not rare for me to be taken for either a spy or a journalist. The only solution I found to make my presence less awkward was to offer concrete services whenever possible, to follow women’s projects and support them the best I could.
In order to preserve the anonymity of my informants, I have sometimes changed their names and used pseudonyms. I have anonymized some of the women I interviewed at the National Assembly when they explicitly asked me to do so. When it is the case, I only mention whether they come from rural or urban areas since it is a significant distinction that involves a radically different position. I have coded their interviews and removed biographical elements that may make them too easily identifiable. I kept the original names of the women activists and politicians who were willing to gain some public visibility through my writing. All the women who have shared with me some intimate stories that I have used to support and inform my argument have been given pseudonyms.
Researching Women’s Political Expression
This book is structured around two main parts. The first part focuses on the state and the various manifestations of its power over women’s bodies. I locate the current project of “state building” in a continuum of modernization attempts conducted in the early 1930s, in the 1960s–1970s, and during the Soviet occupation of Afghani stan. In the course of a history marked by forced modernization and Islamic fundamentalism, I show how the state has remained a phantom figure that haunts Afghans’ collective imagination in powerful ways. In the second part, I show how Afghan women routinely respond, through embodiment and performance, to the various sources of pressure pertaining to their visibility in public life.
The first chapter is a historical overview of the fashioning of the Afghan nation and of its articulation along gender lines. I show how the modern history of Afghanistan is marked by a constant focus on women’s bodies as either sites upon which the state strove to apply the stamp of modernization or, on the contrary, the stamp of an imagined tradition. I place the contemporary moment in the continuity of these numerous attempts at remaking women.
Chapter 2 uses the example of a “gender empowerment” training program carried out by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs as part of its broader “gender mainstreaming” mandate to illustrate how ideas associated with modern state building and citizenship are being infused into Afghan society. I show how “reconstruction” does not simply consist in the formation of a bureaucratic apparatus based on Western models of liberal democracies but primarily involves cultural and symbolic production.
Chapter 3 focuses on the justice sector as a major site of attention of current state-building efforts. Through interviews and observations conducted in Family Response Units (FRUs), Kabul Family Court, women’s shelters, and defense attorneys associations, I unpack some of the contradictions, ambivalences, and ironies of justice sector support programs conducted under a fuzzy “rule of law” agenda. The inaccessibility and impotency of formal justice institutions has led women to take justice into their own hands and turn to community-based forms of mediation. Using observations conducted during Koran classes taught by an Afghan women’s rights activist, I underline the centrality of Islam and kinship in legitimizing claims for rights, especially in the highly sensitive arena of family law.
Chapter 4 is an ethnographic account of young women’s responses to moral panics that have emerged in the national and local press as a result of the appearance of some commodities and cultural products such as cosmetics, fashion, and Indian soap operas on the local market. These panics flagged the threat of moral dilution and cultural pollution and urged policy makers to react in order to reestablish social order. While unpacking the multiple meanings of these moral anxieties, I explore how female students boarding at the National Women’s Dormitory in Kabul struggled to position themselves in a new life environment away from their families. I argue that these young women’s bodily practices revealed a constant tension between the necessary fulfilment of different roles as dutiful and modest daughters and as young urban educated women aspiring to present themselves as “modern” and Muslim. The fact that Islam remained a central element of their self-justification should not be understood as a reflection of the conservative nature of Afghan society but rather as a form of resistance to foreign domination.
Chapter 5 aims to characterize new meanings attached to women’s veiling in the new Islamic republic. While the chadari (burka) has become the ultimate symbol of women’s oppression for Western audiences, it is necessary to take a closer look at its multiple and often contradictory uses and to contextualize the reasons for its maintenance, despite the downfall of the Taliban regime. The ethnographic data I collected among women’s rights activists and women MPs demonstrate that women who are attempting to access public spaces have developed creative strategies of dissimulation to get public recognition. They have become visible under the veil and have sometimes been able to challenge gender hierarchies behind the appearance of compliance and conformity. These findings challenge liberal ideas according to which women’s visibility in public spaces is a necessary guarantee for their emancipation and their agency.
Chapter 6 investigates women’s emotional performances and discourses of suffering, jihad, and martyrdom. I show how these ambiguous communicative tools serve to make commentaries on social relations and gender hierarchies without totally disrupting the honor code and the ideal of female modesty. I also analyze more dramatic gestures, such as suicides, and suggest conceiving of them not as mere signs of despair but rather as nondiscursive communicative acts that are part of women’s broad repertoire of emotional performances. I highlight the ambiguous symbolic power of suicide and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women’s poetic expression.
