ISSN 2562-9948
Review of: Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Tragectories. Edited by Rajen Harshe’ and Dhananjay Tripathi. (New Delhi: Routledge), 2016, pp. xix+248. The colonial and postcolonial writings about of Afghanistan are marked by the absence of a systematic and critical awareness about the country as an offspring and dependency of Western colonialism. The ethnographic, historic […]
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The military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and its partners has spawned floods of popular and academic writings and visual effects about the culture, history and politics of the country. A leading contributor to these stores of information about Afghanistan is Thomas Jefferson Barfield, currently professor of anthropology at Boston University and president […]
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This is in response to M. Nazif Shahrani’s piece titled “The Taliban Enigma: Person-Centered Politics & Extremism in Afghanistan” published in ISIM Newsletter 6, October 2000, pp. 20-21. Crucial ethnographic details, structural principles and historical processes, especially those dealing with social inequality and political instability in contemporary Afghanistan, are misunderstood, garbled, and oversimplified by the […]
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Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, as I photographed part of it in 1969 The new USNATO military base at Maimana. Note the farmland plowed up to prevent approach and to prevent improvised explosive devices to be hidden there by the occupied peoples. Stand back! You are too close. [Note: this article incorporates some text […]
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First published in Critique of Anthropology, 2011, 31(3) 256–270 Review Essay: Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, xi + 389 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6. $29.95 (hbk) The destabilization and military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States over the past three decades has triggered the hasty production of […]
Read More…Come On, Show Me that Smile! One has to wonder if NATO military planners and officers in the field are just slightly insane with frustration, or simply have a perverse sense of humour. In this BBC story, British troops armed to the teeth enter a compound in darkness en masse, scaring the little children, and […]
Read More…Readers will appreciate that a tremendous amount of historical research, and interviews with participants, went into this project to present the true history of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to Afghanistan, a history that thus far has been replete with misconceptions, unsubstantiated rumour, and popular myths. Clearly, Columbus and his brothers are to be celebrated […]
Read More…In the latest in militainment news, Electronic Arts has bowed to pressure from military officials in the U.S. and UK–not that it wasn’t already predisposed to their sentiments–and to the overreaching complaints of family members of those who died killing Afghans, and removed mention of the Taleban from the upcoming release of “Medal of Honor.” […]
Read More…In Western discourse, the neo-fundamentalist Taleban movement and the noun from which it is derived are awkwardly, often incorrectly, represented. In Paxtu (Pakhtu, Pashto, Pushtu, etc.) the movement is rendered da talebano ghorzang, and in Dari (Afghan Farsi), jonbesh-e taleban. In Paxtu and Dari usage, the noun taleb (student, seeker of knowledge) is gendered, and […]
Read More…In terms of American mainstream media propaganda at the service of U.S. wars of occupation, and particularly favourable to the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, my vote for the most generous treatments, in descending order, are first the piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, second this prize in The Atlantic, third this recommendation to Obama […]
Read More…IRAQ 1492 Reflecting on the (in)capacity of scholars, and even some indigenous leaders, to learn from the history they researched or the history they survived, I circulated a poem back in 2003 that juxtaposed the invasion of Iraq with Columbus’ invasion of the indigenous Caribbean. It was on a scholars’ listserv, from where it has […]
Read More…This post, while actually written on 20 April 2011, is backdated to the time that the video in question below was uploaded to YouTube. The video, “Humam al-Balawi: Slayer of CIA Terrorists in Afghanistan,” was an unacceptable challenge to some, starting with the very title. Let’s put this in some perspective first. The video was […]
Read More…Over the past couple of weeks there has been much discussion online of the Taliban’s Youtube channel: Istiqlalmedia. The greatest amount of content on that site is, arguably, that generated by a mass of mostly hostile comments by YouTube users who in many cases would like to see the channel deleted. Right now, by any […]
Read More…Where Even Nature Itself Seems to Rebel Against You “three French soldiers died in a violent storm in northeastern Afghanistan late Saturday [Sept. 26, 2009]. One soldier was struck by lightning while two were swept away by a rain-swollen river during an operation in Kapisa province, said military spokesman Christophe Prazuck.” (read more) Where Nature […]
Read More…More U.S. troops to Afghanistan? Why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won By Hugh Gusterson | 21 September 2009 [reproduced with the permission of the author] A number of commentators have remarked of late on the ominous parallels between the situation in Afghanistan today and the quagmire in Vietnam in the 1960s: “The war […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 