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Acknowledging Afghanistan

Notes and Queries on an Occupation

Johns Hopkins University, USA

This article questions the privileging of gender as the primary axis along which the experience of being a woman in Afghanistan can be understood and attended to. I argue that the privileging of gender is part of a two-pronged problem: first, there is a substantial lack of current knowledge on everyday life and subjectivity of Afghans, and second, this lack of knowledge is held in abeyance, while a limited set of analytical concepts and clichés—especially gender and Islamic fundamentalism—occupy the respective discursive space. My claim is that knowledge of Afghanistan that lays emphasis on a limited set of analytical parameters ultimately results in an impossibility of acknowledging the experiences of Afghans—men and women alike. A discussion of ongoing ethnographic work in a widow-run bakery in Kabul will serve as an entry point to reconsider the ways in which Afghanistan may inhabit our imagination.

Key Words: Afghanistan • feminism • gender and suffering • international aid institutions • post-war reconstruction

Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 18, No. 3, 293-311 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0921374006071616


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