Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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“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”