Street Fights: The Commodification of Place Names in Post-Taliban Kabul City

Abstract

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ended the Taliban rule and brought to power a coalition government whose members had spent most of the previous decade fighting each other. After 2001, the rivalry between these groups was mainly pursued in the cultural sphere where each was fighting to shape the narrative of the war. Place names have been one of the main domains in which this ideological conflict has been fought. The contestation over place names in Kabul city has turned these mundane geographical signs into coveted commodities of great symbolic significance. This article examines the practice of place naming in post-Taliban Kabul to explore the cultural challenges of state-building in a postwar city. Based on official data and field observations, this article is informed by recent theoretical developments in the field of critical toponymy and specifically draws on the emerging debates on commodification of place names. In the post-Taliban era, the article shows, place names have turned into resources for accumulation of symbolic capital and political recognition. As a result, the state offers toponyms to buy political loyalty and nonstate groups often appropriate them illegally. The article contributes to existing scholarship on commodification of place names by linking it to questions of postwar state-building and spatialization of ethnic identity.

美国于 2001 年入侵阿富汗, 终结了塔利班政权, 并使得一个由过去十年间不断相互斗争的成员所组成的联合政府开始掌权。2001 年后, 这些团体之间的对抗, 主要是在每个团体各自力图形塑战争叙事的文化领域中进行。地方名称则作为主要的斗争场域之一, 意识形态的冲突便于其中相互竞逐。在喀布尔城市之中, 地方名称的竞逐, 已将这些日常的地理标志, 转化成为具有巨大象徵重要性并受到觊觎之商品。本文检视后塔利班时代于喀布尔的地方命名行动, 以探讨战后城市中的国家打造之文化挑战。本文根据官方数据与田野观察, 从批判命名学领域中的晚近理论发展中取得信息, 并特别运用逐渐兴起的地方名称商品化之辩论。本文将展现, 在后塔利班时代中, 地方名称已转变成为象徵资本积累和政治承认的资源。国家因而透过提供地方命名来收买政治忠诚, 而非国家团体则经常以非法的方式挪用地方命名。本文透过将地方名称商品化连结至战后国家打造与族群身份认同空间化的议题, 对既有的学术研究作出贡献。

La invasión de EE.UU. a Afganistán en 2001 acabó con el régimen talibán y llevó al poder a un gobierno de coalición cuyos miembros han gastado la mayor parte de la década anterior peleándose entre sí. Después del 2001, la rivalidad entre estos grupos se libró principalmente en la esfera cultural donde cada uno luchaba por configurar la narrativa de la guerra. Los nombres de los lugares han sido uno de los principales dominios donde este conflicto ideológico ha sido disputado. La impugnación a nombres de lugares en la ciudad de Kabul ha convertido estos mundanos signos geográficos en productos apetecidos de gran significado simbólico. Este artículo examina la práctica de asignar nombres de lugares en la Kabul postalibán para explorar los retos culturales de construir estado en una ciudad de posguerra. Con base en datos oficiales y observaciones de campo, el artículo es ilustrado con desarrollos teóricos recientes en el campo de la toponimia crítica y específicamente se apoya en los debates emergentes relacionados con la comodificación de nombres de lugares. En la era postalibán, indica el artículo, los nombres de lugares se han convertido en recursos por la acumulación de capital simbólico y reconocimiento político. Como resultado, el estado ofrece topónimos para comprar lealtad política y los grupos no estatales a menudo se los apropian ilegalmente. El artículo contribuye a la sabiduría existente sobre comodificación de nombres de lugares ligando esto con cuestiones de construcción de estado en el contexto de la posguerra y la espacialización de la identidad étnica.

Key Words:

• commodification
• critical toponymy
• Kabul
• place naming
• postwar city

关键词：:

• 商品化
• 批判地名学
• 喀布尔
• 地方命名
• 战后城市。

Palabras clave:

• comodificación
• toponimia crítica
• Kabul
• asignación de nombres
• ciudad de posguerra

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Will Straw, Jennifer Fluri, the two anonymous Annals reviewers, and Richard Wright for their generous comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. A version of this article was presented at the University of Toronto and I also thank the audience for their feedback.

Notes

1 The Pashtuns, who are originally tribes from the Sulaiman Mountains in northern India (now Pakistan), moved to the areas now known as Afghanistan in the early fifteenth century (Ariyanpour 1997, 79–118; Noelle 1997, 158–219). They probably form between 38 and 44 percent of the Afghan population (Nichols 2011, 263). Pashtuns rose to power in Afghanistan in 1747 and since then have been ruling the country.

2 Even in recent times, some place names in Kabul have been generated in folkloric ways. One example is the Brezhnev Bazaar, a makeshift bazaar during the Soviet occupation that used to sell items from the Soviet military. Another is the Bush Bazaar, a similar place that emerged under the U.S. occupation in Kabul that was named jokingly by the public after the former U.S. president (Barker 2006).

3 The disputes were settled after U.S. President Barack Obama called the rivals three times and Secretary of State John Kerry paid two visits to Kabul to mediate between the men and called them twenty-seven times. Finally they agreed to share power: Ghani became the president, and Abdullah became Chief Executive Officer—a position made up by the Americans (Trofimov 2014). Ghani ran in the 2009 presidential election, too. Back then, Karzai won the election and Ghani finished fourth, getting less than 3 percent of the votes (Mashal 2015).

4 Ghani also paid Karzai in economic capital: In the same decree in which he authorized the airport name change, he also offered Karzai a government house as a farewell gift (Office of Administrative Affairs and Council of Ministers Secretariat 2014).

5 After Ghani came to power, he fired both Alako and Nawandish. The street sign bearing Alako's name was also removed.

6 In June 2015, the Hazara community noticed that in the list of place name changes approved by the Commission for Street Naming (Kabul Municipality 2014), the name of Mazari Road (a Hazara leader) in West Kabul is suggested to be changed to Katib Road (a Hazara historian) and Katib Road was renamed Chardehi Road (the historical name of the West Kabul valley). Hazaras held several street demonstrations against those who made the suggestion. Also, both former Vice President Karim Khalili and the current deputy of the Chief Executive Officer, Mohammad Mohaqiq, released strongly worded statements condemning the suggested renaming. As of September 2015, the name change had not occurred and it is unlikely to happen (The Daily Afghanistan 2015).

7 Other than this odd method of increasing revenue, the practice of naming university buildings after donors is also becoming popular in Kabul, thanks to the Americans. Western universities have a long history of naming buildings after people who donate to the institution. In Afghanistan, this type of place naming has been very rare, and only in recent years has the American University of Afghanistan (established in 2006) brought this tradition to Kabul by naming two of its buildings after Bayat, a wealthy Afghan family (who owns AWCC), and another building after Azizi, an Afghan banker who owns a bank of the same name.

8 There is another American who is going to get a place named after him in Kabul. In March 2015, during his first visit to the United States as the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani gave a talk to a group of U.S. veterans of the Afghan war at the Pentagon. Among the audience was Susan Myers, the widow of Major General Harold Green, who was killed in Marshal Fahim Military Academy in Kabul in August 2014. As an act of gratitude, Ghani promised her to name a section of the academy after General Green, who was the highest ranking U.S. official killed in Afghanistan since 2001 (Brannen 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Karimi

ALI KARIMI is a Vanier Scholar and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0G5 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. His areas of research include urban communication, material media, and the question of modernity in the Middle East.