‘Good men don’t elope’: Afghan migrant men’s discourses on labour migration, marriage and masculinity

ABSTRACT

This article explores the intersections between masculinity, migration and marital strategies through both a historical and ethnographic focus on the everyday lives of Turkmen men from Northern Afghanistan working in Turkey. While the economic rationales of migration (in response to war and poverty) have been studied previously, this is the first time the intertwined nature of the marital and migratory strategies of Afghan men have been examined in a diaspora context. This involves examining the connections between strategies of self-making as adult males through marriage and strategies of capital accumulation as migrant workers. Moreover, providing for one’s family, rather than the desire for individual fulfilment, is a key signifier of a caring and loving man and one of the many ways in which men in Afghanistan assert and perform their masculinity. The argument presented in this article seeks to go beyond the notion that young Turkmen men from Afghanistan are merely conservative in their attitudes to marriage in terms of compliance to parental choice of partners. Rather, it seeks to highlight the importance of the maintenance of social networks that require the upholding of moral and material obligations towards familial and kin elders to the livelihood strategies of these men. This argument integrates Afghan men (and especially Turkmen men) into wider discussions of patriarchy and family life in globalizing contexts rather than simply treating them as an exception to broader socio-economic trends.

KEYWORDS:

• Afghanistan
• Turkey
• masculinity
• marriage
• work
• breadwinner

Introduction

In Afghanistan, arranged marriage is still considered the most prestigious route to matrimony and household formation. The scale of socioeconomic transformation since 2001 after the fall of the Taliban and the importance that ritualistic ceremonies and status-enhancing consumption have acquired has meant that this type of marriage and modes of economic reproduction have come under considerable strain in recent years. Normally, societies have some resources that can be drawn upon for organizing marriage and ensuring basic functions of social reproduction. Different forms of economic capital such as land, animals or commerce can be converted into social capital through marriage alliances and exchange of brideprice. However, due to conflict, climate change, displacement or poverty society may not always be able to reproduce itself without some additional external resources. As was the case with Afghanistan, this necessitated the deployment of human capital outside the country, for example, in the form of long-distance traders or migrant workers.¹ Migration, often circular in nature, has thus been a key feature of Afghan life and central to the modern history of Afghanistan (see, Marsden 2018).

Yet, our knowledge of the political economy of contemporary marriage in Afghanistan and the role that labour migration plays in marital strategies of working-class men engaged in informal work in neighbouring countries remains limited. Considering that recent scholarly research has mainly focused on conflict and elite politics or international interventions and their impact on Afghan society more generally,² the attention to marriage and household formation has remained marginal, if not entirely neglected, in academic works on Afghanistan.³ It is worth noting that studies of labour migration and social networks (in response to war and poverty, for example) have highlighted the importance of the transfer of remittances to household economic strategies in Afghanistan (Harpviken 2009; Monsutti 2012).⁴ However, the interconnections between market (labour) strategies and household marital strategies have yet to be examined. Similarly, the role that notions of social status and collective security play in relation to both the market and the household have remained relatively unexplored and under-theorized in the case of Afghanistan. Likewise, the conflicted inner lives and affective dimensions of migrant men’s existence and their critical attitudes, yet, complicit behaviour in upholding traditional modes of marriage and normative ideals of masculinity has not received any consideration in the literature.

This article focuses on Turkmen migrant workers from Northern Afghanistan currently engaged in strategies of self-making through marriage and capital accumulation through (informal) work in Turkey. First, it explores the (inter)connections between market/labour strategies and household/marital strategies. Second, it shows that notions of personal status (or family reputation) and considerations of collective security through mutual interdependencies play a key role in migrant men’s marital and work-related trajectories. Household strategies refer to accumulation of money (remittances) to provide livelihoods, increase household assets through the purchase of property or the payment of debts. It also includes marital strategies such as obtaining funds for the payment of brideprice or marriage expenses. A second, but related, theme deals with the link between men’s provider/breadwinner role and its relationship with concepts of male honour and adult masculinity. Together, they explain Turkmen migrant men’s tendency to maintain rather than subvert traditional conventions of marriage and normative ideals of masculinity.

Ethnographically, the article shows that attempts by men to fulfil these competing expectations have become increasingly difficult to sustain in the context of war, poverty, displacement and generalized criminalization of mobility and migrant workers. A range of discursive and practical strategies used by the men point to the tensions that exist between models of masculine conduct that are valorized in speech and forms of manliness that are enacted in everyday social life. Analytically, the article emphasizes that the awareness of the costs entailed in adhering to the masculine ideals of their fathers’ generation may not necessarily conflict with the desire of the men to gain wealth and status or their attempts at self-making as caring and responsible men, a status generally acquired through labouring and providing for their families. Therefore, the men in my study sample do not easily fit into an explanatory model involving oppressed young men and powerful patriarchs in a so-called traditional society. The ethnography suggests that these men were in fact actively engaged in maintaining what is referred to as traditional conventions of marriage and normative ideals of masculinity, for reasons that shall become clear later on in the text.

The first section of this article is concerned with debates relating to masculinity, labour migration and the place of marriage in Middle Eastern and Central Asian societies. The remainder of the article introduces the ethnographic data, describing the everyday lives of Turkmen migrant men living in Afghanistan and working in Turkey. In the final section, I probe into the reasons for my respondents’ apparent tendency to ‘cling’ to tradition, showing that both structural conditions and subjective considerations may provide some tentative answers.

The article is based on fieldwork in Kabul, carried out in 2017 and 2018 and Istanbul, carried out in 2018. Data was collected using structured interviews and ethnographic observations in both locations, including visits to places of work and residence and through follow-up conversations with selected informants using social media platforms. Additional interviews, especially at the initial stages to identify potential informants were conducted with migrant men’s friends and family relations based in Afghanistan. In total, I worked in some detail on seven cases, two of which feature in this article.

Discourses on men, masculinity, marriage and family

Contemporary ethnographic works with Middle Eastern and Muslim men have paid particular attention to the more caring, loving and companionate side of men’s lives and their various social roles and identities as sons, husbands, fathers, helpful relatives, friends and neighbours. This focus on caring and compassionate Muslim men stands in sharp contrast with the negative portrayal of Middle Eastern men as patriarchal and oppressive and downplays the significance of cultural idioms of violence and revenge evident in earlier anthropological studies of Muslim societies (see Introduction in Inhorn and Naguib  2018). Critical discourses about patriarchy and notions of male oppression have generated alternative models of masculinities and men’s self-making as actively constructed, heterogenous and historically rooted as opposed to culturally derived and static masculinities (Osella and Osella 2000; Ghannam 2013; Naguib 2015).

Compared to the multiplicity of perspectives on men and masculinities in other regions, men in Afghanistan emerge in a much narrower register, typically emphasizing notions of honour, bravery and autonomy.⁵ Crucially, there has been a certain elite bias in the literature, with much focus on Pashtuns, historically a dominant group and on certain class of men: wealthy land owners and tribal elites (Barth 1959; Lindholm 1982; Edwards 1996), and more recently ‘warlords’ and militia commanders (Giustozzi 2009; Mukhopadhyay 2014). This exclusive focus on elite men’s status meant that men and masculinity received some attention, but mainly in their capacity as ‘other things’ (Gutmann 1996, 385). As Chiovenda points out, the discussion of masculinity in Afghanistan has mostly been about publicly held conceptions of cultural ideals of manliness (for example, male honour and female modesty) rather than the private meanings such idioms assume for individuals and their subjectivity – or what it means to be a caring and compassionate family man: a loving son, husband or father in the context of family life (Chiovenda 2018).

The emphasis on cultural idioms, in particular the link between seclusion or control of female dependants and male status – that is ‘honour’ – has at times detracted from the importance of resource accumulation strategies or the political and economic resources a man controls in constructions of masculinity and manhood. As Tapper writes, a man’s social standing in society (prestige, honour) are closely connected to his ability to properly manage his household’s economic resources (man as provider), rather than as commonly assumed his ability to strictly enforce purdah or the seclusion of women (Tapper 1991, 238–239). Thus, a key lacuna in the literature relates to the aspirations (personal and familial) and varied experiences of young men’s transition to manhood and the importance of labour migration and wealth accumulation to household and marital strategies in contemporary Afghanistan.

Writing about the contemporary Middle East, Ghannam argues that ‘work (and therefore providing) is part of an ethics of care’, and that providing for one’s family ‘is key to a proper working-class man’ (Ghannam 2018, 130). Reflecting gender relationality, Ghannam’s work highlights the crucial role women as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, aunts, etc., play in socializing men to provide and care for their female relatives. Providing for others entail emotional costs associated with working long hours outside the home – and for migrant men many years of living in exile. Therefore, one of the ways in which a man performs the ultimate act of love and care for his family may be through work and the emotional sacrifices that that entails (see Ghannam 2013). Clearly, the centrality of this ‘ethics of care’ underscores the need for questioning the simplistic portrayal of the oppressive or uncaring Afghan man and for writing new ethnographies of the complex moral worlds of men in Afghanistan. As shown below, many young men in Afghanistan may be called upon or feel the need to display this kind of care and affection for their families through work and to fulfil the role of a male provider for their families.

Istanbul: the Grand Bazaar of migrant labour

Migrating to work both to more prosperous regions inside the country and to neighbouring countries has historically been regarded as a rite of passage to adulthood and a way for Afghan men to assert and perform their masculinity (Monsutti 2007). As Monsutti writes, migration even in the context of war and displacement ‘is not a rupture but a crucial stage in the life cycle’ of men in Afghanistan (Monsutti 2007, 182). The ability to work hard, withstand difficulties and provide for one’s family not only represent a transition to adulthood, it also enables men to earn money and to marry, another key (and expensive) signifier of manhood. Obtaining income through work entails the expectation of migrating into new positions of status, power and economic affluence (Osella and Osella 2000). Therefore, the accumulation of economic capital and its conversion into social capital (through marriage) is one way for migrant men to attain social mobility.

Foreign remittances have been a core economic strategy for many households in Afghanistan. In addition to contributing to household expenses and fulfilling men’s provider role, remittances are an important source of finance available to parents back home with which to arrange the marriage of one or more sons. From the perspectives of the men I discuss in this article, the most ideal type of marriage is an arranged marriage with someone from a similar socio-economic background. Such ‘prestigious’ marriages, based on the payment of a large brideprice and staging an expensive wedding, are usually arranged by parents and elders of the groom.⁶ Brideprice is common across Afghanistan but particularly so amongst rural groups such as Turkmens in Northern Afghanistan. While in the past the brideprice payment consisted partly or fully of so many heads of cattle or a plot of land,⁷ nowadays cash payments predominate marriage negotiations in both urban and rural areas. Moreover, fuelled by the post-2001 war-aid-drug economy and the broader monetization of the economy, weddings and other life-cycle ceremonies have taken on a much more lavish character. With traditional modes of economic activity unable to compete with demands for cash, remittances obtained through working abroad have become a key source of finance for marriages in Afghanistan.

Despite heavily policed borders and frequent deportations, Iran and Turkey have been important destinations for Afghans seeking to work abroad. The cost of the journey, while not insignificant, is not prohibitively high and can be paid for, say by mortgaging family property or through credit obtained from friends or relatives working abroad. Although present in other parts of Turkey, Istanbul happens to be a favourite destination for Afghan migrant workers.⁸ Before arriving in Turkey, many migrants might spend a few years working in Iran, partly to accumulate the needed capital to finance the onward journey to Turkey. In general, finding work is easier and wages are better in Turkey compared to Iran, a country whose economy has been devastated by decades of punitive Western economic sanctions. A construction worker, for example, could earn between $200 and 250 in Iran, while in Turkey he could get paid $450–500 doing the same job in 2018 before economic crisis and COVID-19 affected Turkey.

Turkey has hosted thousands of Turkic-speaking Afghans since the 1980s.⁹ According to an Afghan Turkmen trader I meet in early 2018 in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, who had moved to Turkey following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Turkish government had resettled thousands of Turkic-speaking Afghans during that period, mostly from Pakistan’s refugee camps.¹⁰ He himself had arrived from Pakistan in the 1980s, initially settling in the Diyarbakir region of Turkey, and later on moved his family and business to Istanbul, where he now owned a shop selling Afghan carpets and handicraft.¹¹ The social worlds of the newly arrived migrant workers I studied and the old refugee-trader communities happened to be connected by close ethno-national or geographical ties (for example belonging to the same village, town, or province), making it possible for such ‘partial communities’ (Marsden 2018, 86) to reassemble new relationships of mutual dependencies and commercial exchange between Turkey and Afghanistan.

During the research for this article, I met another Afghan Turkmen trader in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar who had come to Turkey during the early 1990s following the collapse of the Afghan leftist regime and now owned a prosperous business dealing in glass beads and jewellery imported from China and Afghanistan. During a conversation one afternoon in February 2018 while we drank green tea and discussed the latest events in Afghanistan, the owner of the shop, Juma Mohammad, introduced me to one of his young apprentices, an Afghan Turkmen from Imam Sahib district in Kunduz Province, Northern Afghanistan. At the time of our meeting, Farhadullah had been working in Istanbul for over two years and was preparing to return to his village to get married, a marriage arranged by his parents, partly financed by the income he had earned while working in Istanbul. He hoped to return to his work in Istanbul after spending a few months with his new bride in Afghanistan. The owner of the shop where he worked, Juma Mohammad, whom he knew through family connections in Afghanistan, had offered to sponsor his trip back home, pay for some of the marriage expenses and help him obtain a Turkish visa in Kabul so he could return to Istanbul and work there legally. Such forms of social capital and solidarity networks are key to the survival of new comers like Farhadullah, but they also speak to the nature of social and commercial relationships between recent and more established Afghan Turkmen in Istanbul and the salience of traditional forms of marriage in the lives of people constituting such a ‘mobile society’ (Ho 2017). I will say more later on about the intertwined nature of the marital and migratory strategies of Afghan Turkmen and their attachment to supposedly traditional forms of marriage when discussing the ethnographic material presented in this article.

As Marsden writes, these Turkmen-speaking Afghans, a small minority in modern day Afghanistan but predominantly represented in the country’s ethnically-mixed Northern provinces of Faryab, Jowzjan, Balkh and Kunduz¹² typically identify themselves both in terms of ethno-national categories salient in Afghanistan and Central Asia (for example Turkmen and Uzbek) as well as the descendants of families from Bukhara who immigrated from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan in the 1920s and 1930s.¹³ Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, some of these Central Asian families remained in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s and were aligned to the pro-Soviet Afghan communist regime, occupying important military and civilian posts in the Afghan state. Yet, many other families from Bukhara that had moved permanently to Northern Afghanistan (to a region formerly known as Afghan Turkistan) – to escape Soviet purges of local political and economic elites, including wealthy peasants and merchants as well as religious authorities in Central Asia (see Khalid 2014) – left Afghanistan in the early 1980s and moved to Pakistan where they established homes and carpet factories in the cities and towns of Pakistan (for example Peshawar and Lahore). Other families that had moved to Pakistan from Afghanistan subsequently migrated to other destinations in the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, where initially they set up commercial activities that supplied goods and services (for example opening cafes and eateries or selling prayer mats) to pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Madinah during the Hajj pilgrimage season (see Marsden 2018).

These merchant families of Bukharan-Afghan decent in Saudi Arabia overtime expanded their business operations to other parts of Asia, for example Turkey and China. Scholarship on Afghan trading networks¹⁴ has demonstrated that these Turkic-speaking Afghans (who hold Afghan, Pakistani, Saudi and increasingly Turkish passports) play a major role in Inter-Asian commercial interaction and circulation between China, the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey and a range of settings in West-Asia and the former Soviet Union. This mode of existence described by the term ‘mobile societies’, involving successive waves of migration over many generations, has been made possible by the role played by newer and older types of networks involved in commodity trade in the context of an Asia-wide arena of commercial interaction and circulation and the use of travel documents reflecting these diverse national and geographical identities (see Marsden 2018).

‘Dilim khoon ast’¹⁵

The story of Yusuf, a thirty-seven year old migrant worker living without legal papers in Turkey illustrates the value some men still attach to conventional ideals of marriage and masculinity, despite the emotional costs involved. A Turkic-speaking man from Aqcha in Jowzjan Province, Yusuf had been in Turkey for six years at the time of our meeting in Istanbul in February 2018. He did not actually live in Istanbul, but rather in a small town in the Anatolian countryside. It had taken him four hours, traveling by bus and Metro to get to Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s Old City. This was Yusuf’s first time in any big Turkish city since he arrived in the country.

At 37, Yusuf was long past the traditional age of marriage and fathering children. He is the main breadwinner of his family, which consists of an elderly mother, a sister and three younger brothers, one of them an apprentice working in a bakery in Kabul. The family live in a small mud compound in Aqcha district, where they own a small land holding used for growing fodder to feed to the few animals the family own. Yusuf grew up as a yatim (orphan), being only a few years old when his father died. His mother was re-married to her late husband’s brother, a common practice in rural Afghanistan for retaining ownership of ancestral land under male control. As a result, the small landholding, Yusuf and his mother were inherited by his uncle after the marriage. He did not go to school, and to augment his stepfather’s meagre income he started working at an early age. In the village where he grew up, the most common type of work was sharecropping; growing wheat or vegetables on land rented out to poor farmers by wealthy villagers. Alternatively, the landless poor may take up seasonal work, including in other provinces, harvesting wheat or fruit in exchange for cash payment or a small share of the harvest.

In 2010–2011, when Yusuf turned thirty he was engaged to a girl from a neighbouring village in his native Aqcha. His stepfather had selected the girl and his mother had approved the match. He saw no reason to object to a marriage arranged by his parents, as prescribed by custom or local traditions that are not only valued by Afghan Turkmen in Northern Afghanistan but also to a lesser or greater degree by many other ethno-national communities such as the Uzbeks and Tajiks as well as Pashtuns and Hazaras in different parts of the country. Although some Afghan parents tend to consult their sons before finalizing the marriage negotiations, it is not so common, particularly in rural areas to obtain their daughters’ consent to marriage, especially if they are very young. In many parts of Afghanistan, as in neighbouring Pakistan, parental authority is considered central to conventional models of marriage, often overriding notions of individual choice or romantic love (Marsden 2007b), although some urbanite parents today might consider obtaining their daughter’s consent before approving a marriage proposal.

According to my informants, social norms and marriage traditions among Turkmen place strict limitations on socialization between unmarried young men and women. The significance attached to seclusion of women (purdah) and female chastity (bakarat) is considered a corner stone of a respectable marriage in both rural and urban areas in many parts of Afghanistan, something that is not unique to Afghan Turkmens. With limited educational opportunities and strict observance of purdah, there are few opportunities for most young Turkmen men and women to socialize in public spaces such as school, university or public parks. As elsewhere, family gatherings and functions such as weddings or religious holidays are coveted social spaces, offering relatively more freedom to young men and women, especially if related, to meet and possibly develop intimate feelings for one another.

Under such circumstances, it is possible that a young man might see a particularly attractive girl at a family wedding and decide to gain her affection. He will then send his parents to make a marriage proposal (khwastgari) and ask for the girl’s hand in marriage. While the initial courting period and its delicately orchestrated traditions might offer some couples a brief respite from rigid social customs in cities like Mazar-e Sharif or Kabul, the local custom (rawaj) among Northern Turkmen based on the strict enforcement of purdah limits this type of youth socialization at the initial stages of marriage. Yusuf remarked that ‘in our culture, boys and girls are not allowed to see each other during the initial khwastgari period or even later on during namzadi (engagement)’. Initially, only the man’s parents and close female relatives might be allowed to see the girl before deciding to present a formal marriage proposal. Often the only way for a young Turkmen man to acquire some information about his future wife was via his mother or sister or sister-in-law.

In accordance with local Turkmen custom, Yusuf was not present at his own engagement. That meant that the initial contact, visiting and approving the girl, negotiating a brideprice and marriage expenses were carried out by his parents. Apart from what he had heard from his close relatives, he had very little idea about the girl he was engaged to. His brideprice was agreed at seven hundred and fifty thousand afghanis (roughly $11,000), to be paid in monthly instalments to his prospective father-in-law. At the time, Yusuf was working in a brick kiln in Mazar-e Sharif, his monthly salary was only a few thousand afghanis. After the engagement, Yusuf left for Kabul in the hope of finding a better paying job. He started work as a cook in a local restaurant for a monthly salary of eight thousand afghanis ($120). Gradually his salary increased to fifteen thousand afghanis ($250). He saved up most of his earnings, only keeping a small amount for personal expenses. Every month he sent five thousand afghanis (about $100) to his parents in Aqcha, which was handed over to his father-in-law as per the marriage agreement. In a year and a half, he managed to pay, with some help from his family, two hundred and fifty thousand afghanis to his father-in-law (about one-third of the total brideprice). He knew that he still had a long way to go before he could get married. He began to think about migrating to Iran or Turkey. He had heard from his friends and a few relatives working in Turkey that in Turkey there were plenty of jobs with much higher wages than what he was getting in Kabul. With growing concerns about his prospects in Afghanistan, Yusuf had made up his mind to leave Kabul and migrate to Turkey.

Many migrant workers without independent means rely on help from friends and relatives working abroad to finance their journey out of Afghanistan. Closely-knit networks of human smugglers operate across the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. It is common for smugglers to demand their payment after a migrant has reached his destination. Resembling a pre-financing scheme, migration arranged by smugglers in this way make it ideal for those migrant workers who lack readily available cash to fund their own journeys. Apparently, what you need is a guarantor who can vouch for you and pay the smuggler’s fee when you get to your destination. A guarantor can be a relative, a friend or someone from your village back home who is already working abroad and willing to assume some financial obligations on your behalf. After a guarantor has paid the smuggler’s fee at the point of arrival, the debt is then transferred to the guarantor. The debt that a newly arrived migrant worker owes to a guarantor is typically paid in monthly instalments after he has secured a job and starts earning. It could take a newly arrived migrant worker between six months to a year to clear the debt related to his journey from Afghanistan to Turkey.

Migrant workers who lack the necessary social capital (family relations or friends working abroad) find other ways to finance their labour-related migration strategies. For example, they can directly appeal for help to a human smuggler to pay for their journey. In the same way that a guarantor is repaid, migrants who receive financial help from a smuggler will be required to repay his investment in monthly instalments. In such cases, migrating men will be asked to arrange for a collateral, for example through mortgaging family land. There is also a third alternative: self-financing. A year and half after getting engaged, Yusuf embarked on a perilous journey that took him through Southern Afghanistan, Western Pakistan, deep into Iran, and after two weeks reached Turkey where he settled to a new life in a small town in central Anatolia. For his journey to Turkey he paid about one thousand dollars, using his own savings, to a smuggler known to him.¹⁶

Not long after arriving in Turkey, Yusuf started working in the country’s booming construction sector. His monthly income consisted of 1500 Turkish liras which he divided into three parts. Most of his earning went to cover his family’s household expenses; every month he sent home between 700–750 liras ($180–200). He spent about 400 liras ($100) on food, rent, electricity and daily expenses in Turkey. He saved around 400–500 liras ($100–120) monthly, which he sent to his prospective father-in-law toward the brideprice. After six years working in Turkey, Yusuf still owed his father-in-law 300,000 afghanis ($4,500). He hoped to save up this amount in one or two more years. In addition, he needed another 100,000 afghanis ($1,500) for the wedding expenses. In other words, he needed a total of $6,000 to get married and bring his wife home. It is customary for a married couple to have their own living quarters inside the family compound. Yusuf added that he needed some extra cash to build a few rooms in the family compound where he could live together with his wife. That meant he had to work a few more years, may be another five or six years, to earn the money he needed for the brideprice, the wedding itself and the building work.

It is a common practice among Afghan Turkmen that until a namzad (engaged man) has paid the full brideprice he can’t get married. As a result, men like Yusuf end up being engaged for many years with little or no contact with their fiancées. Ordinarily, migrant men might count on support from other family members toward the brideprice – for example, a brother may be able to contribute part of his income from working abroad toward a sibling’s brideprice. As Yusuf explained, men such as him who happen to be the eldest son of the family and also being an orphan have to rely on their own income to play both the role of a provider and arrange his own brideprice – and sometimes the brideprice for one or more of his younger brothers.

It had already been six years since he had got engaged and migrated to Turkey, I reminded him. Will his fiancée or her father wait another five or six years for him to arrange all the money he said he needed? What if his father-in-law got frustrated and broke off the engagement? Indeed, his father-in-law had recently threatened to cancel the engagement unless the full brideprice was paid, and vowed to give his daughter to another man in marriage. Yusuf let out a heavy sigh and offered this response: ‘although my heart is bleeding (dilim khoon ast), I see no other way (dega chara nayst). I must keep on working until I have earned all the money and can get married’.

Evidently, he was not prepared to disregard the masculine ideals of his society despite the obvious challenges of living up to those ideals in his own life. In the past, wealthy parents were expected to arrange and pay for the marriage of their sons as soon as they reached adulthood. However, as an orphan and eldest son of a poor household, Yusuf was in a particularly vulnerable position. The effects of both a lower social class and ethnic minority status (Turkmen are a small minority in Afghanistan) were factors to be considered when evaluating his life chances as an illegal migrant labourer in Turkey.

The perspectives on manhood and notions of masculinity that emerge from Yusuf’s life story highlight the critical importance that some migrant men attach to the ideal of male breadwinner and traditional modes of marriage in Afghanistan. Actions such as breaking an engagement or running away (elopement) as a means of avoiding marriage payments and parental control is considered shameful in both rural and urban parts of the country. The sentiment that ‘good men don’t elope’ is a strong motivating factor in the social and economic relations shaping the lives of the migrant men I engaged with in Turkey. However, such masculine ideals and notions of manhood entail significant emotional costs for some men. Among Northern Turkmen, an engaged man (namzad) will have no or very limited contact with his fiancée. He will not be allowed, for example, to visit his father-in-law’s house or contact his fiancée via mobile phone. He will only be able to see his future wife after he has paid the full brideprice and arranged a wedding party. That means a man’s first view of his wife will most probably be on his wedding night. Some men might have to wait for five or six years or longer for that moment to come. Such a rigid controls no doubt adds to the strains of migrant lives in a modern city like Istanbul, where young men from small villages in Afghanistan are constantly bombarded with sights of easily consummated love affairs in Turkish telenovelas or Bollywood romance movies.

When asked to compare his own life and respect for tradition to mixed sex socialization and marriage customs in Turkey, Yusuf offered more critical perspectives on traditional forms of marriage, thus revealing a more intimate, emotional side of himself:

It has been six years since I got engaged but I still haven’t seen my fiancée. I don’t even know how she looks like. Is she pretty? Is she ugly? I don’t know. My sister says she is pretty. I know that she is a patient girl, and patience is a great virtue. It must be difficult for her too to wait so long to get married. She doesn’t complain or ask where I am or why am not returning home. I think she is a good person. We haven’t spoken on the telephone not even once. Of course, I want to speak to her. I want to tell her that am doing this for her, for us. I want her to know that I care about her. That I often think about her. I want her to be my gham-sharik (companion/soulmate), a friend to whom I could talk about all the difficulties I face in exile. But her family doesn’t allow any contact between us.

As Kandiyoti writes, ‘patriarchal bargains’ not only pertain to relations between men and women, they can also help us understand relations of power between older and younger women, as well as father-son relationships (Kandiyoti 1988). During the research for this article the inter-generational dynamics, especially the son’s relationship to his father was described to me by Turkmen men in overly deferential terms: ‘Turkmen boys’ I was repeatedly reminded ‘never openly criticize their parents’ or for that matter act in a way that might be construed as opposing their parents’ or elders’ authority. In matters pertaining to the market, household economy and inter-generational gender relations, Turkmen parents and male elders appear to exercise considerable power and authority. This description of the ‘obedient son’ might be (mis)taken as evidence of the power and influence of culturally ingrained or static notions of patriarchal authority and traditional conventions of marriage among Turkmen.

As an orphan with poor economic prospects, Yusuf’s obligation to provide for his family in Afghanistan could not be easily disregarded; the role of a male breadwinner placed specific and unavoidable constraints on his life. At the same time, as the eldest son and in the absence of a paternal authority, he is less constrained by the limitations of father-son dynamics structuring male-male relations in a typical patriarchal household. His long stay away from home in the absence of a father to intercede on his behalf may have weakened his position in relation to his prospective father-in-law, and to some extent explains the harsh limits placed on social interactions with his fiancée. While avenues of sexual access or romantic relations are extremely limited in a Turkmen village, this is not the case in urban Turkey. In a situation where unsupervised access to sexual relations gives young migrant men more freedom to enjoy the pleasures of life, it can lessen the pain of separation from a fiancée or a wife back in Afghanistan. While I deliberately avoided any discussion of heterosexual activity by the men with local women or prostitutes, to avoid offending their sensibilities as religiously pious and traditionally respectful men, I am not ruling out the possibility that some of the men might have procured sex in the local market.

In the next section, I ask the men if they had had any romantic relations with local women, using the English term of girlfriend which is socially more acceptable, especially among un-married young men. Again, while I am not ruling out romantic relations between migrant men and local women, the men I interacted with ruled out this possibility, pointing out that as men who earned relatively little money and with many mouths to feed back home, they couldn’t engage local women in romance because that meant spending lots of money. I was given to understand that having a girlfriend in a place like Istanbul entailed lots of expenses for a man, such as buying clothes and make-up for the girl or going out to restaurants. Besides, the long hours that the men worked left little time for socialization, and visiting markets and restaurants carried the additional risk of arrest by the police and deportation to Afghanistan, which I shall discuss later on.

‘Good men don’t elope!’

Through another research interlocutor I met Juma Gul, a twenty-four-year-old Turkic-speaking Afghan migrant worker currently based in Istanbul and something of a respected leadership figure amongst his peers. About five years ago, he left his home village in Khamyab district, Jowzjan province and migrated to Iran. There, he worked as a construction worker for three years before going to Turkey. At the time of our first meeting in Istanbul (February 2018) he had been working in Turkey for two years. He spoke good Dari (Afghan Persian) and talked about his life in Afghanistan and Istanbul with a disarming sense of humour.

We kept in touch after our first meeting, and a few weeks later I arranged to meet him in his home in Bagcilar, a working-class suburb of Istanbul. He lived in a two bed-room apartment on a quiet residential street which he shared with seven other young migrant men, all of them fellow Turkmen from Khamyab, and a few of them related through marriage. Juma Gul was one of the few lucky Afghans who had a legal status in Turkey. He had recently obtained a UN refugee card which entitled him to stay in Turkey. Since the refugee status did not include any material benefits, cash payment or food subsidy for example, he had to work to support himself. At the time of our meeting he was working as a shop-assistant in a local market. His flatmates, on the other hand, had no proper legal status and they all worked illegally in Istanbul. A few of the men worked in a nearby garment factory, while the others had found work in Turkish-owned or Afghan-owned businesses as shop assistants, cooks or cleaners. Their illegal status meant they could be rounded up by the police at any time and sent back to Afghanistan, which indeed was what happened to many Afghans with increasing frequency, although many succeeded in making it back to Turkey yet again.

Juma Gul was the eldest member of the group. As an ‘elder’ he managed the household economy and enforced a degree of discipline among the men. He did most of the shopping and cooking and dealt with the Turkish landlord, who charged one thousand Turkish liras ($280) per month for the flat. He appeared to be an easy-going, friendly fellow and seemed at ease with his role, keeping good relations with everyone. The seven young men who lived with him in the flat ranged from eighteen to twenty-four years in age. Typically, the eight men worked in day-and-night shifts- four men doing night shifts while the other four worked in day shifts. There was not enough space in the two-bedroom flat for all the eight men to sleep in it simultaneously. Instead, they took turns in using the flat, sleeping on shared mattresses, using the small kitchen for cooking and eating in one of the two bed rooms. There was a small toilet opposite the kitchen where the men not only washed themselves but also did the laundry and hung their clothes to dry. They had no access to a balcony, and thick curtains were used to cover the two windows that looked to the front and back of the building. As is also common in Afghanistan, there is a reluctance to rent to single men in general and the men had to be extra careful not to draw attention to themselves and give cause for complaints by neighbours.

For the few men in the flat who worked at a garment factory about an hour from where they lived, the work cycle for those doing the night shift typically started at 10 pm. They returned home after work finished at seven or eight the next morning. They used the morning hours to bathe, wash clothes, cook and eat. They then slept from twelve until four or four thirty in the afternoon. After waking up, they went out to buy food, cook and eat dinner and get ready again for the night shift. For those who worked the morning shift, work started at seven in the morning and ended at seven or eight in the evening. For a typical 12-hour work shift each man was paid about 1,500 Turkish liras (roughly $500) per month. During weekdays, there was no time for relaxation, but on Saturday night Juma Gul and his friend invited their friends from other parts of Istanbul for dinner and late-night conversation. Alternatively, they might go and visit another friend and have dinner together. On nights like these, entertainment consisted of listening to music or watching Bollywood movies or Turkish telenovelas on their mobile phones. Sometimes the men sang in groups, relying on a rich mix of Dari/Farsi, Urdu and Turkish pop music.¹⁷ Such gatherings (mehfils) went on until the small hours of the morning. Sunday was the day when the men rested, often sleeping late into the afternoon, followed by a ‘brunch’ around mid-afternoon. After feeding their bodies and performing prayers, they headed to the city. The men often visited their friends in the Zeytinburnu neighbourhood, home to perhaps the largest group of Afghan migrant workers in Istanbul. Play consisted of wrestling, football or volleyball, and sometimes cricket.

The scale of out-migration to Turkey from Afghanistan was striking. In Khamyab district, where the men were from, about 1/3 of the total youth population had apparently migrated either to Iran or Turkey in recent years. One of Juma Gul’s flatmates estimated that close to five hundred young men from Khamyab alone were believed to be currently working, illegally, in Turkey.¹⁸ This meant that only a few dozen young men had remained behind in the villages to attend to land and livestock. In many rural areas of Afghanistan there is no other form of paid work for young men, except for joining the Taliban insurgents or the government’s security forces. As a result, some households in the Northern region consist of only old men, women and young children. In the context of the ongoing armed conflict, the push factors of migration are overwhelmingly complex: no jobs, risk of being forcibly enlisted, insecurity, high brideprices and poverty.

Deep household poverty in Afghanistan¹⁹ and the precarious nature of migrants’ existence in countries like Iran and Turkey provides a striking contrast to the elite perspective dominant in Afghan government and some civil society circles berating young men for ‘abandoning their country’ and seeking refuge in the West or otherwise migrating to work in neighbouring countries. Such elitist and nationalistic slogans are amply displayed on concrete blast walls in downtown Kabul and on advertising billboards at the city’s international airport. A mural on a blast wall that caught my attention had this stark warning for those seeking to emigrate: ‘dar farar qarar nayst’ (there is no serenity in escaping). The ruling elites have made no secret of their contempt for Afghans escaping war and poverty in their country. President Ashraf Ghani’s infamous ‘I have no sympathy for Afghan migrants’ (BBC News 2016) comments is a befitting reminder that there is a huge gap between the expectations of the rulers, who are calling on young men and women to stay and ‘defend’ their country against insurgents (while their own families live securely abroad), and the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who are selling off their last few remaining worldly assets to escape rising insecurity and economic hardship and seek a better life elsewhere (Mashal 2015).

At the time of our meeting, Juma Gul had been in Turkey for two years working in a shop as a sales assistant – and before that in Iran for three years. Five years ago, he had been engaged to his paternal cousin in the village while working in Kabul. It had been arranged by his parents; he did not attend the engagement ceremony. As he was engaged to a close relative, a cousin, he had already met her a few times in family functions. His brideprice was set at $14,000, which he was asked to pay in regular instalments to his prospective father-in-law. Upon completion of the marriage payment, he was expected to organize a wedding ceremony attended by family, friends and all his neighbours. So far, he had only paid $1,000. He said he could only manage to earn enough to take care of his expenses in Turkey and send some money to his family in the village. Since he was engaged to his cousin, his father-in-law had been more tolerant when it came to his brideprice payment.

Besides the brideprice, arrangements had to be made for the wedding, including buying gifts for the bride’s family and jewellery and clothes for the bride. Juma Gul said he would have to work for another five to six years to accumulate the money he needed to get married. That is a long time to be away from home and one’s fiancée, I reminded him. In response, Juma Gul stated, half-jokingly, that if everything else failed and he was not able to realize his plans he would then elope with his fiancée and bring her to Istanbul. I was surprised by the statement, however, when I pressed him further on that point, he dismissed it as a possibility. ‘Good men don’t elope’ he reminded me. This reflects a broader sentiment that clearly speaks to the value of social status and family prestige among Afghans, although in practice these values are often differently mediated by class and gender considerations. However, he seemed to be keenly aware of the possible repercussions of elopement in his own society: ‘our elders will cut the head of anyone who might think of eloping with a girl’.

As research has shown, the lived reality of Afghan Turkmen is much more complex and elopement marriages, an un-prestigious route to marriage often chosen by persons of lower social status,²⁰ are not unheard of among Turkic language speaking communities in Northern Afghanistan (Wimpelmann, Hakimi, and Saadat 2020). However, due to its lower social status, this model of marriage may neither be desirable nor easily accessible to migrant men who have families in Afghanistan and work in Turkey. As Juma Gul himself admitted, even if his plans to elope were to succeed, it was not likely or indeed possible for him to bring his fiancée to Turkey, both because of unfriendly immigration rules but also because of the difficulty of supporting a family on meagre income available to illegally working migrant workers in a city like Istanbul where the costs of living was already very high. Nonetheless, the fear of not being able to live up to the traditional conventions of marriage and ideals of adult masculinity was easily discernible in his and the other men’s conversations. In a social setting where the notion of male provider is strongly valued no one wants to be branded as unmanly (namard) for failing to arrange one’s marriage payments or provide for one’s family.

As such there is an underlying logic to the broader political economy of marriage payments. A brideprice can function: (a) as a means of establishing status for the bride-givers’ family, (b) as an input to arranging brideprice for another sibling, (c) as economic compensation to the girl’s family for losing the daughter’s labour or the dowry she takes to her husband’s house, and (d) strengthening the economic base of the family through cash injections. Marriage can be viewed as both a means of signalling responsible male (or female) adulthood and establishing relative status in the community. However, the path of elopement exposes one to risks like losing the types of protections (especially for women) that one might benefit from in case of marriage breakdown or abuse- for example women who are wronged or maltreated by their husbands may expect to be backed by their brothers. Elopement is also risky for men who put themselves beyond the conventions which give them a place in the social hierarchy and reinforces their claims to respectability and status, but which could also land them in prison (Hakimi and Wimpelmann 2018).

But what about life after marriage? Does life get easier for migrant men after they have paid the brideprice and brought their wife home? In other words, how do family men, especially those with young children in a large household that includes older parents and other siblings make sense of the challenges of everyday existence in Afghanistan? As I demonstrate below, after marriage migrant men are expected to return to Turkey to work and earn their livelihoods, often after only a short stay at home (perhaps enough time to father a child). That means they continue to travel between home and places of work in Turkey for a good part of their adult lives. As the following statement shows, the masculine ideal of the male provider becomes even more central to men’s gendered identity after marriage and fathering children:²¹

I know that it might take me 4–5 years to pay the brideprice and get married. But once the children are born the size of my family will grow. There will be more mouths to feed, that means I will have to keep working in Turkey. Since it’s not even possible for me to bring my wife and children here, because I don’t earn enough and am illegal, I will have to keep going back and forth [between Afghanistan and Turkey], probably for most of my adult life … until am too old to work.

Yet, despite the harsh reality of migrant existence the men from Khamyab seemed determined to uphold traditional marriage conventions and male obligations which they regarded as crucial elements of what constituted being honourable men and husbands fulfilling their ethical, material and familial responsibilities. Although some of the men complained about the inflexible attitude of their elders and the oppressive nature of marriage payments, they appeared either to have accepted it as part of what might be termed ‘tradition’ or had resigned themselves to their fate, however unjust. If they entertained any rebellious sentiments or the desire to altogether disregard their elders’ views with regards to marital strategies and the worldly expectations placed on adult men, such perspectives were strategically silenced in our conversations, even though some of the men were critical of their elders for perpetuating the customary practice of brideprice. On the question of elopement the men appeared resolved: falling in love and running away (or eloping) contravened the traditional conventions of marriage and often entailed great dishonour for both the couples and their families in a conservative society like Afghanistan.

Why, might one ask, do these young men labour so hard, only to ‘waste’ a large part of their hard-earned funds on brideprice? Is this merely an effort to ‘prove’ their masculinity? I suggest that it is only by exploring the interconnections between migratory (labour market) strategies and household marital strategies that their efforts to adhere to such ideals make sense. The concept of social reproduction might have its uses here in accounting for the patterns I observed among my Turkmen respondents. It refers to the structures and activities that transmit social inequality (or social status) from one generation to the next. In Bourdieu’s terms, social reproduction is based on four types of capital: economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1989, 1986). Marriage and marriage alliances are a key component of social reproduction. Normally, societies have resources that can be drawn upon for this purpose; different forms of economic capital such as land wealth or commerce that can be converted into social capital through marriage alliances (through exchanges such as brideprice and dowry) which determine the relative standing of the family in society and strengthens its social base.

When society (or family) can no longer reproduce itself without input from the outside, work-related migration may be undertaken not just to escape poverty but also with the expectation of migrating into new positions of status, power and economic affluence (Osella and Osella 2000). Being a man and becoming a man is closely linked to accumulation and consumption, that is attaining social status by converting economic capital into social capital (connections, social networks). Holding lavish weddings and displaying wealth through conspicuous consumption (patronizing neighbours and relatives) not only signals social standing to others, they are critical to social reproduction by forging new alliances (through marriage, for example) and expanding social networks of mutual support in the community.

The literature on the connection between conspicuous consumption, status considerations and enacting or reproducing social interdependence in the Central Asian context is particularly useful in this regard. Studies of household dynamics and ritualistic consumptions have pointed to the tendency of people in the post-Soviet Central Asian republics to hold lavish weddings, funerals, or other life-cycle ceremonies even though it meant they got deeply into debt or made status consumptions that need not be necessarily related to available economic resources (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998; Kandiyoti and Azimova 2004; Reeves 2012; Beyer 2016). Staging a so-called ‘traditional’ wedding in Tajikistan, for example, may be one way of seeking social approval, making claims to status or preserving one’s family reputation in the community (Cleuziou 2019). In Kazakhstan, status-enhancing consumption was found to be a way for newly arrived city dwellers belonging to migrant households to signal their social standing to their neighbours (Danzer et al. 2014). As described by the respondents of these studies, they were ‘destroying money’ by spending their hard-earned savings on gifts and entertaining hundreds of guests, as in the context of traditional funeral ceremonies in Kyrgyzstan, in order to remain inside the ‘communal’ (Beyer quoted in Cleuziou 2019, 10). What was valued the most, it appears, was to have the right networks and connections and maintaining access to community support networks. Thus, my Turkmen informants often complained about hefty marriage payments, yet staged lavish wedding ceremonies in order not to be made into social outcasts.

Status-enhancing consumption and ritualistic ceremonies clearly serve a social need by converting economic capital into social capital. They not only play a crucial role in marking membership in a lineage or village community, they also reproduce social interdependence and strengthen relationships that are essential for getting by in daily life (see Reeves 2012). These may include securing a loan from friends and relatives working abroad to pay smugglers to cover the cost of a migrant’s journey; securing work and accommodation abroad also depends on having friends there to help; having friends and relatives relieve some of the challenges of migrant existence such as loneliness and offer protection in numbers, aspects of migrant lives which are clearly highlighted in the ethnography. Ritual expenditure and status-enhancing consumption is, therefore, far from being an ‘irrational’ investment. As scholars of post-Soviet Central Asia have argued, such expenditures might serve a crucial mechanism for ‘navigating the shocks of the neoliberal economy’ (Reeves 2012) in the wake of the collapse of public social security nets after the disbanding of Soviet rule in Central Asia.

It is worth noting that my Afghan Turkmen respondents and their families were performing these ‘traditions’ in a context where reliance on the state for social reproduction has, historically speaking, not been the norm, and where familial and kin relations of mutual support matter even more in the context of war, displacement, poverty and dependence on increasingly precarious labour markets. I argue that the maintenance of networks of social interdependence, with all the customs these entail, among Turkmen migrant men would carry a lot less weight as key livelihood strategies, say, in the context of a welfare society where the state and public agencies contribute to the costs of social reproduction.²² This is clearly not the case with the Turkmen men from Khamyab, or Turkmen men from Northern Afghanistan more generally, who can only access work illegally in Turkey and who depend on family and community-based networks in Afghanistan for basic functions of social reproduction. This, however, does not mean that they are merely conservative in their attitudes to marriage. As this article has sought to demonstrate, the men’s preference for ‘traditional’ marriage and deference to parental authority and the need to sustain social networks that require the upholding of obligations to family and kin may not be so specific to this group. Rather, these dynamics are clearly linked to the intertwined nature of the marital and migratory strategies of these men, the itinerant modes of their existence and the nature of the livelihood strategies they happen to pursue. This places Afghan men (and especially Turkmen men) into wider discussions of patriarchy and family life in globalizing contexts rather than simply treating them as an exception to broader trends.

The harsh poetics of the port city

The precarious existence of undocumented Afghan migrant workers in Turkey deepened in the summer of 2018, when Turkish authorities started to deport them en masse. In August 2018, I boarded a midnight Turkish Airline flight from Istanbul to Kabul. On board were a group of about 40–50 young migrant men from Afghanistan. They had been rounded up from different parts of Turkey, including from Istanbul, in police raids on homes, factories as well as individual and group arrests in the streets and markets. They were now being forcibly deported to Afghanistan in groups ranging in size from a few individuals to a few dozen. From speaking to some of them during the four and half hour flight, I learned that most of them, after being arrested, had been kept for weeks in harsh conditions in military-style camps without adequate clothing, food or water and no access to medicine or a doctor. They were still in the clothes they had on them the day they were arrested. On that hot summer night, they had been kept for hours in a metal cage on the tarmac waiting to board the plane. Many of them complained of repeated beatings and harsh behaviour by the Turkish prison guards at the camp.

This treatment stood in sharp contrast to earlier tendencies by Turkish police to threat Afghans, and particularly Afghan Turkic speaking groups more leniently than, for example, Syrians. For instance, Yusuf, whom I previously discussed, told me that he himself was arrested a few times by the police. After learning that he was a Turkmen from Afghanistan, they let him go, telling him he was a kardeş (brother in Turkish). However, this relaxed attitude seemed to have changed over time. By the spring and summer of 2018, it mattered little whether you were kardeş or not, or whether you were Afghan or Syrian. As one of the Afghan men on the flight pointed out, the whole regime involving humiliation, torture and abuse was designed to discourage Afghans from staying in or returning to Turkey: ‘the taunting, beating, starvation, denial of medical services, all of this was done for a purpose … they made the camp conditions so bad that you ended up begging the guards to send you back to Afghanistan’.²³

For the next few days I reconnected with my Afghan Turkmen interlocutors in Istanbul to learn if any one or more of them had been deported. I learned that a few months after our meeting in Istanbul two brothers (from the group I had met), Asad and Yasin had both been sent back to Afghanistan. They were picked up on their way from the factory to their flat. On landing in Kabul, Asad, the older of the two brothers had gone back to his village in Khamyab. Yasin had stayed in Kabul and after getting a new passport had headed for Herat, which is considered a gateway for migrants smuggled into Iran and beyond. After a brief stay there, he had crossed into Iran. Dispossessed of his earnings when he was arrested, he had to borrow money from friends to pay for the return journey to Istanbul. Later, in October 2018 I heard the news that Yasin had finally made it back to Istanbul. Soon after, Asad began his journey through Iran on his way to Turkey. His flatmates in Istanbul were anxiously following his progress; he eventually was reunited with his brother, Yasin, in Istanbul.

The two brothers were now heavily indebted because they had to borrow a considerable amount to pay to smugglers in order to get back to Turkey. On top of the marriage payments and providing for a family, they were now additionally burdened by the debt related to their return journey to Turkey. Before their deportation, Asad and Yasin worked twelve to fourteen hour shifts in a garment factory in Istanbul to provide for their family and raise the $11,000 needed for the marriage payment of an older, but handicapped brother in the village. They had arranged about two-thirds of the brother’s brideprice money when they were sent back to Afghanistan. Now, first they had to raise what remained of their brother’s marriage payment and get him married. Afterwards, it would be Asad’s turn to get married. His younger brother, Yasin would be next in line. Asad was acutely aware that arranging the marriage of two or three brothers, one after another, could very well take at least a decade, if not more. However, the hopeful expectations of the two brothers, and by extension the other Turkmen migrant workers I met in Istanbul, seemed to be out of sync with the times, especially considering the hardening of anti-migrant sentiments in the region and globally. It appeared that this circulatory mode of migrant existence, working in Turkey and providing for family in Afghanistan, already quite a brutal life, may very well be unsustainable in the future.

Conclusion

This article has explored the intersections between masculinity, labour migration and marital strategies among a diasporic community of Turkic-speaking migrants from Northern Afghanistan engaged in wage-labour in Turkey. The article has focused on the hitherto neglected connection between market/labour strategies and household/marital strategies. Studying the connections between strategies of self-making, establishing oneself as an adult male through marriage, and strategies of accumulation (and status-enhancing consumption) through market participation (as migrant workers) has made possible a contribution from Afghanistan to the broader literature that addresses the intersections between modes of social reproduction (labour migration and marriage), masculinity (provider/breadwinner ideal) and social status (honour, reputation).

By going beyond considerations of migration in response to household poverty or war-related displacement, I have sought to account for the maintenance of a normative masculinity that requires men being a provider/breadwinner and conventions of marriage that rest on payment of an impressively large brideprice and staging an expensive wedding. Although some of the men appeared to hold critical views about their elders for encouraging such backbreaking marriage payments, the desire of the men to gain wealth and status and perform the role of provider indicated that they were far from being passive participants in maintaining this oppressive system. Marriage alliances are a key component of social reproduction, signifying the conversion of economic capital (money gained through wage labour abroad) into social capital (social connections and networks of mutual support) through consumption (staging an expensive wedding and exchanges such as brideprice), which provides a coveted space for migrant men to display wealth, gain respectability and improve social standing.

Therefore, the tendency to conduct marriages according to ‘tradition’ is not as irrational as it may seem since this is an event that establishes young men’s status and the family’s relative standing in the community and demonstrates its ability to mobilize resources and support networks among kin or affines or the broader community. At the same time, in situations of pervasive insecurity and general precarity, people tend to invest, even disproportionately, in having the right networks and connections, a form of tribalization of social relations to compensate for eroding public or corporate safety nets. Migrant workers, like the men from Khamyab have few economic opportunities or safety nets back home to rely on, so their fall-back options are extremely weak. This explains the tendency of the men to remain in Turkey and work (illegally) under exploitative labour conditions or the risk of deportation. They preferred to endure hardship instead of choosing an easier marriage option like elopement, because ‘good men don’t elope’. At the same time, they are denied social benefits by host countries and are reliant on their own societies and families for social reproduction (marriage, raising children and care of the sick and the elderly). This in turn explains the tendency among the men to remain deferential towards their elders, maintain traditional conventions of marriage and ideals of normative masculinity.

In the past young men may have been more dependent on their parents for social reproduction, and converting economic capital (land, livestock, etc.,) into social capital through marriage (as brideprice, for example), which undoubtedly translated into more power for elders over the younger members of the household. However, this model of household economic production and the power relations inscribed in it has been transformed as a result of changes to the rural economy and widespread monetization post-2001. The importance of land and agricultural production to household economic strategies have declined in the past few decades. This has resulted in increased household poverty and food insecurity, particularly in rural areas. After 2001, the rural economy has diversified significantly, with the majority of rural households relying more on wage labour and non-farm work than on agriculture, leading to a greater recognition of the significance of migration and remittances to survival strategies of the rural poor (Pain 2019). Therefore, remittances from wage labour, including from Afghan cities and abroad has been the main source of survival for the majority of rural households. In principle, such changes in the rural economy could empower independently earning sons vis-à-vis their parents and family elders.

However, increased economic power and more independence does not always mean young men are turning their backs on tradition. As I have shown, the migrant men with whom I worked continued to rely on their own families and societies for basic functions of social reproduction. I argue that this is an intriguing paradox to be explored. The men’s tendency to maintain so-called ‘traditions’ should not be taken for granted, but understood as an active accomplishment necessitating significant investment in the cultivation of social relations of interdependence. There is perhaps more to the image of the ‘obedient’ son that we come across in the accounts provided by the men I studied. Viewed dispassionately, it is not difficult to see that it is part of a pragmatic strategy to maximize economic security, acquire new positions of power and wealth, and step upwards on the social ladder as respectable and reliable family men. At the same time, these examples highlight the emotional struggles men encounter in attempts to fulfil idealized visions of gender roles and the ways young migrant men critically engage with prevalent gender ideologies and practices that sustain social inequality and power hierarchies. Nonetheless, the adherence to norms pertaining to ‘traditional’ notions of family life and manly conduct ensure the inter-generational transmission of structures and activities that reinforce social inequality.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Deniz Kandiyoti and Torunn Wimpelmann and two anonymous journal referees for their constructive and critical comments made on earlier versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd [grant number 24970].

Notes

1 For the role of commodity trading in connecting Afghanistan to external markets in the nineteenth century, see (Hopkins 2008; Hanifi 2011). For a contemporary account of Afghan trading networks active in the broader Asian arena, see (Marsden 2016, 2019).

2 To be clear, contemporary scholarship on Afghanistan has certainly had a much broader conceptual and historical scope than that. Recent historical and anthropological works, dealing with both the pre-war (prior to 1979) and the subsequent conflict (1979 onwards) periods, have dealt with a variety of social, cultural, economic and historical questions, going well beyond the narrow engagement with elite politics or the specific concerns of peacebuilding and statebuilding literature (see, for example, Marsden 2016; Hopkins and Marsden 2013; Hanifi 2011; Green 2015; Crews 2015).

3 There are a few exceptions worth mentioning, they include (Chiovenda 2018; Marsden 2019; Wimpelmann 2017; Wimpelmann, Hakimi, and Saadat 2020; Hakimi and Sa’adat 2020).

4 It is worth mentioning that Afghans’ experience of exile and refugeehood is much older than the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. Many Shia Hazaras, for example, fled political persecution in the late nineteenth century and settled in Quetta, see (Monsutti 2012). After 1979, the war against the Soviets (and subsequent conflicts) has given a more dramatic dimension to these population movements, creating millions of refugees and internally displaced people, the majority headed for Pakistan and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s. These dynamics point to the complex nature of the migration process, involving movements of people within the country, due to conflict and for reasons of work, and across nation-state borders.

5 For a critical discussion of such culturally static imageries of Afghan men, see (Marsden 2019).

6 Although marriage traditions are changing in many parts of Afghanistan, and the idea of romantic love, although historically salient in the region, is assuming new significance among young people, especially in urban settings such as Kabul, yet the ideals describing ‘traditional’ forms of marriage and the key role that elders and parents play in marital decisions of their children are still significant.

7 Quite a few sources mention that brideprice was partly paid in cash in the 1970s (Tapper 1991; Barfield 2010). Tapper writes that a brideprice among the Durrani Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan was considered the equivalent of one hundred sheep. The average value of brideprices paid between 1967 and 1972, consisting of cash, animals, land and other goods, was about 65,000 Afs, equivalent to about £5,000 in today’s money (Tapper 1991, 142).

8 According to one study, the number of Afghan migrant workers involved in the informal sector of the economy in Turkey is estimated at more than 128,000 in 2017 (Bozok and Bozok 2019, 2)

9 Istanbul is a mega-city that attracts migrant workers and refugees from elsewhere in the region. In 2017, Turkey was host to 3.1 million refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and beyond (Bozok and Bozok 2019, 2), including 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees, some of whom work as informal seasonal workers in the country’s agricultural sector (Kavak 2016, 34).

10 As Marsden has noted, these ‘refugees were settled across the country, but especially in the South-East (e.g. in Hatay, Gazaiantep, Shahliurfa), East (Van), and North (Tokat) and in Istanbul (Zeytinburnu)’ (Marsden 2018, 93). Common ethno-linguistic identity played a key role in the decision of Turkish authorities to resettle Afghan refugees in Turkey during the 1980s. Part of the reasoning behind this policy also related to older, historically warm relations between Turkey and Afghanistan dating back to the Ottoman period, which were further strengthened during the reign of the reformist king of the newly independent Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan and the Turkish reformist leader, Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s (see Ahmed 2017). A more recent Turkish ‘pivot to the East’ has meant that the Turkish military and aid apparatus has been engaged in the post-2001 reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, including setting up a Turkish military and development aid presence in Wardak Province and more recently a Provincial Reconstruction Team, a joint military-civilian aid operation in Jowzjan Province in Northern Afghanistan, home to many of Afghanistan’s Turkic-speaking communities (Turkmen and Uzbek). For discussion of Central Asian migration to Ottoman Turkey, especially the question of Central Asian Muslims belonging to Ottoman imperial and Turkish national communities, see (Can 2020). On the question of multiple imperial subjecthood claims by Afghans and Central Asian migrants, including Ottoman, Russian and British Indian, see (Can 2012, 2016).

11 Interview with Haji Naquib, Afghan Turkmen trader in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. 23 February 2018. Istanbul, Turkey.

12 For a discussion of Pashtun settlements in Northern Afghanistan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see (Tapper 1973, 193; Fuoli 2017).

13 In the wake of the establishment of the Soviet Union, a proportion of Bukhara’s Turkic-speaking communities left Central Asia and moved into present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Chinese Turkistan and India (see, Marsden 2018, 88).

14 For a more broader treatment of the subject, see (Marsden 2016).

15 A Dari term taken from my conversation with Yusuf, which translates as ‘my heart is bleeding’.

16 According to Yusuf, smugglers charge between $300-400 from Afghanistan to Iran and $400-500 from Iran to Turkey.

17 For treatment of musical gatherings and homo-sociality in Pakistan’s Chitral region, see (Marsden 2007a).

18 Nurullah, Afghan migrant worker in Istanbul, 25 February 2018. Istanbul

19 For a recent discussion of decreasing agricultural production, landlessness and growing poverty in rural Afghanistan, see (Pain 2019).

20 Class and social status are key to understanding the dynamics of elopement in Afghan society. For example, while elopement marriages are common among young Hazara couples in Daikundi in central Afghanistan, the more educated and social status conscious members of the same community working and living in Kabul have demonstrated their attachment toward traditional forms of marriage and the payment of brideprice (see Hussaini 2018).

21 Asad, Afghan migrant worker in Istanbul, 25 February 2018. Istanbul.

22 For a comparative, if starkly different, account of migrants who have residency status, social rights and benefits such as Turkish migrants invited to work in Germany in the 1960 (see, Kandiyoti 1977).

23 Hashmat, former Afghan migrant worker in Istanbul. 9 August 2018. Conversation recorded on board Turkish Airline flight from Istanbul to Kabul.