The specter of the “arrivant”: hauntology of an interethnic conflict in Afghanistan

Abstract

For more than a century Afghanistan has been marred by (among other things) the interethnic conflict between two major groups in the country, with Pashtuns in the role of the dominant ethnicity, and Hazaras of the oppressed minority. The post-Taliban period in Afghanistan has seen a renaissance in Hazaras’ social and political participation, which has aroused fear and anxiety in Pashtuns’ collective imaginary. Jacques Derrida, building on Freud’s “uncanny,” has written on the political and moral features of spectralities and haunting figures. On the basis of ethnographic material, we interpret members of both ethnic groups today as being haunted not only by a murderous past (the revenant), but also by a future (the arrivant) which anticipates equally murderous violence. Through subtle psychological dynamics, members of the two groups seemingly manage to see themselves as both victims and perpetrators.

Keywords:

• Afghanistan
• interethnic conflict
• hauntology
• Hazara
• Pashtun

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An additional ethnic group who bear strong Asian somatic features are the Kirghiz. However, the tiny minority of Kirghiz people live in the remote high mountains of the Wakhan corridor, sandwiched between Russia, Pakistan, and China. They are so isolated and removed from the rest of the Afghan population that for all intents and purposes the Hazaras may still be considered the only Afghan ethnic group whose somatic features maintain such a strong social relevance.

2 In fact, Alessandro Monsutti had already detected the seeds of this shift, particularly among Hazaras, in the late 1990s (Monsutti 2005). Of course, in big, mixed urban centers like Kabul or Mazar-e-Sharif, a well-educated elite would today maintain a more inclusive and nation-based approach to politics. Yet in a sizable and Pashtun-majority city like Jalalabad, where Andrea Chiovenda has mostly carried out his fieldwork, the perceived divide between Pashtuns and Hazaras seemed very pervasive and clear-cut.

3 See for example, Barth 1959; Ahmed 1976, 1980; Steul 1980; Lindholm 1982; Anderson 1975, 1978, 1983; Grima 1992; Tapper 1991; Glatzer 2002; Barfield 2010.

4 Among many others, Peristiany 1966; Gilmore 1987; Giovannini 1981; Herzfeld 1985; Nisbett and Cohen 1996; Blok 1981; Aase 2002; Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera 1998.

5 Barfield (2010, 30) explains that Soviet ethnographers have misleadingly identified these non-Sunni, non-Persian-speaking inhabitants of Badakhshan’s borders with Tajikistan as “Mountain Tajiks,” while they should be more correctly termed “Pamiris,” as in fact does the 2004 Afghanistan constitution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Chiovenda

Andrea Chiovenda is a post-doctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College, Boston. He received a PhD in anthropology from Boston University, and an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University. His research interests revolve around Afghanistan, psychological and psychiatric anthropology, masculinity, and refugee studies. His most recent and ongoing project focuses on psychological suffering among Afghan refugees in Greece.

Melissa Chiovenda

Melissa Kerr Chiovenda is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College. She completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of Connecticut and an MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University. She spent 18 months conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Bamyan, Afghanistan and since 2015 has started a new research project with Afghan refugees and asylum seekers in Athens, Greece.