Qaum: Conceptualizing Potters in the Afghan Political Arena
Noah Coburn ncoburn@bu.edu Doctoral Candidate Boston University Anthropology Department
September 2008
In Afghanistan international military forces, government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have all struggled to grasp the nuances of local political alliances, feuds and hierarchies. Examples abound of international military forces and NGOs claiming to bring democracy to local communities and instead simply reinforcing traditional power structures. These range from tribal leaders using development funds to install wells in their front yards to the way that local warlords have been able to 'pass on information' to American troops about 'Taliban activity' in order to induce American air strikes on their own personal enemies (Tanner 2002, 313 and more recently Straziuso 2008). The purpose of this paper is two fold, first to try to understand and classify one specific political group, the potters of Istalif, and to use this example along with other ethnographic accounts to complicate and reinvigorate the debate over exactly how local politics in Afghanistan actually function outside of the major urban centers.1 I will suggest that while in many ways local politics in Afghanistan appear to be a classic case of segmentary opposition, in fact, by using Fredrik Barth's understanding of ethnicity as a boundary marker, we can see how flexibility allows the potters and other groups to create manipulable definitions that they use to differentiate themselves as a political group. Too often current political analyses of Afghanistan tend to reduce politics to a struggle between insurgents and the state or, at other times, tribe and state. They do this even while recent studies point to both the failure of state building at local levels and the diversity of informal political structures that still dominate politics outside urban centers (Nixon 2008). Occasionally more detailed accounts will break the tribes into sub-tribes and lineages, but the ethnographic record shows that political organization in Afghanistan is more complex than this. While tensions between tribes, lineages and cousins often encourage the anthropologist to look at Afghan politics as structured through segmentary opposition, this overly simplified understanding of the political environment ignores the historical diversity and dynamism of politics in Afghanistan. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, accounts demonstrated an array of changing political structures. Thomas Barfield showed how among the Arabs of Afghanistan selfinterest was weakening the corporate clan (Barfield 1981). Pierre Centilivres and C-J. Charpentier studied the guild system in the town of Tashqurghan, showing its parallels and marked differences with the South Asian caste system (Centilivres 1972 and Charpentier 1972). Whitney Azoy studied how the traditional khan-based political systems were interacting with government among the Uzbeks (Azoy 2003), while Schuyler Jones and others were demonstrating the intricate political systems found in Nuristan (Jones 1974). My research suggests that if anything, twenty-five years of warfare and limited state penetration has further complicated these diverse systems. Now in addition to traditional elders and state officials in Istalif, the small town where I conducted research from the summer of 2006 to the spring of 2008, there are international troops parking their tanks in the bazaar. Watching from a distance are warlords, who all seem to have turned in some, but not all of their weapons, and a wealthy new landowning group, who earned their wealth as refugees abroad and are at odds with traditional tribal structures. In the meantime, mullahs and other religious leaders compete for influence with NGOs that are handing out vast sums of cash, sometimes upsetting delicate local balances and at other times simply reinforcing traditional hierarchies. Particularly for young men, trying to gain financial

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