CONCOCTING A FROLICKING “PASHTUN COUPLE” IN AFGHANISTAN

M. Jamil Hanifi

CONCOCTING A FROLICKING “PASHTUN COUPLE” IN AFGHANISTAN

M. Jamil Hanifi

Abstract

The validity, truth and truth value of the text and context of Euro-American, especially postmodern Anglo-American, ethnographies of Afghanistan, are rarely interrogated. A systematic scrutiny of these ethnographies reveals how prolonged blind acceptance of faulty, distorted, misinterpreted, and cooked-up information buttressed by the authority of “fieldwork” has been produced and reproduced in widely circulated packages of pseudo-knowledge about the peoples and cultures of Afghanistan. Various degrees and forms of this tradition of production and reproduction are available in virtually all postmodern Anglo-American ethnographies of Afghanistan. Some instances of pseudo-knowledge about Afghanistan have been interrogated elsewhere (Hanifi 2000, 2004, 2005, 2011). This essay offers a culturally informed scrutiny of a concocted “Pashtun couple” stored in photographs embedded in a postmodern Anglo-American ethnography of Afghanistan.

Keywords

Anthropology of Afghanistan, Deconstruction, Ethnographic Imperialism, Misrepresentation.

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