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1. Guerre, reconstruction de l’Etat et invention de la tradition en Afghanistan (War, Reconstruction of the State and Invention of Tradition in Afghanistan)

Author:
Fariba Adelkhah
Publication Date:
03-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
War since 1979 and the reconstruction of the state under Western tutelage since 2001 have led to a simplification of the identity of Afghan society, through an invention of ethnicity and tradition – a process behind which the control or the ownership of the political and economic resources of the country are at stake. Hazarajat is a remarkable observation site of this process. Its forced integration into the nascent Afghan state during the late nineteenth century has left a mark on its history. The people of Hazara, mainly Shi’ite, has been relegated to a subordinate position from which it got out of progressively, only by means of jihad against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and the US intervention in 2001, at the ost of an ethnicization of its social and political consciousness. Ethnicity, however, is based on a less communitarian than unequal moral and political economy. Post-war aid to state-building has polarized social relations, while strengthening their ethnicization: donors and NGOs remain prisoners of a cultural, if not orientalist approach to the country that they thereby contribute to “traditionalize”, while development aid destabilizes the “traditional” society by accelerating its monetization and commodification.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Civil Society, Religion, War, History, Sociology, Peacekeeping, Identities, State, and Anthropology
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Asia, and United States of America

2. Mutations sociales et identitaires en Azerbaïdjan : les évolutions du rituel de deuil

Author:
Raphaelle Mathey
Publication Date:
06-2013
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Anthropological studies demonstrate that personal values, social relationships and indicators of cultural identity are expressed in a symbolic manner in funeral rites. In Azerbaijan such rites can include as many as ten commemorative events (yas) in the year following the death. These are critically important events in which allegiances are made and broken. During the period of political chaos and economic recession which followed independence, from 1991 to 1996, the yas served as an incubator for a local identity movement. Political stability, beginning in 1996, and the advent of the petroleum era, in the 2000s, transformed the country’s face, reordered the relationships between individuals, and today raise the issue of creating a State and developing a national political project. The study of funeral rites enables one to measure the magnitude of these changes. The evolution of yas reveals new needs of a society in turmoil and reflects the fundamental examination Azerbaijanis are undertaking of themselves, their religion, their European and Oriental identity and their relationship to modernity.
Topic:
Economics, Religion, History, Culture, Identities, and Anthropology
Political Geography:
Central Asia, Asia, and Azerbaijan

3. Les madrasas chiites afghanes à l’aune iranienne : anthropologie d’une dépendance religieuse (The Afghan Shiites Madras in the Iranian news: the anthropology of religious dependance)

Author:
Fariba Adelkhah and Keiko Sakurai
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
As a social institution, the madras must be analyzed in terms of their relationship to social, econmomic and political change and to the public educational system whose bureaucratic organization they have copied. In the case of Afghanistan they cannot be disassociated from the war and its consequences, such as emigration and the reconstitution of ethno-religious affiliations. Financed and run by the diaspora, they enable the Shiite minority, notably Hazara, to reestablish itself in the central State and to provide a counterweight to the Pachtoune domination. They also contribute to the education of girls and children from disfavored social classes. The dependeance of Shiite education in Afghanistan on the Iranian clergy has organizational, theological, financial and symbolique benefits. But it is accompanied by a reinvention of, and separation from, the Iranian model which should, in the minds of the religous authorities, lead to a national schism in Afghanistan of which Kaboul hopes to be the spiritual capital. The asymetric Irano-Afghan interaction illustrates the relevance of the notion of « religous dependence ».
Topic:
Education, Religion, War, Ethnicity, and Anthropology
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East, and Asia