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Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how—faced with frontiers—they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.
“There is a great deal to commend this volume … there is no other collection of essays by fieldworkers who have worked in the region that addresses the dynamics of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” • Magnus Marsden, University of Sussex
“I think this volume is one of the first groundbreaking editions to question conventional knowledge production based on ‘ethnographies’.” • Katja Mielke, Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies
Nafay Choudhury is Assistant Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. He has won several international prizes for his writings on legal pluralism and private governance, including the Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize and the Asian Law and Society Association Article Award.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Nafay Choudhury and Annika Schmeding
*This chapter is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from NIOD Institute.
Chapter 1. Strategies of Survival: Navigating Kabul’s Money Bazaars
Nafay Choudhury
Chapter 2. Obligation, Failure and the Promise of Migration
Annika Schmeding
Chapter 3. A Month in Coal Country
Abhilash Medhi and Abdul Ahad Mohammadi
Chapter 4. The Protest as Field Site: The Deh Mazang Suicide Attack and the Disruption of a Movement
Melissa Chiovenda
Chapter 5. All Women Are Equal, but ‘Begum Sahibas’ Are More Equal Than Others: Exploring Opinions of Upper Middle-Class Pakistani Women about Education
Saima Khan
Chapter 6. Women’s Worlds: Vignettes and Memories of Afghanistan
Farhana Rahman
Chapter 7. Familial Frontiers: Researching with Hindustani Musicians in Kabul
Michael Lindsey
Chapter 8. Drawing on the Frontier: Sketchbook-Cum-Journals and My Positionality as an Ethnographer of the Kalasha
Tom Crowley
Chapter 9. Kashmir as Fragments of My Diary
Omer Aijazi
Conclusion: Predicaments of the “AfPak” Frontier Ethnographers
M. Nazif Shahrani
Index