Summary of Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Afghanistan is a landlocked country that lies in the heart of Asia. It has been invaded by numerous armies over the course of history, and has been a center of many different empires ruled by outsiders.
#2 The anthropological approach of this book gives prominence to both culture and history, which is why it is important to discuss political order in the abstract without forgetting about them.
#3 The most fruitful way to approach these questions is to examine the changing notions of power and political legitimacy in Afghanistan over a long period. When the political structure was least open to competition, rulers found it easiest to maintain their legitimacy and authority.
#4 The emergence of a class of professional rulers was the result of a hierarchical political culture in which only men from certain elite descent groups were believed to have the right to rule or even compete for power.

Sujets

• Asia
• History
• General
• General officer
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822503779
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Afghanistan is a landlocked country that lies in the heart of Asia. It has been invaded by numerous armies over the course of history, and has been a center of many different empires ruled by outsiders.

#2

The anthropological approach of this book gives prominence to both culture and history, which is why it is important to discuss political order in the abstract without forgetting about them.

#3

The most fruitful way to approach these questions is to examine the changing notions of power and political legitimacy in Afghanistan over a long period. When the political structure was least open to competition, rulers found it easiest to maintain their legitimacy and authority.

#4

The emergence of a class of professional rulers was the result of a hierarchical political culture in which only men from certain elite descent groups were believed to have the right to rule or even compete for power.

#5

The situation in Afghanistan changed after the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880. The new amir, Abdur Rahman, abolished the decentralized governmental system in which tribes and regions maintained a high degree of autonomy in exchange for submitting to the legal authority of the Kabul government.

#6

The stalemated mujahideen civil war opened the door to interference in Afghan affairs by neighboring states, which strengthened regional ethnic power brokers, and facilitated the exploitation of Afghanistan’s weakness by foreign Islamist groups.

#7

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many international actors feared that Afghanistan would break apart along ethnic and regional lines if not controlled by a central authority. But Afghans have long found the existence of a single state more advantageous than the alternatives.

#8

Afghanistan is a country that is medieval in the sense that religion still plays a significant role in culture and politics, just like it did in Europe before the Enlightenment. It is also biblical in the sense that it retains a non-mechanized rural subsistence economy and caravans of nomads.

#9

Ibn Khaldun’s model of Middle Eastern political organization is applied to Afghanistan in the final section of chapter 1. He proposed two different types of societies: a desert civilization based on subsistence agriculture and pastoralism in marginal zones, and a sedentary civilization based on the surplus agricultural production of the irrigated river valleys or plains that supported the cities.

#10

The Afghan state has been underplayed in a modern Afghan history that gives primacy to the Pashtuns as the country’s rulers. In reality, the Pashtuns were never rulers in Afghanistan before the mid-eighteenth century. Only at that time, after serving as military auxiliaries to the Safavid and Afsharid empires in Iran, did the Durrani Pashtuns come to power.

#11

The last two decades of the twentieth century were bookmarked by the imposition of two extreme ideologies on Afghanistan. The first was a failed attempt to implement revolutionary social and economic policies by a Communist regime. It led to the Soviet invasion and occupation of the country in the 1980s.

#12

The first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan was marked by political and military struggles that swept through the country. The country’s problems can be understood by examining where they fit past patterns and where they break from them.

#13

The past of Afghanistan is not just past, but still present in the form of its history. It is difficult to write authoritatively about the twentieth century as history, but it is not difficult to see how Afghanistan’s politics have been shaped by its past.

#14

The underlying structure of analysis seeks to test theoretical models against events and events against theoretical models to shed light on both. At the same time, the material is presented with a story line, so those readers who have little interest in the models may still find the book engaging.

#15

Political scientists often give primacy to individuals, political parties, and ideologies in their studies. However, anthropologists believe that group interest regularly trumps individual interest. In Afghan society, for example, individuals support decisions made by their group even if such support has negative consequences for them.

#16

The outstanding social feature of life in Afghanistan is its local tribal or ethnic divisions. People’s primary loyalty is, respectively, to their own kin, village, tribe, or ethnic group.

#17

ethnic groups in Afghanistan are defined by their shared cultural values and characteristics, and they are biologically replicating groups that share a fundamental cultural value.

#18

The definition of ethnicity in Afghanistan is flexible and open to change. People do assert that ethnicity is both fixed and historically rooted, but they also acknowledge that it can be strategically manipulated.

#19

ethnic groups in Afghanistan come in two flavors: tribal and nontribal. Tribes are a type of ethnic group that defines its membership through the unilineal descent from a common ancestor, real or assumed. Nontribal groups make no claim of genealogical relationship among their members.

#20

There are dozens of major and minor ethnic groups in Afghanistan, and no one has ever agreed on their numbers. The five largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan account for approximately 185 percent of the country’s total population.

#21

The Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in modern Afghanistan, and they are primarily composed of lineages that trace their origin to Qais, the putative common ancestor of all Pashtuns.

#22

The Tajiks, a nontribal Persian-speaking Sunni Muslim group, constitute about 30 percent of Afghanistan’s population. They traditionally made up the majority of urban residents in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar, but their population is spread out over the mountains of the northeast.

#23

The Hazaras are a ethnic group in Afghanistan who make up about 15 percent of the population. They are Shia Muslims who engage in alpine subsistence agriculture and livestock breeding.

#24

The Uzbeks and Turkmen make up about 10 percent of the country’s population. They are Sunni Turkish-speaking groups that descended from nomadic tribal confederations that arrived in a series of waves from central Asia.

#25

The Aimaqs are a tribally organized Sunni Muslim group that lives in the mountainous territory east of Herat and west of Hazarajat, the ancient territory of Ghor. They also live in some of the steppes and desert lands north and east of Herat.

#26

The remaining ethnic groups in Afghanistan are diverse, but represent only 3 percent of the country’s population. They have had a significant impact on the country’s history, as Afghan rulers frequently appointed members of small ethnic minorities to high positions in the government and military.

#27

The Nuristanis live in the mountains northeast of Kabul. They were initially converted to Islam in the late nineteenth century, but their distinct culture was maintained. Their languages are unrelated to any others in Afghanistan.

#28

The Qizilbash, a Shiite Turkish military unit, helped to found the Afghan state during the turmoil of the mid-eighteenth century. They were key in government and trade.

#29

The Baluch are located south of the Pashtuns in the desert. They are extensions of much larger populations found in Iran and Pakistan. They have their own language, Baluchi, which is related to Persian.

#30

The Arabs of Afghanistan claim descent from the Arabian armies that conquered central Asia in the eighth century, but they are now Persian speakers. They have a tradition of pastoralism that is well integrated into market production.

#31

The Ismaili groups inhabiting the headwaters of the Oxus River on both sides of the border are not considered Tajiks in Afghanistan, and they have antagonistic relations with their Persian-speaking Sunni neighbors in Badakhshan.

#32

There are a variety of endogamous itinerant communities in Afghanistan, which engage in specialized crafts or are peddlers and providers of exotic services. They all share a common marginal social status in Afghan society.

#33

Afghanistan has a tiny non-Muslim population, consisting of about ten to twenty thousand Sikhs and Hindus who have been living in Kabul and a few other cities for centuries.

#34

The habitus is the ingrained patterns of apprehending the world and interacting with it. In the realm of the power of ideas, the two most significant are conceptions of group identity and the cultural framework of Islam.

#35

Afghanistan is a land of small villages, which traditionally accounted for about 80 percent of the population. The country’s economy is based on rural production. Cities, although politically dominant, constitute no greater percentage of the population than do the country’s nomads.

#36

The life of a subsistence farmer in Afghanistan is extremely difficult, and the country has some of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world.

#37

Subsistence agriculture, by its very nature, provides its practitioners with a degree of autonomy unknown in a market economy. Prices for grain may fluctuate widely and often severely, but since farmers first set aside grain for their own consumption, such swings have less of an impact than in urban areas.

#38

There is a close link between the villages, towns, and nomadic encampments in Afghanistan. The wealth of the towns depends on the surplus that their hinterlands provide.

#39

The key distinction in agriculture is whether the lan