|
Etude I: The event
as the object of cultural analysis. An
example of a problem and a frame of reference: structure in practice [incomplete]. Introduction In 1966 -
1968 while doing field work among Hazaras in Shibar, Afghanistan, I discovered that in some places they
were sharply divided between two kinds of Shi’ites,
Ithnā `Asharīya
(“Twelvers”) and Isma’ilis,
even to the fracturing of small communities.
This is a memoir of the mares nest of disputes that came to light the
more I probed into this society. The
explanation for the original division that drew me into these affairs will entail
recounting the narratives about why and when various disputes took place, not
only between the two sectarian groups but in particular within the Ismaili community.
In order to explicate these narratives I will rehearse the conventions
of social practice that endowed these events with significance. The Problem The
locality The
circumstance that prompted this cultural study existed in Shibar,
Bamian Province, Afghanistan. Shibar is a marginal
area in several ways. Topologically, it
is a highland plateau at the extremities of three great riverine
systems. At the northeastern end of
this plateau resides the Shibar Pass which divides
waters flowing east and west. To the
east is Ghorband whose waters flow into the Kabul
River, which eventually reaches the Indus and the Indian Ocean. To the west of Shibar
Pass water flows toward the center of Bamian where
it joins the Bamian river then veers abruptly
northward to race through the Shikari gorge, a great
rift in the Hindu Kush Range, and then joins the Qunduz
- Oxus river and the Aral Sea catchment basin. On the southwestern end of the Shibar plateau lies another pass
into Bamian, the Unai,
which divides the water along another axis.
Northward the streams flow into Kalu a
tributary of the Bamian valley. Southward the water flows off the Unai Pass to form the headwaters of the Helmand, the
great river that once nourished the famous Persian civilization of Sistan but now dies in the deserts of Registan
and Dasht-e Margo.
Shibar is also a marginal area politically as it lies
along the eastern edge of the province of Bamian,
demarcating its boundaries with the current provinces of Parwan,
Wardak, and Ghazni. It is thus marginal administratively, lying
at some distance from the capitals of these neighboring provinces. The capital of Bamian
province, the Markaz (the “center”), was in the
1960s several hours drive away. Late
in the nineteenth century the Kabul regime had to crush a rebellion of the Hazara peoples, including those in Shibar,
although mostly those further west in the Hazarajat,
and the government has been advancing its writ over the region ever
since. A local alaqadar,
a sub-sub governor, was assigned to Shibar in the
1920s but his leverage there was minimal for at least a decade. In the 1960s he and a small staff were
situated in Shumbul, relatively close to the Shibar Pass. His
office was the first point of government contact with local affairs.[1] The judiciary was situated in the Markaz but was broadly distrusted, even feared. In earlier times rarely did anyone from Shibar dare to bring a dispute before the official
courts; whatever redress a defrauded individual could have, if any, within
the community was to obtained by appeal to the local notables. But by the 1960s it was becoming more
feasible to take one’s quarrel to court at the Markaz,
even though that option was broadly condemned within the community. Everyone believed dealing with the
government was expensive and time consuming and in any case uncertain. People
survived in Shibar by irrigating wheat (rotated
with fava bean) in the lower elevations and barley
and rye higher up, and by keeping a few sheep and goats, which they protected
indoors in winter and released to pasture the rest of the year. Some parts of Shibar
received enough rainfall for dry land farming of wheat and barley. Households that dwelt along the main roads
supplemented their subsistence by selling cash crops, wheat, potatoes and
poplar trees. Besides the peasants there,
in those days (but not since about 1980) pastoral nomads climbed into the plateau
in spring, bringing large flocks to pasture on the highland meadows and hilly
slopes, and retreated in the fall.[2] Survival
here was a social and communal affair.
Truly, it was difficult if not impossible to live in these highlands
without communal support, the environment being severe and the technology relatively
undeveloped. In winter, snow drifts
could pile up as high as twenty feet. Many
of the valleys are oriented north and south and bounded by abrupt hillsides
and cliffs, so they enjoyed sunlight for only a few hours of the day, except
in high summer. In spring, streams
raced precipitously unless undammed for irrigation. Agricultural means were
pre-industrial: the steep hillsides,
if planted to benefit from rainfall, could be plowed only with oxen. Until as late as the 1950s horses were common
vehicles of transport. The passes
could be impassable for days in winder; vehicles were often stuck in snow and
sometimes they slipped off precipices.
The main road was unpaved. There
was little cash; many transactions were in barter. Matches, tooth brushes and other personal
goods were being walked in by a trader.
In
such a setting folks took it for granted that friends and neighbors should cooperate. Neighbors and relatives sometimes shared
oxen for plowing in spring (although the rush to plant as early as possible
limited sharing) and threshing in fall.
They helped in construction of houses and walls. They loaned each other money – a group of
them collecting enough cash and goods for one of their number to pay the huge
expenses of a bride and a wedding.
Relatives and neighbors attended each other’s special events --
circumcisions, weddings, funerals – when food was served by the hosts. On such occasions the women gave gifts to
each other, to be reciprocated later, even years later. Among the most critical activities of the
community, which demonstrated and iterated their close interdependence, was
the cleaning and refurbishing of the irrigation channels in early
spring. Many channels extended for
miles up into the mountains and every meter needed attention after the winter
snows; the task demanded many hands.
And after the channels were cleaned, their waters had to be shared by
turns, a circumstance that required cooperation, agreement on water rights,
and consensus as to responsibility and leadership. Folks
sought ways to reinforce their connections, one of the most important being
through marital ties. A sister or a daughter
would be given in marriage to a neighbor or his son; brothers sometimes
married sisters of a friendly family; or families arranged for an exchange of
sisters. Of course one marriage begat
others; it could be replicated in the next generation; first-cousin or
second-cousin marriage was common. The
obligations to help and share were thus reinforced and reduplicated among
neighbors and relatives, enforced by the austere conditions. Among these communities, and indeed
throughout rural Afghanistan, the bonds that tied neighbors and relatives
together were extensive, elaborate, and reduplicative. This
was a society that by every appearance seemed to be a typical peasant
community of the sort familiar to sociologists. Max Weber
(1968: 37) would have described it as united by the “the sacredness of
tradition,” even by “[t]he fear of magical evils” that reinforced “the
general psychological inhibitions against any sort of change in customary
modes of action”. Emil Durkheim (????: p.100) would have emphasized the common
moral sensibility, a likemindedness that has “exceptional force” among these people because it is
collectively embraced, conceived as universal, permanent and intrinsic. The Marxist sociologist Raymond
Williams (1994: 596-7) would have said that the economic,
political, and cultural relations in this society were
so mutually reinforcing as to constitute an integrated “sense of
reality” for its members. The
fracture So I was
surprised to discover an awkward pattern of actual social relationships. There were two religious sects, Twelver Shia (henceforth “Shia”) and Ismaili, in this
area, and relations among them were not good.
It was, in practice, a major fault line.[3] Shias and Ismailis, even if living nearby, did not speak to each
other. They did not greet each other
when passing on solitary paths in the mountains. (“They are silent with us,” said an Ismaili man from Bolola,
speaking of his Shia neighbors.) They did not help each other in the fields
or combine their flocks under a single shepherd, the normal practice among
friends and neighbors. They did not
share food: a bitter quarrel took
place when a Shia family threw away food given to
them by an Ismaili family. As an Ismaili
elder put it, “If we want to borrow from them, they would send us away and
tell us to go to our own kind.” If a Shia man went looking to buy wheat in another
neighborhood, as folks were sometimes obliged to do, he would buy from Shia, and if he had to stay overnight he would stay in a Shia household. An
Ismaili would buy from Ismailis
and stay with Ismailis. Craftsmen served one community or
another: Stone masons in the hamlets
of Iljānak and Ghojurak
served Ismailis; a stone mason for the Shia lived in the valley of Jowlā. Blacksmiths for the Ismaili
were located in the valleys of Iraq, Shumbul, Daki, Birgilich and Sheikh Ali;
Shia blacksmiths were in Jowlā
and the hamlet of Gholam Ali in Shumbul. The sectarian division between Shia and Ismaili seemed to reified the ancient quarrel over rights to leadership of
the Islamic community in their social practice, as if the dogmatic argument
over succession and dogma had acquired contemporary social and political implications
in Shibar.
The spatial
distribution of these sects in Shibar did not always
match the pattern of house construction.
As one might expect, most of the valleys, alluvial plains spilling
down from the high ground, were occupied by one or another sect group. For instance, the valley of Lajow was occupied by Shias;
the valley of Lida was occupied by Ismailis. And in
some valleys both sects were represented.
For example, as one person explaining it to me,
put it: “The valley of Ashur is half Shia and half Ismaili; the valley of Kaaka is
one third Shia and two thirds Ismaili.” Labmushak and Lablabu were similarly divided. But in some places the division was
surprising. The houses built on the
alluvial planes were clustered roughly in groups of four to a dozen houses. These were agnatic kinship groups, qawms, but they were not always of the same religious
sect. The extended family of Gholam Ali occupying a hamlet high up in Labmushak was divided; the extended family of Kida
occupying a village just off the main road near the Shibar
pass was divided. That is, even
though many of the the hamlets appeared to be
communal units, recognizing obligations to help and share, some of them
fractured. The hamlet of Rezagâ in Labmushak was
divided: “ten or twelve” of its
households were Shia, I was told by an Ismaili elder; he could be more specific with respect to
the number of Ismailis there: eight.
“These are all related,” he said.
“The Shia changed from Ismailia about 15
years ago.” In one hamlet I met a
woman who denied any relationship to the family living in the adjacent house.
The
configuration of sectarian loyalties throughout Shibar,
in some places dividing hamlets as well as neighborhoods, suggested that Shibar had been rent asunder by a major social cataclysm,
a rupture in the social fabric. It was
as if a great earthquake had fractured the whole
plateau of Shibar, dividing neighborhoods, breaking
through valleys, ripping hamlets apart, leaving a dramatic ideological scar
across the plateau.[4] Whatever commuity
life existed in which traditional bodns of
solidarity and mutuality were effected by an
economic and social interdependency that might have constituted an “absolute” social reality, as Raymond Williams
would have put it, had little resemblance to the
appearances on the ground. What once
was the basis of communal solidary at the time
these houses and hamlets were constructed had by all appearances been
refigured. This society had been
reconstituted in a sharply different pattern of loyalty, cooperation, and
solidarity. The
obvious contrast between actual social practice and the shape of the built
environment prompted me to ask many questions. My quest for an explanation of the
situation and of his comments drew me into history, the series of events that
produced this peculiar situation. It
led me into a study of the relationships that constituted the social world of
folks in Shibar.
Eventually I would hear stories about what had happened in Shibar, how the unthinkable in fact took place. Social practices, statuses of authority,
strands of influence, marriage and inheritance patterns – all these were
disrupted by a social cataclysm.
Unsurprisingly, the events that produced this great fault line was a topic of public interest all over the
eastern-central region Afghanistan. Shibar was the epicenter. These
affairs took place in a region relatively distant from the mechanisms of
state control. These folks preferred
to deal with their problems without involving the government. The
events that produced this fracture were in every sense public and
political. That is, this society –
somewhat marginal to the effective reach of the government -- had a public
sphere and a politics. Reputed
authorities have claimed that apart from the royal family and a small urban
elite Afghanistan had “no politics.”[5] The reality of course was otherwise: Folks in Shibar
were highly politicized.[6] In this environment they had to cooperate
to live, as they were obliged by their setting and resources to enlist help
from each other: to build a house for
themselves or a wall around it, to construct and maintain an irrigation
channel, to resolve disputes and enforce agreements – and without involving
the government whenever possible. They
managed their social concourse, their conventions of practice, and their
means of enforcement on their own – activities that were essentially
political and ideological. In fact, as
I would discover, there were, in a sense, two parallel networks of social
concourse, that among the women and that among the men. The social intercourse of the men stood
somewhat apart in that among the men there were leaders who interacted with
the wider society. Notably there were mirs (also called maliks by the
government) who acted as intermediaries between the local community and the
government. Mirs
normally entertained the men of the community fairly often, when issues of
broader interest had to be discussed, and they of course fairly often trecked to the offices of the Alaqadar,
the local official ensconced in government buildings at the mouth of Shumbul, in Shibar, and
sometimes also took a bus or truck to the provincial offices in Bamian. The men,
that is, men occasionally in the guest rooms of the mirs
and other notable figures in the community and so constituted an active
communication network. Among the women
there were networks of communication that functioned in the form of gossip in
the hamlets and in the social convocations that took place among relatives on
the occasion of weddings, circumcisions, or funerals. On those occasions the men and women gathered
separately, objectifying the different communications of the two sexes. There were, that is, even in this
relatively isolated rural neighborhood, “public spheres” where information
was broadly shared, mainly through informal means.[7] To
understand the political affairs of these people I had to examine the
conditions in which their informal relations established grounds for cooperation,
and the exercise of power and influence.
I was forced to ask more general questions about how this society was
constituted: how social control and influence were effected, how social
affairs were given order where the institutions of the state were feared and
avoided, how the conditions under which a fracture of the sort extant in Shibar could take form as a sectarian division. Conceptual issues: History
and theory The case
obliges us to reflect on how to explain events culturally. The events that created this peculiar
configuration of alliances in Shibar and the wider
neighborhood raise the question of what a culturally necessary and culturally
sufficient explanation for an event or series of events should entail. Whatever took place in Shibar
must be explained culturally as well as historically. An event such as the disputes that
fractured society in Shibar was an actualization of
a “structure,” a cultural system, that preceded it,
a structure in place. We have to
distinguish here between event and structure.[8] Meaningful communication (as in speech, Saussure’s
parole) is made possible by the existence of a
invisible code (his langue) that is understood by members of a
community. The signs that constitute
the code are mutually defining, conceptually integrated according to a logic
that is internal and unique to itself. They are arbitrary with regard to the world
they reference: different languages
terminologically index different sectors of the color continuum, for
instance. The
disorderly flow of human affairs -- speech, writing, behavior, social event
-- is given significance by the system of mutually defining signs that people
employ in order to make sense of their experience. Their conscious use of symbolic resources
in practice makes social life referential; behaviors become “actions” and
specific happenings become “events” as they are given significance by general
concepts (Sahlins 1985: 145).[9] Events are thus overt manifestations of a structure
in place, and thus logically are its product (Bourdieu
1968: 24). Explaining an event entails
identifying the cultural resources that informed the understanding of the
participants and shaped their response to it. But if
structure gives meaning to events, events can reshape structure (Giddens, Sahlins). As human life takes place in a world that
has its own properties, its own caprice[10],
the use of certain signs to characterize a situation constitutes a certain
risk to the system and to those who deploy them, for the categories deployed may
not apply: people may misinterpret each
other’s intentions, or the situation may in fact contradict the presumptions
of those who sought to characterize it.
The deployment of a sign in real situations thus subjects it to possibilities
of change. When a turn of affairs
surprises, producing unforeseen outcomes, the signs deployed to inform them can
be forced to take on new implications.
When used to encompass situations in a world that escapes human
presuppositions signs take on new meanings – a revaluing of the signs that
can ripple through the system, the signs being systematically related in
according to the logic of the system.
So in practice “event” – parole – can determine “structure.” As
happenings become events, and behaviors acts, when they are perceived in
meaningful terms, events and acts become history. Events and actions produce history, and history --
the memory of events past – become structure.
Events and actions remembered join the elements of structure, both to
modify and be modified by the structure in place (Giddens ????). Human action repeated and reiterated in
practice becomes a habitus, a “product of history
[that] produces individuals and collective practices, and hence history in
accordance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu
1977 [1972]:82). Moreover,
besides the revisions in structure imposed by events in a world that has its
own relationships there are the strains imposed on it by the ways that folks
make use of it. Individuals make use
of the cultural resources at hand in order to fulfill their own
purposes. And they act from different
positions and with “widely varied interests, capacities, inclinations, and
knowledge” (Sewell 2005:209). In
social interactions individuals with personal agendas and personal
perspectives deploy cultural devices – speech, gesture, objective creations –
to define the situation in their own terms, so encompassing it with their own
presuppositions. Their actions in turn
become objectifications of the presuppositions that can become a public
possession, a social fact that can be deployed by others for their own
purposes with their own meanings. The attempt
to control how a situation is defined is a political act, and the struggle to
make one’s own formulation of the situation accepted by the wider community is
a political struggle. A definition of
the situation that stands in ebb and flow of public dispute is of course the
dominant one. As people set in motion
new meanings by bending categories to fit their own ends (cf. Sewell
2005:204) they create possibilities that escape their control. For the signs put to use in defining
situations are public and what becomes public has its own life, with
implications that deployable for new purposes, to fulfill individual
intentions. Our project
is to produce an “eventful account” of what took place in Shibar,
an endeavor that will entail merging history with its social and cultural
context, a linking of adventitious affairs with the meaningful contexts that gave
them significance. If contingency is
one (not the only) principle of all history (cf. Gould 1989: 283)[11],
and historical accidents continually deflect the course of events (Mann 1986)[12]
, the affairs of human beings (unlike other creatures) are informed by and
directed by frames of meaning that have properties of a different order from
the caprice of events. Life for human
beings is never a haphazard series of accidents, for humans perceive each
happening as an instance of an imagined order of reality. An explanation for a particular event such
as the conditions that broke these communities apart must place the contingent
and the incidental within the idealized “realities” of those who lived it,
and within the historic trends that the events displayed. THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK But this
view of the human condition necessarily confronts the problem of how human
beings can act willfully and creatively within a system of conventional
practice. If idealized “realities”
define human experience and shape human action, how can human beings, as
sentient agents, be acting on their own volition? The events examined here were a product of
humans acting intentionally as agents; human actors produced this
configuration of relations. What is
the relation between the structures that inform human experience and human
creative action? A cultural
explanation of an event or series of events depends on the relationships among
three entities: event, the imaginative
structure within which it takes place, and the agents acting willfully in the
event. Here I offer four propositions
about these relationships preliminary to proposing how an event or series of
events may be explained culturally. Each
proposition is given in abstract terms and then emended to clarify its
relation to the irregularities of actual social life. I. Events are
actualizations of “structures” that the participants bring to the events By “structure”
we mean a system of mutually defining symbols – language, codes of behavior, conceptions
of the material world and its mechanics – through which people make sense of
their experience.[13] These symbolic systems, invisible except in
their overt manifestations – as in speech, behavior, social conventions, mythical
narratives, monuments, emblems and the like – are constituted according to their
own internal logics, logics that are arbitrary with regard to the world they reference: different languages, for instance,
terminologically index different sectors of the color continuum, and
different cultures recognize different causes of disease and death. It is of these symbolic systems that human
conceptions of reality are made; through such cultural forms humans understand
and respond to what happens to them (Geertz 1973:
216). The human
dependence on symbolic resources makes social life referential; behaviors
become “actions” and specific happenings become “events” as they are given
significance by general concepts (Sahlins 1985:
145).[14] People read situations and react to them in
terms of the cultural resources, symbolic frames of reference, available to
them. “The significance we impute to
the observed events of life is always affected by the frame in which we place
them and the keys with which we read them.
…[p158].
[W]hen observing human interaction we must identify correctly the keys
that the parties to such interaction themselves are using, as the events
unfold” (Barth 1993:157-158). As
events follow upon one another, people are continuously reading and reacting to
them in terms of imagined orders of reality.
Events are in this sense products of structure, overt expressions of
conventional practices in a society. Event Analysis in Practice.
Such is the relation of event to structure in the abstract. The complication in this abstract notion is
that in actual affairs of course individuals can hold different views of an
event. They can bring different frames
of reference to a happening and so define its significance in contrary ways.[15] And so in the course of events folks can
misinterpret each other. As the significance
of the event is disputed, the event can acquire new properties depending on
the frame of reference accorded it. So
the human process of imaginatively encompassing events in terms of idealized
notions of significance may yield little agreement or conherent
behavior (Barth 1993:7).[16] A cultural explanation for an event must expose what
the participants see in it and how they do or do not share a common
understanding of its significance. It must identify the cultural resources
that constituted and informed the “realities” of the participants and shaped
their responses to it. And it must
note the different ways that the various participants interpret and respond
to situations. II.
Structures are also shaped by events. Human life
takes place in a world that has its own properties, its own caprice.[17] Whatever conventional understandings we
bring to events, the events need not conform to our idealized notion of it (Sahlins 1981:6).[18]
When used to encompass situations in a
world that escapes human presuppositions the symbolic elements of a code may
take on new implications, creative nuances:
“[E]very use of a word in and for a world we do not control is a risk
to its meaning” (Sahlins 2004:146). And not only words but every meaningful
social convention. As symbols are deployed
to bring meaning to situations they take on fresh nuances according to the circumstances
of their deployment (cf. Sewell 2005:204).
In practice, if structure can inform event, event can shape structure
(Giddens, Sahlins). Even more, events produce history, and
history – selective remembrances of events past – becomes structure. Events as they take place are sedimented in conceptions of reality that are being
continuously revised by experience. “If
the culture … reproduces itself, it reproduces itself in an altered state” (Sahlins 2004: 292).
As events reproduce the structure in place they also revise it through
continuous flow of idealized enactments.
And as there
are multiple readings of what is taking place, there are multiple concepts of
what has occurred in the past.
Disputed events lead to disparate memories and disputed histories, and
to disparate notions of the importance of particular events. And beyond the diverse readings of events
by participants in an event there are the properties of the world – that is,
the empirical nature of the situation itself, which exerts an influence that
is extraneous to the imaginations of those present. So the parameters of the event, the
conjuncture of persons and viewpoints and agendas and positions, are
conditions that can escape immediate recognition and nevertheless endow it
with a significance that becomes important in subsequent settings. Events considered insignificant at one time
can in other contexts be accorded critical significance. An adequate
cultural explanation for an event, therefore, must also include not only the
conditions that gave the event significance but also the revisions in the
structure that the event created. It
means identifying the way human beings through their collective and separate
activities creatively produce the realities they live in (Barth 1993:8, 6-7). III.
Human beings are agents and creators of the structure in place. The cultural
frames within which humans act, the keys by which they interpret events are
never singular; multiple readings and reactions to them are possible. Moreover, individuals
have “widely varied interests, capacities, inclinations, and knowledge”
(Sewell 2005:209) they pursue particular agendas, making use of the cultural
resources available to them in order to fulfill their individual
purposes. People are creative agents
in the world, making decisions about how to understand their experience and
how to react to it, deploying the resources of culture in respect to their
individual agendas. In the process of
creating their cultural realities people elaborate or discard their customary
practices according to the exigencies of their everyday affairs (Barth 1993: 1993:8,
6-7). Structure is in this sense a
repertoire of meaningful forms -- categories, images, ideals, narratives –
that folks deploy with a view to giving significance to their experiences. They are in effect sifting the cultural
resources available to decide what are most workable in their immediate
contexts (Barth 1993:5). IV.
What humans create reflects and reproduces the cultural
conventions in place. Humans are products
of structure as well as its creators; the relationship is reciprocal. The form a
certain action takes and the significance it acquires derives from social
conventions already established. As
people deploy the cultural resources familiar to them so as to encompass
their experiences, they act according to conventions already familiar to
them. In their behavior they exemplify
presuppositions already inherent in customary practice. As folks read situations and react to them in
terms of conventions already established they reinforce and reiterate those
practices. The habitus,
cognitive and motivating structures of “regulated improvisations” are a “product
of history [that] produces individuals and collective practices, and hence
history in accordance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]:78, 82). The pattern of behavior is in this sense “unconscious”
in that it is shaped by and informed by scenarios already in place, scenarios
that suggest ways of behaving and typical ways that affairs may proceed, or ways that natural phenomena relate, and that people
typically react to particular circumstances.
Such unexamined practices have been called the “doxa,”
ways of life and thinking that are taken for granted, considered “natural” (Bourdieu 1977
[1972]: 164; Amossy 2002).[19] So the culturally
constituted “realities” that creative actors produce authorize not only the events
but also the individuals who produce them.
Sentient agents, acting on their own volition, carry out and behaviorally
display patterns of social behavior already immanent in their ways of life (Sahlins 2004:157).
Sahlins 2004: 155 “… persons can be
empowered to represent collectivities:
to instantiate or personify them, sometimes even to bring them into
existence, without, however, losing their own individuality. … history makes
the history-makers. Sahlins 2004: 291.
“The event was contingent, but it unfolded in the terms of a
particular cultural field, from which the actors drew their reasons and the
happening found its meanings.” “… the structural coherence of a contingent outcome … ” Sahlins 2004:
292. “Who or what is a historical
actor, what is a historical act and what will be its historical consequences: these are determinations of a cultural
order, and differently determined in different orders. No history, then, without culture. And vice versa, insofar as in the event,
the culture is neither what it was before nor what it could have been.” We then
presume that a cultural explanation of an event then entails recounting · what individuals did in culturally
constructed situations, · how their action evinced the
structure in place, and · how it also deflected affairs
according to the specific styles/ actions/agendas of the actors involved. It is possible to say of an event, as
Sahlins did about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic hit ??? in “The situation put him
in a position to make a difference, and the situation constituted the
significance of the difference he made” (Sahlins
2004: 157). ================ Our frame of
reference for examining and interpreting the course of events that created
the fractured community of Shibar includes,
therefore, the following terms: · structure (the categorically
constituted system of meanings in place), · event (the exigent, discursive,
jumbled, even tumultuous flow of human affairs), · world (the materially constituted
conditions of place and circumstance, including other animate beings), · and agents (actors with individual
purposes wielding cultural forms to cope with the practical exigencies of life), · habitus (the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of acting
that are taken for granted, acquired through the activities and experiences
of everyday life). |
[1] The British make no mention of an alaqadari (a sub-governor) in Shibar in the 19th century (Adamec. ??? Gazatteer, Bamian). The first alaqadar was not well received. My notes: [8-78] Mir Ali Ahmad Beg and Arbaab Kabir [of Bolola] said the first Alaqadaari was set up in Bulola (I think first by Amanullah). The Saqaw sent a man whom they did not accept (some trouble with him at least) and the real alaqadar was set up finally by Nadir Khan [r. 1929-1933]. This was first in Bulola. He stayed in the guest room of Bulola. He fought with someone (over what?) and finally he left and went to house of Mir Mowladaad [in Shumbul] for a while, then moved back again to Bulola. He was for a while in the house of Sayed Taalib Shaa (in Shumbul) and then back to Bulola, etc. People didn't want him. Eventually a place was made for him and his staff in Shumbul.
[2] The number of pastoral nomads holding land in the region was increasing as they often loaned money to the peasants with the land as collateral; failure of the borrower to pay could entail losing his property (cf. Ferdinand 1962 [Nomadic expansion]).
[3] I here use the term “Shia” as that is the usual term for the “Athna’asharia Shi’a” in the region. To keep my narrative clear I will avoid using the more the more presice term.
[4] I avoided answering this question for many years because telling that story required giving information that could have been used against the various parties involved, for the precipitating issues were still alive. All the figures in this affair are no longer on the scene: most have passed away.
[5] Paul,
Jim. 1980. “The Khalq Failed
to Comprehend the Contradictions of the Rural Sector: Interview with Feroz
Ahmed.”
[6]
The political situation in Shibar seemed to exemplify
the pervasive mechanisms of social control that Foucault emphasizes in his
work. He sees power as permeating all of
social life, acting in a plethora of small and insignificant contexts. Rather than deriving power and influence from
large institutions such as a state or the influence of certain classes, he
stresses the informal relations and encounters of social life, which work in
disparate and conflicting ways to solidify conventions of practice. Power for him is manifest “through ceaseless
struggles and confrontations” that form “a chain of connections, a system.” “[L]ocal conditions
and particular needs” give form to the flow of events “in piecemeal fashion” to
create larger aggregations of the collective will.
Foucault,
Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley.
[7] It seems unnecessary to derive the contrast between family life and public life from the Greeks, as Habermas does. Rather, we see in the Greek categorical distinctions that Habermas adduced a particular instance of how societies develop social controls even in the absence of a state.
[8] The original formulation was articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure for the study of language and extended and elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss for the study of all cultural products, and later emended by other social scientists (Sahlins, Giddens, Bourdieu, Ortner). Saussure’s primary interest was in exposing the structure of the code that informed speech; Levi-Strauss’s interest was analogous, only on a cultural level: he sought to elucidate the “unconscious” patterning of meanings in the products of the human mind, as in (the topics of his own work) kinship systems, patterns of economic exchange, and the construction of myth (cf. Crick, Malcom. 1976. Explorations in Language and Meaning. London: Malaby).
[9] Sahlins, Marshal.
[10] Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism, as well as Marxism, is that they obscure the essential uncertainty of the human condition (1977: 5 ff.). Sahlins’s critique (1981, 1985) seeks to correct the emphasis by noting how categorical systems are revised in practice: “The world may not conform to the presuppositions by which some people talk about it” (1981:6)..
[11] Gould,
Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of
History.
[12] Mann,
Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, Vol I: A History of
Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1720.
[13] The fundamental distinction between event and structure was articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure for the study of language, famously extended and elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss for the study of other human products. Saussure’s primary interest was in exposing the structure of the code that informed speech; Levi-Strauss’s interest was analogous, only on a cultural level: he sought to elucidate the “unconscious” patterning of meanings in the products of the human mind, as in -- the topics of his own work -- kinship systems, patterns of economic exchange, and the construction of myth. Structuralist thought has been emended in different ways by other social scientists (Sahlins, Giddens, Bourdieu, and others).
[14] Sahlins, Marshal.
[15] Sewell
(2005:205 ff.), in an effort to make Sahlins’ frame
of reference more usable to historians, emends Sahlins’s
frame of reference in ways that seem fully compatible with the original
intent. Sewell notes (what Sahlins well knew) that actual societies are never informed
by a single structural system; societies are instead “sites of a multitude of
overlapping and interlocking cultural structures … [that] are only relatively
autonomous.” Because these disparate
“cultural structures” “contain common symbols, …
[that] refer or lay claim to common objects, and … coexist in and hence inform
the subjectivities” of the members of a society ?? (Sewell
?????).
[16] We do not insist that imagined structures of significance are perfectly consistent, only that as the elements of a system are elements of an idealized order they more or less “seek” consistency.
[17] Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism, as well as Marxism, is that they obscure the essential uncertainty of the human condition (1977: 5 ff.). Sahlins’s critique seeks to correct the emphasis by noting how categorical systems are revised in practice.
[18] Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. …???
[19] Amossy, R. “How to do things with doxa: Toward an analysis of argumentation in discourse” Poetics Today [fall, 2002] Vol 23 no. 3: pp 465-487.