Caravan of the Gone: Disorder, Ruination, and Place-Making in Afghanistan

Abstract

This thesis is about cultural senses of place and place-making in Afghanistan. For over forty years, since the communist revolution of 1978, Afghanistan has experienced continuous war. This has destroyed towns and villages and devastated the natural environment. It has left every family with lost or missing relatives. A group of anthropologists, seeking to understand the complex ways that war has impacted Afghan society, have researched the narratives and practices that emerged amid this chaos and precarity. My own research, based on fieldwork in Balkh and Bamiyan, contributes to this literature by investigating the cultural meanings of place and landscape in the aftermath of violence. During fieldwork, I drew on semi-structured interviews and a method of ethnographic walking, in which my informants walked with me through places of local significance: former dwellings, markets, shrines, caves, and gardens. As I walked with my informants through these landscapes, I observed the way they encountered places afflicted by war, and I documented the stories and memories that these places evoked. Ruination, in both a social and spatial sense, became a central theme of this project. Another important concept is socio-spatial order (nazm): an often-unspoken principle in which the social, moral, and cosmological order are interwoven through the medium of place. When war destroys and reshapes the landscape, it disrupts this delicate sense of spatial harmony, resulting in a perceived inversion of the socio-spatial order. This can lead to feelings of bewilderment and estrangement from once-familiar places. For my informants, practices such as spontaneous sociality, nostalgic reflection, pleasure outings, and visiting shrines became ways of refashioning place-worlds.