Anthropology
Open Access

Abstract

Cococting the “Other” in Afghanistan

M. Jamil Hanifi

The validity, truth and truth value of the text and context of Euro-American, especially postmodern Anglo- American, ethnographies of Afghanistan, is rarely interrogated. A systematic scrutiny of these ethnographies reveals how prolonged blind acceptance of faulty, distorted, misinterpreted, and cooked-up information buttressed by the authority of claimed “fieldwork” reproduced itself in widely circulated packages of pseudo-knowledge about the peoples and cultures of that country. Various degrees and forms of this recycling tradition are available in virtually all postmodern Anglo-American ethnographies of Afghanistan. Some instances of this reproducing tradition of pseudoknowledge have been interrogated elsewhere. This essay offers a culturally informed scrutiny of a concocted “Pashtun couple” stored in photographs tucked in a postmodern Anglo-American ethnography of Afghanistan