Rahmat

The chapter revolves around Rahmat, a young man, father of two, who lives in a rural village on the border with Pakistan. His case is different from the previous ones in that he embodies apparently all the characteristics that would be expected from an appropriate Pashtun masculinity. He is in fact a well-known and respected figure in his district. Under the surface, however, lies the conflicted personal history of a man who straddled the geographical border of the two countries to engage in drug trafficking and production, and who secretly longs to escape elsewhere to regain the sense of an ideal masculinity, of which he feels he was metaphorically robbed by the distortions of a war-ravaged social context. The sense of responsibility to embody the features of the “perfect” Pashtun man clashes with the inability to do so in the “right” way, due to the perceived degeneration of modern life in Afghanistan.

Conclusion

The conclusion to the book pulls together the many conceptual threads that emerged from the ethnographic material presented in the previous chapters. It argues for a human “shared psychic reality” that can only be expressed and operationalized through the meanings given to it by the cultural world in which each individual is immersed and lives. Thus, while psychic mechanisms have to be “primed” by the individual’s cultural and social environment in order to function meaningfully, so also cultural material, in order to be understood, has to be approached by investigating the subjectivities and psychological dynamics of those who utilize it and produce it. This is particularly true in the realm of conflict, in all its connotations, which is a constant presence in the pages of the book. Indeed, power is here considered to be constitutive of all relations of interdependence between individuals, and not simply as something that someone has and others have not, whether when producing harmony or conflict.

Between What “Was” and What “Is”

This chapter presents a briefer profile of four more individuals from Nangarhar province. The common theme among them is their coming of age in a quickly morphing social and cultural environment, and the frictions (both internally and outwardly) that each of them has to go through in order to make sense of contradictory cultural cues in a volatile political space. The author followed these four adolescents into their early adulthood and participated in their struggle to shape a future for themselves, amid war, new opportunities, and the call of tradition.

Rohullah

The chapter introduces the first of the main four informants that will be discussed in detail in the book. Rohullah was born and raised in Kabul and had to relocate, while still a child, to a small provincial town due to the civil war raging in the country. There, his performance of masculinity was considered inadequate by his peers, and he had to learn the hard way how to reshape himself as a worthy and culturally appropriate masculine man, in order to avoid being violently bullied. His story is about the creation, and pragmatic utilization, of multiple subjectivities (or “selves”), complementary and not necessary antagonistic to each other. The chapter will provide evidence of how these multiple subjectivities stand in dissociated spaces in relation to each other, and still unconsciously in communication with each other. Rohullah makes successful use of this unconscious dialogue to shift from a condition of subordinated and discriminated masculinity to one of hegemonic masculinity, necessary to survive socially and physically in a punishing environment.

Introduction

The chapter lays the theoretical and epistemological foundations on which the ethnographic analysis contained in the subsequent chapters is based. It explores how a particular kind of psychoanalytic approach and practice (intersubjective and relational) can be successfully utilized in ethnographic research to investigate the subjectivity of the ethnographer’s informants. It delves into the perspective from which masculinity is looked at in the book—that is, as a “cultural turf” onto which broader, personal psychological dynamics are played out. It then describes the methodology with which the research was carried out, which amounts to a “clinical ethnography,” characterized by long-term interview sessions with a select group of informants. Finally, it provides a rationale for the choice of such a methodological approach, by highlighting the intimate contiguity between the analyst’s and the ethnographer’s work in the field.

Baryalay

This chapter follows Baryalay, a college-educated man in his early thirties who hails from, and still lives in, a volatile rural village in Nangarhar province, marred by the conflict between the insurgent Taliban, the Islamic State, and the Afghan government. The chapter introduces the concept of self-representation, as the locus where different, even conflicting, self-images and subjective states find coherence and eventually lead to the “illusion” of the unity of the self. Baryalay in fact has to struggle between his concurrent identifications as a pacha (a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad), and as a Pashtun, which hold at times contrasting social requirements in terms of appropriate masculinity. Additionally, via the analysis of the personal experiences that Baryalay had in a geographical area of intense violent conflict and intimate danger, the chapter also elaborates on the way in which forty years of continuous war have considerably changed the understanding and performance of masculinity among Pashtun men.

Umar

Umar is a man from Jalalabad, now in his mid-thirties, who early in adolescence became a religious preacher for the Taliban movement. The defeat of the Taliban at the hands of the US-led coalition shook his beliefs and political convictions. After a period of personal confusion, he found a new path for himself, and now is a financial officer for an international organization that funds agricultural works in Afghanistan. The chapter elaborates further on phenomena of multiple subjectivities and healthy, adaptive dissociation between them, which it claims are key to understanding the developments in Umar’s life. By looking closely at Umar’s personal struggle, the chapter also investigates the depth with which enculturation and social arrangements shape the individual’s subjectivity. It argues, and shows, that culturally mandated life choices and behaviors may become authentically “one’s own,” and still conflict with more purely private and personally derived ones.

Historical and Ethnographic Background

This chapter sets the historical and ethnographic stage for a better comprehension of the subsequent chapters. It includes an overview of the recent history of Afghanistan and the run-up to the 2001 occupation of the country by Western coalition troops, as well as an introduction to the fieldsite in southeast Afghanistan, and to the ethnic group—the Pashtuns—that the protagonists in the book belong to. The chapter also presents an elaboration on the theme of culturalism, the misleading explanatory template that takes “culture” as the major (and often only) criterion to explain sociopolitical dynamics and personal behavior.