Category Archives: Anthropology/Sociology

Food Sovereignty vs. Food Aid: Why Smallscale Farming Suffers

Agriculture, Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Development, Environment, Food and Drink, Picturing Yemen (by Varisco), Yemen
Traditional farming in al-Ahjur, Central Highlands (photography by Daniel Martin Varisco)
The early major civilizations in the Middle East and Asia with their head start several millennia ago had one thing in common: an agricultural base that fed not only people but led to development of states and their services. Major river systems like the Nile and Tigris/ Euphrates, the Ganges of India and the Yellow of China were important centers for mass production, but at the same time small-scale farmers utilized a variety of water sources or practiced dry farming in a variety of ecozones across continents. Although there were periodic famines due to climate variability or political violence, until the start of the last century many countries were able to grow most of the food needed for their citizens and several were major exporters.

In 1798 Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist in his day, suggested that humanity faced a major food crisis. At that time the world population was around one billion; today it is closing in on eight billion. Malthus argued that population growth, if unchecked, grew at a geometric rate over time, but food production increased only arithmatically; thus it was inevitable that there would be food shortages, especially for the poor. At the time Malthus was unaware of later advances in agricultural technology, but his warning still serves a purpose. There needs to be a way to ensure that any form of food production is sustainable. The so-called "Green Revolution" that prophesied major dams and irrigation schemes as the wave of the future has indeed been a wave, but far more destructive to the environment and local agricultural traditions than anticipated.
 
If we are to recalibrate the model of Malthus today, it is less a mathematical issue than a bureaucratic one fueled by monopolistic profit making. In the United States about half of all family-owned farms are considered small-scale, but they generate only 21% of production. There has been a general decline in the number of farms in the U.S. from a high of 6.8 million in 1935 to about 2 million in 2021. The problem is even grimmer outside the industrialized West, where overall crop diversity has declined by 75% in a century, in large part due to the domination of commercial seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Not surprisingly the need for food aid has grown in recent years.
 
The case of Yemen has become a poster child for food aid since the humanitarian crisis began in a war that started in 2015. As noted by the World Food Program

The current level of hunger in Yemen is unprecedented and is causing severe hardship for millions of people. Despite ongoing humanitarian assistance, 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure. The number of food insecure people is projected to go up to 19 million by December 2022. 
The rate of child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world and the nutrition situation continues to deteriorate. A recent survey showed that almost one third of families have gaps in their diets, and hardly ever consume foods like pulses, vegetables, fruit, dairy products or meat. Malnutrition rates among women and children in Yemen remain among the highest in the world, with 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under 5 requiring treatment for acute malnutrition. 

Historically, the rich and fertile land of Yemen, stemming back three millennia to the ancient kingdom of Sheba (Saba), was the bread basket of Arabia. During the 13th century, for example, Yemen boasted diverse crop production from the hot and dry Red Sea Coast to cultivated mountain terraces at the highest point on the Arabian Peninsula. One of the ruling sultans, al-Malik al-Ashraf Umar, interviewed local farmers and wrote a major treatise of the agriculture practiced in Yemen in his time. There were, of course, periodic famines, but overall Yemeni farmers were able to feed themselves and export grain north to Mecca. After the civil war in the 1960s toppled the long-lasting Zaydi imamate, the resulting republic in Yemen’s north received major development aid for improvement of agriculture, but most of this had limited impact at the local level. As the population grew, from less than seven million in 1976 to now reaching 30 million, and unregulated drilling of tubewells drew down aquifers drastically, food production has declined precipitously. There is still fertile land and Yemen’s limited water resources can be used in a sustainable manner, but the ongoing war has ground the economy to a virtual halt. Farmers are still growing food, but it is not clear how much. The fact remains that without imported food aid, there would be a massive famine.

While there is little choice not to send massive amounts of food aid to Yemen to meet the emergency, there is also an urgent need to revitalize the rich agricultural production systems of Yemen, many of which rely on dry farming techniques developed over centuries. Current violent conflict makes such an emphasis difficult, but there are opportunities to work with local Yemeni communities and NGOs. The need is not for foreign technical know-how, an approach that has been ineffective and a waste of funding, but to assist Yemenis in rebuilding terrace walls and using their own seeds, especially for food crops like sorghum which grow well at most elevations. Without contributing to Yemen’s food sovereignty, the ability of Yemeni farmers to grow their own food in harmony with the environmental constraints and not overly dependent on foreign inputs, food aid is a bandage on a gaping wound.

One of the main contributors to the decline in traditional varieties of seeds and crops around the world is the corporate monstrosity previously known as Monsanto. Fortunately, Monsanto with its GMO push never made inroads in Yemen, but the results have been negative elsewhere. The destruction from its pesticides and control of seeds has been known for over two decades. The negative impact has been especially hard in India, which the film Bitter Seeds explores. By pushing GMO seeds, especially cotton, that turned out to be problematic and an economic burden, farmers were locked into dependence on imported seeds and this led to a decline in the local seed varieties, many of which were well suited to local environments after centuries of use. The fact that major aid donors such as the World Bank have pushed GMO seeds despite the enormous economic and bureaucratic burdens these impose on developing nations, has reduced rather than aided food production, especially given the focus on cotton. Regardless of the negative health impact of GMO foods, the overriding issue is saddling local small-scale farmers worldwide with expensive, imported production needs and has devastated locally adapted crop varieties.

Anthropologist Joeva Sean Rock has just published an ethnographic study entitled We are not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana. He shows that despite the promise of improved cotton varieties, the results were far less promising and actually disrupted local food production, which has been predominantly small-holder. In addition, by talking to Ghanian farmers and activists, he realized that the food aid providers started with the assumption that local farmers did not know how best to farm and they needed foreign assistance or they would starve. Instead of working with farmers to build on their knowledge honed over centuries through all kinds of climate change, they simply presented an unsustainable package deal with strings attached from the outside.

The lesson for the future of Yemen’s agriculture is obvious. Yemeni farmers have been successful in small-scale food production for centuries. While no one is proposing going back to reliance on simple scratch plows and animal labor as a permanent solution, the old systems can be built on and updated with appropriate changes. A major proponent of responsible change is the Yemeni NGO YASAD, the Yemeni Association for Sustainable Agricultural Development, the activities of which have been curtailed as the Yemen war wages on. Food aid must continue to avert famine, but aid to revitalize Yemeni farmers’ food production is just as urgent a need. Major donors like the World Bank, UNDP and FAO, USAID and all other interested agencies should find ways to help Yemeni farmers and local communities directly, not by imposing outside methods but allowing Yemenis to expand on their own successes.

Daniel Martin Varisco is an anthropologist and historian who conducted ethnographic research on highland springfed irrigation in Yemen in 1978-1979 and returned more than a dozen times as a development consultant and historian. He is currently translating the 13th century agricultural text of al-Malik al-Ashraf and other Rasulid documents on agriculture.

This post was republished on Informed Comment: https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/sovereignty-farming-suffers.html

Omar Dewachi on Iraq

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Iraq, Iraq War

Omar Dewachi, an anthropologist who was an Iraqi physician during the Gulf War, has published an article from his forthcoming book, which is entitled “When Wounds Travel: Ecologies of War and Healthcare East of the Mediterranean”.

Here is the start of the article. To read the whole article, click here.

A call from the surgical residence in the outpatient clinic informing us of a new admission to the ward. “It is a burn case,” he warns, “Najwa Abdul Hadi, female, in her early 30s, transferred from a local hospital with burn injuries covering nearly 90% of her body following the explosion of a cooking gas container at her home.” Mohammed and I, the two junior doctors on the floor, rushed to the other side of the ward, impatiently waiting at the service elevators to receive our new admission. Only days into our surgery rotation on the second floor of Baghdad Teaching Hospital—Iraq’s largest referral hospital and medical complex—we had finished medical school a month earlier, in May 1997. This was our first job as “real” doctors. Unlike Mohammed who had studied medicine at another med school, I had spent the past 6 years of my training in this teaching medical complex, and was familiar with the ins and outs of the hospital. Still, this was a new terrain for me. No longer a student, this night was my first time “on call”, and I was getting a bit anxious.

For many of us who lived through the first Gulf war, the sight of a burnt body became a doppelgänger of that war. One such doppelgänger was the charred body of one Iraqi soldier in the carnage of tanks which littered what became known as the “Highway of Death”—where the retreating convoys of thousands of Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait were attacked by the US military with Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry. DU was developed in the US during the Cold War era and experimented with for the first time in real combat during the 1991 Iraq War. It was designed to burn through thick metal surfaces, namely tanks and fortified armored vehicles. The artillery tips burn through the thick alloy, incinerating them inside and out upon impact.

Another image of that war, which I witnessed for myself, was the silhouette of two skeletal remains fossilized into the concrete walls inside the famous Amiriya Shelter, where 408 people were killed with so-called bunker busting, “smart bombs.” US pilots nicknamed them “the hammer” for their massively destructive capabilities and wide-ranging blast radii. I visited the Amiriya shelter in 1991 after the cessation of the bombing campaign. I remember thinking that it was a blessing that those in the bunker did not suffer for long. It was more merciful and dignified to die on the spot than to endure the effects of surviving such brutalization. 

Seasonal Knowledge and Arab Gulf Almanacs

Agriculture, Animals, Anthropology/Sociology, Bahrain, Books You Should Read, camels, Environment, Folklore and Proverbs, Kuwait, Oman, Plants, Poetry, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Travel, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book: Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition of the Arab Gulf. Details about the book, including a free online pdf of the table of contents can be obtained here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95771-1

Below is the start of the Introduction…


Before the middle of the twentieth century, everyday life in the Arab Gulf was oriented to the sea and the land. Along the coast and for the island of Bahrain there had been a thriving pearl diving industry until the 1920s, while fishing remained one of the most important food production activities. Trade around and beyond the peninsula was still largely carried out by traditional dhows. Apart from Oman, which has a long tradition of irrigated and rainfed agriculture, most of the Gulf states faced a harsh, arid environment with limited water and only a few fertile oases. Herding of camels, sheep and goat was one of the main ways of surviving in the arid areas. It should not be surprising that prior to the oil wealth that created a lush economic transformation, the main topic of concern was the weather. Successful navigation, pearl diving and fishing required an intimate knowledge of seasonal change, as did pastoralism and farming.

Information on the seasonal sequence for the Arabian Peninsula stems back over a thousand years in collections of poetry, star lore and almanacs. One of the most important Arabic texts is the Kit?b al-Anw?’ (Book of Weather Stars) of Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/879), who is quoted by almanac compilers in the Gulf to this day. Ibn Qutayba describes in detail local knowledge about star risings and settings, weather seasons, pastoral activities, agriculture and a range of environmental conditions. Unfortunately, much of this indigenous heritage has disappeared, as the folklore of generations is now rarely passed on orally within families. In recent years older individuals in the Gulf have written memoirs, preserving their knowledge of life before the Petro Utopia. This gives us a glimpse of the past, a puzzle with many missing pieces, but not the full understanding that comes with actual contact.

Resurrecting the history of seasonal knowledge in the Arab Gulf and the entire Arabian Peninsula thus requires a textual archaeology. It is not enough to simply document what is written, as though one is showing off museum objects; this knowledge needs to be placed into a lived context to have a better understanding of how people went about their lives off the land and on the sea.

The past is like an ocean in which we can sample only a small part of the vast number of ideas and customs that have passed by over the years. To follow this metaphor, most of our sampling is along the shore, learning from individuals we can ask directly or engage with in ethnographic fieldwork. We can only cast our research net a short distance in trying to reach back into what really happened and was said in the past. A historian can sail as well, dropping an anchor where there seems to be something worth exploring. But there are depths in this ocean of knowledge that can never be reached. There are also reefs, barriers that make it difficult to have smooth sailing through our disciplined search for the past. To what extent can we know what local knowledge was shared? Then there is the question of what kind of fish we are trying to catch. Is everything that has been done and said, no matter how many generations back, something we should call “heritage”? If we read about it in a book, even one written centuries ago, does that automatically make it “heritage”? How can we vouch for the accuracy of what has been written down when we cannot see it for ourselves or question the interpreter? These are not insurmountable hurdles, but they do caution us to recognize the limitations of reconstructing the past.

My career as a scholar began in the highland mountains of Yemen, where I carried out ethnographic research on traditional water resource use and local agriculture in the late 1970s. Talking with farmers and observing their work for over a year allowed me to gain an understanding of local practices that no book could give me. While in the field I had access to a fourteenth century Yemeni agricultural text, which described many of the agricultural activities I was seeing for myself. My first book was an edition and translation of a thirteenth century Yemeni agricultural almanac. Over the years I have become what is best called a historical anthropologist, someone who looks at heritage as a product evolving from a past and not simply what one sees, without hindsight, functioning in the present. As an anthropologist I focus on the diversity of what people do and say, giving voice to them rather than plugging them into an outside theoretical package from the start. As a historian I have an opportunity in examining texts to see the strands of past knowledge that survive and still influence the present.

Yemen Film 1973

Agriculture, Anthropology/Sociology, Archaeology and Antiquities, Architecture, camels, Film and Video, Gender and Sexuality, Music and Dance, Qat (Catha edulis), Sanaa, Teaching Resources, Tihama, Travel, Tribalism, Yemen, Zaydi

This exquisite film was produced in 1973 and filmed in 1972, thus representing Yemen half a century ago. It is now available on Youtube. The filmmakers were Karen and Alain Saint Hilaire. The camera was a bolex ebm electric. It has filmed when Qadi al-Iryani was the head of government. There are scenes from the Tihama, Sanaa, Sa‘da, Ma’rib, etc, including many crafts, fishing, agriculture, a funeral, celebration of the end of the civil war and much more. It is well worth spending two hours to watch this archival film of a Yemen now largely past but not forgotten.

Qadi al-Iryani in 1972
Celebration in Sanaa on the anniversary of the end of the civil war

Water and Summer Heat in Alexandria

Anthropology/Sociology, Development, Egypt, Ethics, Travel
Stanley Bridge, Alexandria (© el-Sayed el-Aswad)

After one year of being forced to stay indoors (April ?2020 to May 2021) due to the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Egyptians from different parts of Egypt flocked to Alexandria, “the bride of the Mediterranean ‘arus al-bahr al-abiyad,” as they call it, seeking a fresh, cool breeze and access to the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Tensions have arisen between people’s personal experiences and official narratives concerning many different issues including critical access to water. Two issues related to the use of water are discussed here: one relates to the public access of the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea; the other concerns the supply of drinking water. In general, this issue relates to the fact that Egypt faces economic challenges attributable to mounting poverty, population growth, high inflation, increasing unemployment-particularly among young people, water shortage, decline in agriculture and food supply, and corruption.

Public beaches in Alexandria have been privatized as part of the government’s open-door policy, instigating discrimination and class problems. For example, the cheapest ticket mandated to get into a public beach area such as Miami or Sidi Bishr costs 25 Egyptians pounds per person. Such a price makes it difficult for a low-income family of six (with a resulting cost of 150 pounds) to go to and enjoy the beach. Rather, feeling excluded, they walk along the cement corniche, resting at various places along the coastal walkway, eating roasted corn or toasted seeds, and watching the more fortunate swim, socialize and play in the sands along the water’s edge.

Furthermore, there is an ever-growing problem pertaining to the increasingly high charges for the service of providing usable drinking and cleaning water to the citizens of the city. This problem can be exemplified by tensions expressed between a government official (GM) of a water company and an Alexandrian citizen (AC) as shown in a reconstructed dialogue between the two persons:

AC: (directing his speech to the GM) I am here to complain about the 4600 Egyptian pounds I paid to a meter reader (or collector from the water company). I had informed the collector that I had not used the water for 4 years as I had been out of country. My apartment was closed and nobody was there. I also told him that I had paid all water dues before traveling. But, he insisted that I should pay first, then, explain to the authorities that I had paid in advance. Here is the receipt of the payment. I would like you or the water company to reimburse me the 4600 pounds.
GM: (moving his right hand toward his mouth as if he were eating or swallowing something) There is no reimbursement as whatever enters the government’s tummy never comes back. You should have been careful. I mean, you should have refused receiving or paying the bill. You should have come here (to the water company) and complained before paying the dues as other people who had an experience like yours did.
AC: I do not understand. Do you have a specific procedure that I was not aware of?
GM: Yes. For example, a person, showing his passport as a proof for being out of Egypt for five years, complained that he was charged 6200 pounds for consuming the water that he did not use. He questioned the meter reader and did not pay the dues, but rather came to my office asking for an explanation. I told him that the passport could not be accepted as evidence as somebody else may have been living in the apartment and using the water. I advised him to bring a certificate from the Electric Company of his district showing that no electricity had been consumed in his apartment for the last 5 years. This person actually brought the certificate indicating no electricity was supplied to the apartment during this specific period of time. The water company was entitled not to waive the entire charge of 6200 pounds, as there were fees to be paid for the service, whether or not he used the water.
AC: Such a complicated bureaucratic procedure spoils our short visit to the city. My question is: On what basis does the water company charge people for water when they are away from their residences and not using the service?
GM: The charges are based on a reading of the water meters. But, in the case of a malfunction of the meter and/or absence of the customers, meter readers-collectors provide estimates of the charges.
AC: But the charges as shown in my case and the case of the person you just mentioned were very high despite both of us being outside of the country. I heard that the water company rewards meter readers based on the amount of money they collect. I mean more money they charge costumers more rewards they get.
GM: Yes, it is true.
AC: But this policy might contribute to the exaggeration of estimates made by meter readers in order to receive the rewards. How do you explain that?
GM: I cannot answer this question, as I did not designate this reward policy.

Frustrated at not being able to get his money back, the AC left the office. I was shocked by what I heard about the AC’s case as well as about this reward policy. Addressing this issue about one of the water companies in Alexandria, Wikipedia states that meter readers and collectors get rewards and “receive an incentive equal up to 30% of their salary for exceeding monthly targets.” Such a policy may benefit some employees, but hurts a lot of people. Other fair solutions or policies are needed.

el-Sayed el-Aswad

Far Horizons, Arduous Journeys, and The Conference of the Birds

Afghanistan, Anthropology/Sociology, Miniatures, Taliban, Terrorism Issue
“The Concourse of the Birds” (ca. 1600), Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Jon W. Anderson

Amid the blizzard of punditry and spin-doctoring – especially spin-doctoring from perpetrators and advocates of prescriptions for Afghanistan who turned from the Bush administration’s original goal of smashing al-Qaida and denying it sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which the 9/11 attacks were hatched to destroying Iraq and “nation-building” in Afghanistan – it is worth pausing to take account of how the startling swift advance of the Taliban there from a border post to a provincial capital then to all other provincial capitals in less than a week and Kabul on the weekend looks from Afghan and perhaps even Taliban perspectives. So far, those have been limited to interviews with media-savvy Afghan modernists, on the one hand, and a Taliban press conference on the other. Or, all the news that fits the script(s).

What is new among facts closer to the ground is the much derided and in recent months ignored Doha “process,” if we might borrow that term. Doha is the proximal point of departure for everything that has happened in Afghanistan since the former Trump administration negotiated, signed, and exchanged copies of an agreement with the Taliban last year. From the outside, to external observers, this all looked very diplomatic, including accepting the Taliban as a de facto international player. Very diverting, and pundits were diverted into deconstructing it as variously hasty, overdue, giving up on Afghanistan, or a typical Trump deal, all show but bankrupt at its core. But that wasn’t the Doha Process from Afghan perspectives.

By setting a date for withdrawal of US troops on the ground in Afghanistan in return for Taliban agreeing not to molest that withdrawal, that Trump agreement with Taliban negotiator-representatives reset the game in two ways. First, it concluded armed hostilities in a classic Afghan form of conflict-management where one side concludes it cannot win, stops fighting, and effectively changes sides (while on the surface hiding that) by withdrawing from the field, with the other side accepting that instead of destroying its foe. Second, it provided a sort of non-aggression pact, or informal, more private than public, assurance that the withdrawing party would not be molested in return for effectively laying down arms. This underlying structure of the Doha Agreement from an Afghan perspective, on which foreign observers focused as leaving the Afghan government to make its own agreement, has a denser significance in customary Afghan approaches to conflict management. In those terms, the high-level Doha agreement provided a model subsequently applied “down the line,” as it were at all the points of actual armed conflict in myriad local discussions, agreements, and private assurances by Taliban that they would not molest or revenge themselves on soldiers who laid down (and especially surrendered) their arms nor civilians who didn’t oppose them. They may or may not have had a strategy to preserve and take over existing apparatus of government, as well as discarded military equipment much paraded before the cameras. But this much is basic: they managed a negotiated cessation of fighting and freedom of movement for themselves.

I don’t have direct evidence of myriad local negotiations and private assurances of this sort; but the alternative favored by external pundits – that thousands of soldiers and police, all of them, spontaneously and simultaneously deserted a government too corrupt, distant, and indifferent to their own welfare – is inherently implausible. It is implausible, first, that all would do this at the same time, as if Afghans were of one mind like a flock of pigeons and, second, that the occasional holdouts might not have been taken by Taliban as betrayal of the deal justifying their return to fighting. By all accounts so far, there was little of that and a lot of quietly stopping and simply stepping out of their way.

The structural condition for this outcome was set by the final US strategy of driving Taliban into the mountains and hinterlands while securing urban centers where most of the population lived. To old hands, this might resemble an old Vietnam strategy and defiance of the Maoist alternative, though it probably follows a more contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine of pushing insurgents to the margins so the centers can develop and develop constituencies for development. Again, I do not know if this was the rationale, but the effect of pushing Taliban out of sight was to push them out of mind and so to fail to register localizations of the Doha Deal for what they were, a deal and not just threats to kill any who opposed them.

Second, subsequent Afghan behavior supports the hypothesis of quiet assurances not just in Doha and not just in myriad local settings but all up and down the spectrum from local to national forces and government. The sudden night-time flight of President Ghani, a day after a final – recorded – broadcast in which he proposed to plan a meeting to mediate a national council to negotiate differences, followed the next day by not-so-former grandees who still represented important constituencies, some armed, stepping forward to announce that they stood ready to organize and host such a meeting with the Taliban, suggests the fix was in, notwithstanding his professions of sudden decision and sudden departures. Former President Hamid Karzai, current co-President Abdallah Abdallah, and surviving Mujahadin leader Gulgbeddin Hikmatyar interposed themselves with not-so-subtle reminders of other constituencies in Afghanistan, including armed ones, that Taliban would have to take into account.

While Taliban do not have such a reputation from their previous takeover and time in power, their performative defiance of the rest of the world in that period has so far (not this week but since the Doha Agreement) taken a back seat or at least been supplemented by professions of wanting international recognition following performances of such at Doha and in – of all things – a press conference in Kabul two days after Taliban fighters entered the capital. Whether a Conference of the Big Birds will occur, and whether it might include the volunteer grandees, the gesture and the roles claimed by persons making it are wholly Afghan. Call it speculation in settlement, jockeying for position, attempts to take the game ahead now that the game behind is up. This is the normal next phase in customary Afghan conflict-management: it is not de-escalation, not compromise or cutting the difference, but realignment that recognizes and accepts interests and a politics of alliance-making that begins with collusion. Even former President Ghani’s statements from his new not-yet-exile in the UAE are such a bid to, in journalist terms, “relevance.” In this regard, it may have been wiser than the pundits realized for US President Biden to blame the Afghan army for its debacle, since that cast him, an outsider, and not them as the betrayed party.

Where does this leave journalists and other observer-interpreters? For the most part, they have been outside the local versions of the Doha Process in Afghanistan; within Afghanistan they have been close to modernist constituencies that hitched their stars after the first Taliban period to the two domains that Taliban then forbade, especially to women – namely, education and media broadly interpreted to extend from fashion to broadcasting, publicity, and centering on expressive professions. These are most accessible to foreign observers, first, because they want to be – those are their reference groups – and second because foreign observers already have categories for them that provide a kind of pre-understanding that is at best thin when it comes to Taliban but also when it comes to the other demographic most threatened by them in the past, the Shia Hazara.

The coming test not just for the New Taliban but for the old grandees is who will take an interest in those Afghans in whom foreigners take an interest. This is not just the media world of commentators and interpreters focused by modernists, and particularly by urban women who have grasped the opportunities in education and media to measure the distance they have come from the last time Taliban were in power; it also must include the Shia Hazara whose marja (religious leader/exemplars) in neighboring Iran have deep networks among co-religionists in Afghanistan. This time, Iran is not a bystander and, for those who worry about such things, has two decades of experience recruiting and deploying third-party volunteers/mercenaries in its own regional adventures. Whether or not it could mobilize them, at the least, Iran would take an interest in direct threats to the welfare of Shia in Afghanistan. Arguably, the stability of Afghanistan going forward will depend on such negotiations and alliances formed that Taliban neglected (or rejected) last time but whose public spokesmen now profess to want to engage.

My only prediction is that the process will drive outsiders crazy, and lacking local points of reference will test abilities to tell their own. Among those local perspectives…

In The Conference of the Birds, the Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur (1142-1220) described a meeting of all the birds to decide who would be their sovereign. Each bird represented some human fault, and after some discussion the wisest urged that they seek out the Simorg. To do that, they had to pass through seven valleys, one where they abandon dogmas, one where they abandon reason for love, one where they abandon worldly knowledge, another where they abandon desires and lusts.  In the Valley of Unity they realize that everything is connected, in the Valley of Wonderment that they have never understood anything, and in the final valley of Poverty that the ego is nothingness.  The birds experience agonies and pain.  Many die of fright even at the prospect of the journey, but some do set out, and a final 30 reach the abode of the Simorg (=30 birds in Farsi), which they realize is like the reality of a mirror in which one sees oneself reflected.

Jon W. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America. He conducted ethnographic research in Afghanistan in the 1970s.