Ethnic groups

Language

Religious non-leteracy in a literate culture

Folklore and folk music

Folk music and instruments

Settlement patterns

Life Cycle in Afghanistan
Birth and Childhood
Marriage
Death and Inheritance
Sports and Games
Diet
Dress and ornaments

The inward looking society

The key here, as- in much of Afghan life, is kinship, that reciprocal set of rights and obligations which satisfies and, in other ways, limits an individual's status and role in relation to others in his group and outside his group. Although Afghan society can be pigeonholed as patriarchal (authority in the hands of old men), patrilineal (inheritance through the male line), patrilocai (girl moves to husband's place of residence on marriage), the idealized picture is greatly modified by certain elements which perpetuate matri-influences. For example, the preferred marriage for a man is to his father's brother's daughter, which keeps most females in the group. Intimate aunt-niece relationships, as well as daughter-in-law and mother-in-law closeness, strengthens the already strong matri-core in the society. Although women formally have little power, they are informally quite strong, not only in home-decision making, but often in extra-family economic activities, such as the sale of homemade items. Women have, in fact, always been politically strong in Afghanistan, as is well illustrated by the following, quote from Vigne (1840, 256—67): "Muhammad Afzal Khari, the eldest son. . . . I heard a very good account of him, but he is motherless, and has fewer friends in the Zunana," (i.e., harem or women's quarters), therefore he had less power than his half brothers.

The levirate, still common in some areas, keeps the matri-core intact in the family, as does the low divorce rate. Polygyny, when it (uncommonly) occurs, usually serves as a cohesive factor, for the multiple wives are often close kin. Personality clashes can and do occur, naturally, but the family generally manages to keep in-group conflict behind mud walls and presents a front of solidarity to outsiders.

No genuinely stratified class system exists in Afghanistan, although family connections usually determine leader and follower status. This arrangement tends to be flexible, however, and the 1964 Constitution established for the first time accession to the throne by the king’s eldest son.

Vertically, an Afghan kin-system stretching from nuclear family to nation can be described. Equivalent Afghan-English terms are not always identifiable, and Chart 16 is grossly idealized, because villagers and nomads in Afghanistan do not articulate the system in this fashion. In fact, I have never met an Afghan who could articulate the system, although all could, in varying degrees of comprehension, discuss functions (rights and obligations or lack thereof). Political loyalties usually become so diffused as to be unrealistic by the time subtribe is discussed, and are strongest at the levels up to section, with the present peak of intensity found among the Pushtun nomadic groups. Tribe has, in general, degenerated into a term of identification when away from one’s own village or area.

The system involves a genealogy of real or assumed ancestry, and the blood aspect permeates the entire fabric, for even the blood-feud is inherited. (For detailed discussions see Caroe, 1965; Spain, 1962.)

Non-Pushtun groups often refer to themselves with geographic rather than kin-tribal designations. Tajik, for example, call themselves Panjsheri, Andarabi, etc. Uzbak still use the old names of political units, popular during the great days of their power in Central Asia (Jarring, 1939).

Often, when two Afghans meet and complete the first formalized salutations, they compare kinship affiliations. The begin with major ethnic group, and go down the line until they find a common term to relate or not relate to one another. Their subsequent interactions are defined by this exercise in identification.

The nuclear family, foundation and primary ‘perpetuator of most societies, consists (from ego’s point of view) of father, mother, (and possibly stepmothers), siblings, and half-siblings, when applicable. A nuclear family can generally be defined as one, which eats food, prepared at the same hearth. At times’ this may include ego’s parents or even grandparents, particularly in the urban scene.

Aside from some literates (mainly Western trained), few Afghans have family names, but call themselves "son of so and so." Family names, however, relate to the necessity to identify oneself beyond the extended family group for some—but not all—bureaucratic purposes. Many conscripts still retain the "son of so and so" designation. While in the army, they will have small brass finger rings crudely engraved in Arabic script with their names and use the seals for identification purposes.

Family names become necessary, however, to those Afghans who leave the country for overseas educations. Others, particularly writers and scholars, choose to select personal identifications. Some adapt geographic names: Panjsheri, Ghaznavi, or Kohzad ("of the mountains"); some open a book and with eyes shut point to a word; still others adopt an adjective which relates to their occupations or interests, e.g., Tarzi ("stylist").

At times, the new names make life complicated, when two full or halfbrothers select different family names. Dr. Abdul Zahir (once Ambassador to Rome and former President of the first freely-elected Wolesi Jirgah—Lower House of Parliament—under the 1964 Constitution) and his brother, Dr. Abdul Kayeum (former Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education) have never adopted similar family names, and their respective children continue to use Zahir and Kayeum.

Another set of politically important brothers, Said Qassim Rishtya and Mir Mohammad Siddiq Farhang, actually tried to adopt a family name. Farhang had been named after Mir Mohammad Hashim, an uncle, and Rishtya after their father, Said Habib, giving both Of them parallel name structures. The brothers early became noted writers and adopted pen names which they still use: Farhang (Dan; "knowledge, culture, wisdom"), and Rishtya (Pashto; "truth"). They (and their sister, Roqia Abubakr, who served as an elected member in the Wolesi Jirgah, 1965—69) announced their intention to adopt Habib as a family name in response to a request from the local telephone company, which wished to eliminate the plethora of Mohammad Alis, Ghulam Rasools, etc. However, because of their close identification with their pen names, their efforts were ignored, even by the compilers of the Kabul telephone directory. So they remain Mir Mohammad Siddiq Farhang and Said Qassim Rlshtya.

Individuals are often referred to by their formal status titles (even after they cease to perform the attendant role): Wa:ir Sahib (cabinet minister); Wall Sahib (governor); 'Alaqadar Sahib (district governor);

Mastufi (or Khan) Sahib (finance official, tax collector). Such informal titles as Qar'i Sahib (one who' knows the Qor'an by heart in Arabic, usually a mosque teacher) are also used instead of nicknames or proper names.

Nicknames in the nuclear and extended family usually refer to kin relationship. Terms exist for younger and older brothers and sisters, and a close friend outside the family may be called bradar-jan ("dear brother" in Persian) or lala ("elder brother" in Pashto). A man referred to as "uncle," kaka, particularly in the modern Urban context, need not necessarily be a consanguineal relative, but simply an older friend, upon whom one can call for social, economic, or political advice or assistance. Such informal relationships have tended to expand in importance with the growth of urbanism in Afghanistan.

Pashto makes distinction between paternal (kaka, same as Persian for both paternal and maternal uncle) and maternal (mama) uncles. Kinship terms, therefore, reflect the masculine bias of the society, with the emphasis on the patnilineal side. Ego's mother and her sister (often married to ego's father's brother and the mother of ego's wife), however, have always been embraced in ego's kin-system. In addition, ego's mother's sister (maternal aunt) will become his stepmother under the levirate.

When two ethnic groups live in a gray zone and begin to intermarry, the kinship terms reflect the process, and the terms of the dominant group are adopted by the "lesser" group. Almost always, men of the dominant group will take wives from the lesser, and almost never will a man from the lesser group marry a woman from the dominant. In many areas of the north now occupied by the Pushtun, Pashto kinship terms tend to replace Turkic or Persian terms, as informal channels of communication between the two groups rapidly become formalized.

As an example, during Amir Abdur Rahman's forced migration of many sublineages of the Ghilzai Pushtun in the late nineteenth century, the following process developed in several villages with which I am familiar. When the Ghilzai first arrived, they constructed separate villages near the Uzbak or Tajik villages. If mates of close kin could not be found in the north, young men would return to their lineage homes in south central Afghanistan to seek out brides. Very quickly this system broke down. The Ghilzai who remained in the south did not want to see their daughters move away from the localized, extended family unit, for the very foundation of parallel cousin swapping is reciprocity. So the northern-based Ghilzai males had to look elsewhere for brides, and began to take daughters from the neighboring Uzbak and Tajik, and relations between the involved villages intensified.

Even today, Uzbak men rarely marry Pushtun women, but the Uzbak elders now meet with the Ghilzai elders to form an inter-village council. The mallk (headman), however, remains Pushtun. The term khan, used very indiscriminately in Afghanistan and the North—West Frontier of Pakistan, usually identifies a man as from a respected family, and not as royalty. Many have adopted the term khan simply as a prestige symbol in urban society.

Post-World War II voluntary migrant Pushtun (primarily Shinwari) to the Kunduz area were at first horrified at the Pushtun—Uzbak or Pushtun—Tajik miscegenation, but some have already begun to follow the same marital patterns as the earlier migrants. These processes, among others have, tended to make the nuclear or extended family the most important economic and political institution. Until Amir Abdur Rahman's forced migrations in the I 880s and 1 890s, the clan community (Murdock, 1949, 74—76) existed in many areas of easy áccessikility, especially among the Pushtun in western and south-central Afghanistan. The clan evolved, in Murdock's terminology, into a sib, a group with a name but no residential unity, called a sublineage. In addition, the shifting of extended families from village to village by Abdur Rahman's provincial governors further dismembered the clan community. Many villages which contained only one clan before 1880 (Temple, 1879) today have several lineages and sublineages represented.

Muslim custom permits a man four wives and all the concubines (surati) he can support. Several important figures in nineteenth-century Afghanistan kept large numbers of suj'ati, and the progeny of their unions include the genealogies, of the more prominent families in modern Afghanistan and gave rise to hundreds of new nuclear families. Issue of surati have equal rights with legitimate children, which partly accounts for several vicious nineteenth-century struggles for power.

Throughout Afghan society, but more prevalent in the nineteenth-century power elite, is the ghulam-bachah institution, under which the ruling amir keeps a son or Sons of tribal and ethnic leaders in his court, ostensibly to train them in the ways of government but also as hostages.

In another situation, an individual becomes a functional stepbrother (bradar-andar) or stepsister (khwar-andar if he or she shares a common "milk mother" (madar-i-reza'i or madar-i-shiri). Men and women in such relationships cannot marry.

By general consent, an outsider can become a member, or a blood brother, of a group. Sometimes a family with no sons, but surplus daughters, invites a vigorous bachelor outside the family to take the hand of a daughter and move in with them, the groom becomes the "son" of the family, with the same inheritance rights as a legitimate son.

The extended family currently serves as the major economic and social unit in Afghanistan, particularly among non-literates, although eventually the nuclear family may take over. Residential unity characterizes the extended family, and usually includes ego, ego's wife or wives, ego's children, ego's siblings, their wives or husbands and offspring, ego's parents, ego's parents' siblings and families (i.e., uncles, aunts, cousins of ego), ego's grandparents.

Sometimes residential unity is within the village rather than a single compound. Occasionally, the nuclear families, which make up an extended family reside in neighboring villages, particularly among non-Pushtun groups of the north, but exchange frequent visits and jointly participate in life crisis ceremonies. In addition, a new complication arose in the urban scene after World War II. Often, younger sons left villages for military service and remained in towns and cities to seek a fortune or obtain work on one of the myriad development projects. As a result, the families of two or more brothers in an extended family will not have residential unity, but, at least for the present, maintain intact their traditional rights and obligations. Naturally, lack of proximity places strains on these relationships. More strain actually occurs, however, when ego's parents and/or grandparents move to the city to live with him. Readjustment proves generally overwhelming for the older generation, and some take to opium or marihuana for solace, for once in the new urban situation, most older people have no roles to perform.

Another set of relationships comes under heavy strain when transferred to the urban scene. Male first cousins are often competitors for the daughters of their paternal uncles, but in the villages and nomadic camps they usually have little to do with actual mate selection, which is undertaken by their elders, thus preventing potential conflict. As mentioned elsewhere, seasonal intergroup feuds permit an externalization of the internal, interpersonal tensions which build up during the annual cycle. When segments of extended families (often brothers and their children) move into the same tightly compressed compounds of the city, however, violence becomes internalized, particularly between competing male cousins. So intense is the connection that one word for enmity, tuburganay, is derived from the Pashto term for cousin, tubur.

The dominant pattern is for the extended family to live in a single village or valley, or travel with the same nomadic group. Intensive social (especially parallel cousin marriages) and economic cooperation reinforces the importance of the extended family on the modern scene. Political loyalties also focus more on the extended family, replacing the nineteenth century emphasis on the lineage and sublineage among larger units, where clan communities and villages once existed.

Many educated young Afghans deride the value of the extended family in a developing society, but until the government can assume overall responsibility for social security and welfare, the extended family performs valuable functions in these spheres.

Few non-urban Afghans today use kinship designations above the sublineage, which, however, still retains residual economic and political functions, resorted to only after those of the extended and nuclear family have been exhausted. Few sublineages maintain any semblance of residential unity today, except in some zones of relative inaccessibility, such as mountainous Paktya. Groups which have voluntarily or forcibly migrated from their tribal homelands often can remember ancestors only as far back as grandfathers. Included in the sublineage are all collateral kin extending down from grandfather and his brothers, their children and grandchildren.

The ties become more and more genetically tenuous, and named ancestors normally end at the subtribal or tribal levels, and functional rights and obligations correspondingly lessen. Only in times of imperialistic drive, when tribes moved from loose confederation to empire did the tribe replace the lineage and sublineage as the most important political institution. The constant local warfare (blood feuds, raiding parties) usually occurred between sublineages (clan) or lineages, and only between tribes when they existed as smaller, relatively isolated Units (e.g., the Mangal and Zadran), or long-term struggles for major regional power erupted (e.g., the great tribal wars between the Durrani and Ghilzai). Tribe and sub-tribe, in particular, remain basic territorial designations (with real or imaginary borders), however, for even a displaced Durrani or Ghilzai points to his homeland in the southern and central parts of Afghanistan as his place of origin, a reality of the mind, if not geographic location (see Caroe, 1965, 3-24, for the classic genealogies).

All the above reach peaks of intensification among the nomadic groups, with political importance still in the lineage, or functional camp. Economic importance is dictated by the size of the winter and summer camps, and the fairly strict yet informal power structure which exists. This includes the famous trading camps of the nomads in the central mountains of Afghanistan (Ferdinand, 1962).

Although most literate Afghans continue to articulate the ideal system, the functions of the kinship structure have already obviously shifted in several directions in the twentieth century:

1. The forced migrations of certain Pushtun groups in the late nineteenth century caused a breakdown in the clan community the ending of the sublineage and lineage as important political entities, and a decline of the integrated section.

2. A shift of the economic functions from the clan village to the extended family occurred, in spite of the loss of proximal residential unity among many groups. Whenever a man is away from his extended family, working on a development project or in the city, he maintains close economic ties with his extended family, sending them money and seeking out jobs for his close kin. Some of the surplus village labor force moves to the towns and cities, thus helping maintain the ecological balance in rural areas. The more relatives a man has in the city, the more important he becomes in the localized, newly introduced work groups.

3. Shifts in population also resulted in intergroup marriages between neighbors. Generally Pushtun males marry non-Pushtun females, but seldom do non-Pushtun males marry Pushtun females.

4. Development projects brought about a gradual post-World War II movement from rural areas to urban centers. Forced and hired labor and conscripted army and labor corps service thrust young men into contact with opportunities outside the kin-oriented, socio-economic-political structure. In many cases, the returnees have drifted into informal groupings within their villages, and their accepted leaders, although outside the formalized power structure, influence decisions, especially when development projects enter the area. Factory workers and truck drivers have developed their own leader-follower patterns outside the kin structure, and they exhibit the attributes of incipient unions. The same is true of the miners of the Pul-i-Khumri and Darra-yi-Suf areas.

Kinship, however, still substitutes for government in most areas, and social, economic, and political reciprocal rights and obligations function effectively ~vithin the extended family. For how long, depends on the imagination and vigor with which the central government pushes progressive development programs and the degree of acceptance by the village-nomadic power elites, which slowly realizes that acceptance means the survival of their own local power—at least in the short run.