Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Nafay Choudhury, Annika Schmeding

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781805397595
• eBook ISBN: 9781805397601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how—faced with frontiers—they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface. The Prelude to the Stories We Tell
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Strategies of Survival: Navigating Kabul’s Money Bazaars
• Chapter 2. Obligation, Failure, and the Promise of Migration
• Chapter 3. A Month in Coal Country
• Chapter 4. The Protest as Field Site: The Deh Mazang Suicide Attack and the Disruption of a Movement
• Chapter 5. All Women Are Equal, but Begum Sahibas Are More Equal than Others: Exploring Opinions of Upper-Middle-Class Pakistani Women about Education
• Chapter 6. Women’s Worlds: Vignettes and Memories of Afghanistan
• Chapter 7. Familial Frontiers: Researching with Hindustani Musicians in Kabul
• Chapter 8. Drawing on the Frontier: Sketchbook-cum-Journals and My Positionality as an Ethnographer of the Kalasha
• Chapter 9. Kashmir as Fragments of My Diary
• Afterword. Predicaments of the “AfPak” Frontier Ethnographers
• Index