List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction
Nafay Choudhury and Annika Schmeding
*This chapter is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from NIOD Institute.

Chapter 1. Strategies of Survival: Navigating Kabul’s Money Bazaars
Nafay Choudhury

Chapter 2. Obligation, Failure and the Promise of Migration
Annika Schmeding

Chapter 3. A Month in Coal Country
Abhilash Medhi and Abdul Ahad Mohammadi

Chapter 4. The Protest as Field Site: The Deh Mazang Suicide Attack and the Disruption of a Movement
Melissa Chiovenda

Chapter 5. All Women Are Equal, but ‘Begum Sahibas’ Are More Equal Than Others: Exploring Opinions of Upper Middle-Class Pakistani Women about Education
Saima Khan

Chapter 6. Women’s Worlds: Vignettes and Memories of Afghanistan
Farhana Rahman

Chapter 7. Familial Frontiers: Researching with Hindustani Musicians in Kabul
Michael Lindsey

Chapter 8. Drawing on the Frontier: Sketchbook-Cum-Journals and My Positionality as an Ethnographer of the Kalasha
Tom Crowley

Chapter 9. Kashmir as Fragments of My Diary
Omer Aijazi

Conclusion: Predicaments of the “AfPak” Frontier Ethnographers
M. Nazif Shahrani

Index

Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Edited by Nafay Choudhury and Annika Schmeding

236 pages, 29 ills., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-759-5 Hb Published (November 2024)

eISBN 978-1-80539-760-1 eBook

Details

“There is a great deal to commend this volume … there is no other collection of essays by fieldworkers who have worked in the region that addresses the dynamics of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” • Magnus Marsden, University of Sussex

“I think this volume is one of the first groundbreaking editions to question conventional knowledge production based on ‘ethnographies’.” • Katja Mielke, Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies

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.

Nafay Choudhury is Assistant Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. He has won several international prizes for his writings on legal pluralism and private governance, including the Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize and the Asian Law and Society Association Article Award.

Annika Schmeding is a Senior Researcher at the NIOD—Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Her previous research earned theDutch National Master Thesis Prize in Asian Studies and the Leiden University Thesis Award. Her most recent publication is Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Subject: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

Area: Asia

LC: GN635.A3 F76 2025

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC019000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Methodology; SOC024000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Research

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Edited by Nafay Choudhury and Annika Schmeding

Subject: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

Area: Asia

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Contents

Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Edited by Nafay Choudhury and Annika Schmeding

Subject: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

Area: Asia