Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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. 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. 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.

What People Say

  • “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

Chapters

Chapter 1

Strategies of Survival: Navigating Kabul’s Money Bazaars

Author: Nafay Choudhury

Chapter 4

The Protest as Field Site: The Deh Mazang
Suicide Attack and the Disruption of a Movement

Author: Melissa Kerr Chiovenda

Chapter 7

Familial Frontiers: Researching with Hindustani Musicians in Kabul

Author: Michael Lindsey

Chapter 2

Obligation, Failure, and the Promise of Migration

Author: Annika Schmeding

Chapter 5

All Women Are Equal, but Begum Sahibas Are More Equal than Others: Exploring Opinions of Upper-Middle-Class Pakistani Women about Education

Author: Saima Khan

Chapter 8

Drawing on the Frontier: Sketchbook-cum-Journals and My Positionality as an Ethnographer of the Kalasha

Author: Tom Crowley

Chapter 3

A Month in Coal Country

Authors Abhilash Medhi and Abdul Ahad Mohammadi

Chapter 6

Women’s Worlds: Vignettes and Memories of Afghanistan

Author: Farhana Afrin Rahman

Chapter 9

Kashmir as Fragments of My Diary

Author: Omer Aijazi