St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

40 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 1. Историография и источниковедение Афганистана... Industrial sciences such as forestry highlight external connections mediated by global capitalism, however, wood will also be viewed through the local prisms of public and domestic architecture in Kabul. Public architecture will focus on the spatial distribution of wood and timber markets for supplying construction framing and finished products such as doors, cabinets and chests as well as charcoal for Kabul’s increasingly class-divided population. Domestic architecture will be introduced through the construction elements of framing, planking and beaming, but the foci will be on wood as cooking and heating fuel. Wood as fuel informs domestic spatiality and household consumption practices that were related routinely (daily, weekly, seasonally) to an urban market network for timber and wooden products including charcoal. From wood as fuel for winter heating and for tea-boiling and stewing broths and soups at the most ordinary, private and popular levels of consumption, to state sponsored river-damming and industrial steam-driven production at the national level of political economy, water and wood are intimately historically and ethnographically connected in all geographic regions and economic sectors of Afghanistan. Attention to the domestic use of water and private wells will flow into a discussion of the larger public market for commodified water in the form of bath houses, ice, and mobile water dispensaries in the mid-twentieth century Kabul. The primary focus of the paper’s second section on water is theAfghan state attempt to harness river water for hydroelectricity to replace forest fuelled steampower, beginning with theAmerican engineerA. C. Jewett in the 1910’s but most substantively in the context of the Kajaki dam component of the Helmand (and later Arghandab) Valley Authority that was a co-production of the U. S. and Afghan Governments. This Cold War hydroelectric development project is addressed through the environmental consequences of the deployment of agricultural and social scientific forms of knowledge by the U. S. Government and its functionaries especially theMorrison-Knudsen Corporation. The conclusion of the paper addresses the local environmental impact of global war on terror on Afghanistan through progressive deforestation and ground water pollution by depleted uranium munitions. Genriko Kharatishvili (Faculty of Asian and African Studies, St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia) Teaching the Dari Language Sources at the Faculty of Asian and African Studies of St Petersburg State University Academic staffmembers of the Faculty ofOriental Studies have always been readingwith students various sources from the countries studied.At the Department of the History of the Middle East one of the outstanding Soviet scholars specialising in medieval Iranian studies Professor Ilya P. Petrushevsky read with his students specialising in the History of Iranmanymedieval sources, whichwere used in his research and first brought by him