St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

56 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 3. Общее и особенное в регионах Афганистана и трансграничных регионах... geared to understanding processes of state-formation, yet these social actors are rarely considered as being of significance for understanding Afghan culture or sociality. This paper is a study of Afghan commodity traders whose work and lives is of a global nature both in its significance and scale. The daily lives of the men on whom the paper focuses cross multiple types of geographic boundaries, including those that mark off nation states, cultural areas, regions and continents, and others that distinguish the ‘landlocked’ deserts, plains, and mountains of Asia from the Indian ‘oceanic world’. The ethnographic material presented documents the forms of exchange, movement, and activity that characterise the lives of these traders. Its key aim is to show how these forms of activity and mobility are critical to the fashioning of a translocal context that cuts across the boundaries of South and Central Asia and the ‘postcolonial’ and ‘post-Soviet’ worlds. The position developed in the paper departs from the geographical focus on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier that informs much writing on Afghanistan. The geographical optic the paper takes, rather, is on the links that trade and traders forge between Afghanistan and the former Soviet states of Central Asian and Eastern Europe, as well as between different parts of this region. By bringing attention to the important role played by Afghans in forging such trans-national and –cultural connections, I seek to demonstrate aspects ofAfghanistan’s relationship to the world that are rarely captured in security-focused discussions of the so-called ‘Af-Pak’ nexus. More broadly, therefore, the paper addresses the ways in which traders’ perspectives on life in this dynamic yet fraught arena challenge much that is currently thought about what is now a global point of reference in discussions concerning ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and so-called ‘failed states’. In order to accomplish these goals, the paper explores the everyday lives of Afghan traders, documenting their shifting social and cultural identities, as well as the ways in which their work helps to inform the cultural worlds of those with whom they interact. Robert Nichols (Stockton University, Galloway, New Jersey, USA) The Pashtun Borderlands 1944–1947 During the World War II years and then after 1947 and the partition of British- India, the nation-states of Afghanistan and newly independent Pakistan struggled to consolidate control over claimed territories and to incorporate variously autonomous internal and border populations into national systems of politics, law, economic development, and social regulation. State-building institutions and mentalities produced discourses about modernity, progress, and development. They also produced efforts to control border trade, collect taxes, impose military conscription, and promote national policies about language, education, and culture.