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Key issues : Cultural issues : Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan
from Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan by Peter Coleridge
The ethnic nature of the conflict in Afghanistan has to do with where people perceive their identity to lie, and this is inevitably bound up with values, whether cultural, ethnic or religious. This fact alone indicates that there is no single 'Afghan culture'. There is, for example, a difference between the culture of rural and urban communities, even within the same ethnic group; and there is a marked contrast between the cultures of different cities such as Mazar, Kandahar, Kabul, and Herat. It is also difficult to disentangle 'culture' from 'politics'. The Taliban, for example, who insist on such bizarre rulings as shaving under the armpits and having a beard at least six inches long, indulge in a political manipulation of culture in the name of religion. Although the Taliban are mostly Pushtun, their particular brand of politicized culture and religion is not supported by many Pushtuns, especially the more educated. In what follows there are specific references to Pushtun culture because it looms large in many outsiders' perception of Afghanistan, but it must be remembered that about half of Afghanistan is not Pushtun.. In Afghanistan's eighteen years of conflict traditional value systems have been reinforced in some ways and broken down in others. For example, ethnic identity has become more important, while the extended family system has tended to collapse when many husbands are killed, leaving thousands of widows. The fact that three million Afghans have experienced different cultures through being refugees in either Pakistan or Iran has also had an important effect on cultural attitudes and expectations. In particular it has demonstrated to many of them that education is the key to development - of the individual and his or her family - and the lack of education in Afghanistan is one of the main reasons why they are reluctant to return. On the other hand, the monastic-style education of large numbers of Afghan boys in the Quranic schools of Pakistan spawned the Taliban (which means students).
The one thing that is common to all Afghans is their commitment to Islam as both a belief system and as a social programme. 'If great numbers believe a prophet is authentic and they are in agreement on the means to apply the messenger's teachings in their lives, the result is order and social progress. Unity of belief is linked to collective well-being.'1 Islam itself brings with it a sense of social responsibility, evident in such things as zakat and ushr, both forms of donating charity to those who have less. Helping deprived people, which includes disabled people, is a religious (and therefore charitable) duty through which the giver accrues credit for the hereafter. Islam brings a strong sense of morality. People are respected and earn status to the degree that they keep to the moral code. Islam provides a meaning system, a source of hope, and a gathering point. The mosque is the centre of the community.
The typical Afghan village house consists of a high-walled compound enclosing a complex of inter-connecting mud buildings which accommodate the extended family. From five to twenty people or more may live in this space. Walking though an Afghan village one is conscious that most activities go on behind these compound walls, and are private. Interaction in public spaces is much less than in, for example, an Indian village.
In common with many other poor societies, survival in a subsistence economy like that of Afghanistan depends primarily on cooperation and mutual support within the kin group. The extended family is the prime source of social welfare. Contributing to the family is prized much more highly than making one's own way in the world. Anybody in receipt of a regular income is duty-bound to contribute to the common family fund; dereliction of this duty is despised, and for the vast majority of Afghans unthinkable. If a family member cannot contribute because he or she is disabled, this has an important bearing on their status in the family.
In traditional rural Pushtun society the survival of the family - or at least the degree to which it flourishes - is related to its status, which is related to its reputation. Reputation is determined principally by relations between the sexes, which means that men protect the family's 'honour' by not allowing women to interact in the public domain. Fear of disgracing one's family in some way, however slight, is a very powerful force for social conformity, which is closely tied to religious conformity. The guardians of honour are the senior men in the extended family, who must command the obedience of all other family members. Power resides very definitely in these individuals, and it is used. While these values are strongest in Pushtun society they are also reflected to a lesser degree in the other ethnic groups of Afghanistan. Inability to marry because of disability deprives a man of the possibility of ever reaching such a position, and therefore reduces his status, either potential of actual.
In Pushtun society community decisions are traditionally made by a jirga, a permanent council of respected (and powerful) male elders. Power comes primarily from the number of male relatives a man has, not necessarily from wealth. In all parts of Afghanistan the concept of a shura also exists, which is a council formed for a particular purpose. When the central government is strong these two types of council, jirga and shura, tend to be weak. When the central government is weak they tend to be strong. At the village level people are inclined to give their allegiance first to their own community through the authority of the council and second to the government. Local tribal and ethnic loyalties are therefore reinforced through this mechanism. In the present era when development agencies are active it is common for these agencies to 'consult the community' through a shura which either already exists or which is created for the specific purpose of relating to the development agency. The concept of 'good governance' in the modern sense, an objective of some UN agencies, is not easily understood by people who have had traditional community decision-making mechanisms for hundreds of years. The CBR committees (CBRCs) and disabled people's organisations (DPOs) formed within the CDAP programme and their relation to these councils will be discussed below.
It is very difficult for a foreigner to determine what the words 'social integration' mean in a context where segregation is the norm, where most interaction occurs within the private space of the home, and where women in many Afghan communities only interact socially at rare events such as weddings and funerals. Who is marginalised and what is the measure of marginalisation? The effect is that there are two levels of discourse, one private and one public, one female and one male. Power belongs to the public sphere to which women do not have access. Jirgas and shuras do not include women as members, although in some parts of the country there are women's councils: there are women only CBRCs in the CDAP programme in the north, and, as already mentioned in a footnote, community fora in Mazar are run by women.
The discussion on gender relations in traditional societies, especially Muslim ones, is complex, and is the point where values clash most obviously with 'foreign' values. It is normal in the west to portray Afghan culture as inherently oppressive of women. But most Afghan men and probably many Afghan women perceive it as ensuring respect for women, by protecting them from harassment and from what they regard as the demeaning task of having to engage in wage-earning in the public domain. The idea (frequently quoted in the west) that disabled women suffer the double disadvantage of being disabled and of being female was firmly rejected by well-educated women working for the disability programme described in this paper. They did not accept that being a woman was in itself a 'disability'.2 According to anthropologist Benedicte Grima, a Pashtun woman's identity and her emotions themselves are culturally determined. As for the veil as a symbol of oppression, Grima's and other anthropological studies of Pushtun communities reveal that a Pushtun village woman would no more consider going out without her burqa than she would consider going out naked. She regards the veil as an essential part of her public identity as a woman.3 This does not however apply in other parts of the country. In the northern predominantly Uzbek city of Mazar, for example, women attend a co-ed university dressed in western clothes, unveiled.
A detailed understanding of social relations, especially of what integration implies in a society that has social segregation as a major value, has enormous importance for the design of social development programmes. A programme which aims to 'integrate disabled and other marginalised people into their own communities'4 cannot possibly measure whether it has reached that objective unless it understands and has defined what both marginalisation and integration mean in this cultural context.
A 'western' analysis might insist that a Pushtun woman's acceptance of the veil as part of her identity means she has internalised the oppression. The same is true of disabled people: accepting an inferior position in the social hierarchy 'as the normal state of things' is to internalise segregation. The process of integration must start with changes in perception by the person segregated. In Afghanistan this is particularly difficult. Attempts to 'modernise' the country by various rulers (especially by changing the role and status of women), most recently the Communists in the 1970s, have been the main cause of conflict.
Key issues : Cultural issues : Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan
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14/07/1999