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PREFACE
In 1978 and 1979, revolutions in Afghanistan and Iran marked a shift in the balance of power in South West Asia and the world. Since then, indeed, events in both countries have regularly dominated the media. Shaken by Khumeyni's overthrow of the Shah and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the world has once more been made aware that tribalism is no anachronism in a struggle for political and cultural self- determination. In both countries there has been the sort of tribal resurgence that so often in the past accompanied political upheavals such as they are now experiencing.
The Shah of Iran, miscalculating the strength of opposition to the secularism, excesses and western orientation of his regime, fell, with a suddenness and completeness that confounded the predictions of almost all the experts, to a genuine popular revolution led by the remarkable Ayatullah Khumeyni. In Afghanistan, where a palace revolution in 1973 had replaced the 200-year-old Durrani monarchy with a Republic headed by the last King's cousin, the government was unable or unwilling to put into effect its programme of reform, but here too the socialist military coup in March 1978 came sooner than expected by most experts, who also failed to predict the scale of the subsequent Soviet military intervention at the end of 1979.
By 1980 both revolutions were in trouble. The Taraki and Amin governments had not merely failed to win popular support in Afghanistan but rather managed to alienate it, while the Soviet forces and their puppet Karmal seemed unlikely to be able, by any means short of genocide, to defeat the nationalist insurgency, widely supported in the country especially by Islamic and tribal elements. In Iran the fundamentalist leaders, though continuing to inspire fanatical loyalties, no longer had the support of all the disparate elements that once united behind them. A major problem for the Islamic Republic was the resistance on the part of regional, ethnic and tribal minorities. Within the country, substantial numbers of pastoral nomads settled over the last decades have now resumed their former way of life, and tribal leaders long used to exile in the West have been welcomed back.
It has been difficult for observers, whether interested laymen or supposed experts on the area, to evaluate reports from the two countries. The main obstacle has been lack of reliable information, particularly on current events and aspirations in the rural and tribal areas, and on the anthropological and historical background to the present crisis. This volume is intended to go some way towards fulfilling the second of these needs. It is based on a series of papers delivered at a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in July 1979. The conference was in fact planned as early as 1977, when the convenors (Richard Tapper of SOAS and David Brooks of Durham) felt that in view of the considerable amount of research that had been done over the last two decades on the ethnography and history of the tribes of Iran and Afghanistan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the time was now ripe for stock-taking and generalisation, and an attempt at systematic comparison within a historical perspective, both between Afghanistan and Iran and also with other areas of the world.
By the time of the conference, the topic had acquired added interest and contemporary relevance. Most of the papers were circulated in advance, and some useful and wide-ranging discussions took place. Participants - anthropologists and historians of many persuasions - came from various countries of Europe and North America, but a major disappointment was that the same political developments in Iran and Afghanistan which made the conference so topical also prevented the attendance of several scholars from both countries who had been invited, though there were valuable contributions to the conference discussions from some of their compatriots resident in Britain. Since then, the papers have been reyised to take account of the discussions, of the central focus suggested by the editor, and of more recent developments. A few papers presented at the conference have been withdrawn, and their place taken by others written since.
The main concern of the volume is not an analyPreface sis of the causes and courses of the revolutions themselves, nor of the sparse information available on tribal involvement - though some of this is examined in several chapters. It is rather to provide historical and anthropological perspectives necessary to the eventual understanding of the events surrounding the revolutions. Nor does the volume offer a single hypothesis or approach, but rather combines different approaches to a single theme, explored in a variety of contexts. It is maintained that, despite the spate of publications that have already appeared purporting to explain the revolutions, complete and credible analyses will anyway have to await further documentation of the motives and actions of a rather wider spectrum of society in both countries than has so far been represented. The volume, finally, pretends neither to a complete coverage of the topics addressed, nor to complete representation of experts on those topics - several well-known authorities are not included, though their works figure prominently in the volume through citation and reference.
Thanks are particularly due to the Social Science Research Council (UK), and to SOAS, for jointly and generously sponsoring the conference on which this book is based. The contributors to the book owe much to the other participants in the conference, especially Asger Christensen, Klaus Ferdinand, Alfred Janata, Nikki Keddie, Ann Lambton, David Marsden, David Morgan, Andre Singer and Susan Wright. The editor would like to acknowledge the promptness with which the other contributors, in spite of pressing commitments, responded to his communications, and to thank especially his fellow- convenor David Brooks for help and advice in planning and organising the conference. He is also grateful to the following: to Michael Strange, Keith McLachlan Sarah Ladbury and Hugh Beattie for assistance during and after the conference; to the Editorial Board of the SOAS Bulletin for permission to republish chapter 7; and to Cambridge University Press for permission to make use of material to be published in Volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Iran. Unpublished Crown Copyright material in Public Record Office and the India Office Records reproduced in this book appears by kind permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
The book, finally, owes a great deal to the help and encouragement of Ernest Ge liner and Andrew Strathern, who brought vital and stimulating non- regional perspectives to the conference and have written the two concluding chapters. Neither they nor the other contributors saw the editor's Introduction (the last chapter to be written) before submitting their own final drafts. The editor is responsible for the final condition of the book, including the system of transliteration.
SOAS, London
Richard Tapper
Chapter 1
Introduction
Richard Tapper
The Scope of the Volume
The notion of 'tribe' is notoriously vague. For some, 'tribes' are what anthropologists study, for others a 'tribe' is a very specific form of economic and political group. In fact the term has been used in such a variety of ways in social anthropology, as in other fields, that, as with 'race' in physical anthropology, it has almost ceased to be of analytical or comparative value. The issues are conceptual terminological, and to some extent methodological. Can we talk of 'tribal society' as a particular stage of social evolution? Is 'tribal culture' an identifiable complex? Are 'tribes' groups with particular features and functions? Are they found at particular levels in a political structure? How far can 'tribes' or 'tribal groups' be analysed in isolation from wider political, economic and cultural contexts? Are 'tribes' the creation of states? Is it useful to contrast 'tribal' with 'peasant' society? Or 'tribalism' with 'feudalism', or with 'ethnicity'? Or 'tribe' with 'clan' or 'lineage' or 'state'? Is 'tribe' merely a state of mind?1
Such questions are not merely academic. They are live political issues in many countries of the world, and in many cases, ignoring or sometimes deliberately exploiting the ambiguities of the notion of 'tribe', states adopt unfortunate and often disastrous policies towards their 'tribal' populations.
The following chapters tackle some of these questions as they affect two particular states, Iran and Afghanistan, in whose provincial and national history up to the present day 'tribes' and 'tribalism' have always played a prominent part. The relation of tribe and state emerges as two clearly… |
