This ethnography invites its readers to participate in a figurative attan, an Afghan national dance, something the author witnessed Pashtun taxi drivers perform together repeatedly to mark familial celebrations in Britain. The circular movement of this traditional line dance forms the core metaphor of a book that eschews chronologies and standard narrative practices to illustrate the complex transmigratory arc of Pashtun “journeymen,” so named because of the now obsolete meaning of journey—“day’s work”—who are, by virtue of their migration and their current employment, in a continual state of movement. Readers will likely experience feelings of dizziness and disorientation, which is, according to the author’s introduction and conclusion, intentional. Nichola Khan wants to “disrupt the fixed genealogy of Western cartographies of knowledge about Afghanistan to point to the diversity of Afghan migrant experience—particularly the fragmentation of selfhood, suffering, and forms of impasse that arise from the failures of mobility to bestow its promises and new wherewithal for life” (p. 45). A critique of the Western gaze entranced with “the still life of the proud Pathan tribesman and master of tradition arrested in perpetuity” (p. 222), Khan’s ethnography is an exercise in unmooring.
A multi-sited ethnography conducted “in several periods between 2009 and 2017” in Sussex and London, Great Britain, and Peshawar, Pakistan, Khan’s book takes us into the lifeworld of Afghan taxi drivers who face exclusionary refugee policies in Great Britain and exhausting demands for remittances from their families who fled Afghanistan during and shortly after the Soviet invasion of their home country (p. 22). The book draws our attention to the complex experiences of double or triple displacement not uncommon among war refugees, who first seek physical safety in neighboring countries and then look for economic opportunities further afield. The arc of the Afghan journeymen interviewed for this study begins with the initial displacement as a result of the 1989 fighting between mujahideen and the Afghan army. After settling in Pakistan with their families, fathers paid between 8,000 and 25,000 British pounds to finance their sons’ passage to the UK, where they applied for asylum. By the time of Khan’s fieldwork, these men had obtained British passports or residency permits, and had made it “from illegal to low-paid worker, to citizen and hackney-carriage license-holder,” who were able to make 300 to 400 British pounds a week (p. 61). That taxi economy imploded with the rise of Uber, which the author acknowledges but does not elaborate upon. Presumably today’s Afghan migrants eke out an even more precarious existence in Sussex. Financial struggles and family demands create pressures that lead to bouts of depression, hopelessness, anger, and even suicidal ideation in some men (Hamid, p. 71; Zamarai, ch. 3). For other men, driving a taxi in Britain becomes a means to “self-made upward class mobility” (p. 63).
Khan conducted her fieldwork during “innumerable taxi rides” and “hundreds more mobile phone conversations and messages with drivers between jobs,” as well as “fifty-four variously detailed life-history interviews in Sussex, London and Peshawar” (p. 24). Her mixed qualitative methods, which include life-history work, dream sharing, and historical, literary, poetic, and imaginative research, allow Khan to fuse together an evocative assemblage of narratives that reflect the multifaceted challenges, pressures, and successes of these Afghan “journeymen” (p. 22). She aptly interweaves her own experience of displacement, as a descendant of migrants from central China who grew up in rural, predominantly white England, who has lived in London, Hong Kong, Karachi, Singapore, California, and Sussex. She herself considers “fugitive paths, edges, outsides, and in-between spaces and interstices of mixed and multiple languages, cultures, and sensibility” her own “home” (p. 239). Interviews were conducted in a mix of English, Pashto and Urdu. Keenly aware of the perception that a single woman speaking with single Afghan men might violate rules of Pashto gender propriety, Khan explains that her researcher subjectivities alternated “between the roles of friend, passenger, ‘doctor,’ [and] ‘teacher,’” which allowed her to gain her interlocutors’ trust; indeed, she insists, the stories she collected would not have been shared with a male researcher (pp. 25–26).
The narrative fragments included in this book evoke “dual forces of energy and stasis, mania and depression, life and death … and the dual opportunities and impossibilities produced in migrant life under neoliberal work regimes” (p. 231). Migrants share harrowing stories of tiring travel at the mercy of paid “agents” who abandon them; underage Afghans speak about their placement in foster care; tearful migrants speak of theft and betrayal by Afghan roommates or domestic violence at the hands of their Afghan spouse; adult men share feelings of shame at having to accept food vouchers or happiness when they are able to cook familiar recipes. One entire chapter focuses on the “human pain of an unfulfilled life” expressed via “immobility dreams” (p. 157). One site of pleasurable liminality open to the journeymen is the “chakar (lit. pleasure trip) [which] is a noun, verb, practice, and event” (p. 90). Traditionally an all-male picnic in a beautiful rural location, contemporary chakars are gatherings during migrants’ visits with their families in Pakistan to show off wealth accumulated abroad. Not everyone can afford “to chakar,” meaning they can be “budget or extravagant affairs;” in either case, returnees are expected to foot the bill (p. 97). A chakar achieves multiple ends: it establishes rank and distinction for journeymen who have fulfilled their obligation as the family’s provider, allows for a nostalgic reenactment of a past when men were present in and attached to their native land, and leads to networks of mutual obligation and future participation in chakar. In this way, these family picnics “are dually bound and unbound to identity. They preserve ideals and power relations in Pashto, shape formations of alterity and consciousness, and critique and mitigate the pressures of family obligations and culture in migrants’ realities” (p. 122).
Nichola Khan needs to be applauded for her two-decades-long fieldwork, her empathetic listening to the emotional unburdening of Afghan migrants at different stages of displacement, her poetic renderings of internal lifeworlds, and her firm stance against outdated views of Afghan tribal communities. She adeptly uses a variety of anthropological framings, spanning traditional topics (including liminality, constructions of masculinity, food and commensality, structure vs. agency, and tribal genealogies) and tropes from medical and psychological anthropology (focusing on the fractured self through space and time), to postcolonial theory and critical ethnography (eschewing master narratives and fixed meanings). The book will surely generate lively discussions in graduate seminars about the inchoate experiences of migrants and refugees, as well as in qualitative methods courses about the ways in which anthropologists engage with and represent persons defined by mobility and fragility.
