“We Went to the Hills”: Four Afghan Life Stories
| dc.contributor.author | Weir, Jimmy | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2013-10-17T00:54:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2013-10-17T00:54:39Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Many begin to understand Afghan culture in terms of the importance of honor. While identifying a complex of mix of ethnicities in terms of a single characteristic present in all cultures unavoidably over-simplifies, it nevertheless suggests a useful question: honor before whom? In a series of life history interviews I conducted with Afghans in 2005 I found many narrating images of themselves and their pasts in a relationship to their sense of anticipated audiences to their lives. In my presentation I will focus on four “ordinary” Afghans from distinctly different backgrounds to identify what I perceive to be a narrative image emerging in relationships to their perception of personally significant audiences, that is a community or social entity important to the narrator’s social and self-identification. A sense of a life takes form before a sense of a community who is deemed a valued judge of honor across, in the Afghan case, a lifetime of acting and reacting to circumstances of severe political conflict. The underlying premise is many, especially older, Afghans are engaged in a process of anticipating others they personally value as judging their lives and assessing their honor and I consider this as it emerges across life narratives for insights into memory and intersubjectivity in Afghan contexts. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Weir, Jimmy, "“We Went to the Hills”: Four Afghan Life Stories." Paper presented at the Center for South Asian Studies 30th Annual Symposium, "Sensing South Asia," April 17-19, 2013. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10125/30721 | |
| dc.publisher | University of Hawaii at Manoa Center for South Asian Studies | |
| dc.rights | Weir, Jimmy | |
| dc.title | “We Went to the Hills”: Four Afghan Life Stories | |
| dc.type | Conference Paper | |
| dc.type.dcmi | Text |