² About 6 million in 1990, mostly in Pakistan and Iran, see Colville, Rupert, “Afghanistan: une crise qui s'éternise,” Réfugiés 108 (1997): 5Google Scholar. It must be noted that between March and November 2002, almost 1.8 million Afghans return to their homeland from the neighbouring countries, while more than 200,000 internally displaced people were assisted to go home. Precise figures for 2003 are not available yet (www.unhcr.ch, consulted May 31, 2004).

³ According to the U.S. Department of State (www.state.gov, consulted May 31, 2004), the population is constituted by Pashtuns 38–44%, Tajiks 25%, Hazaras 10–19%, Uzbeks 6–8%, and others (Aimaqs, Turkmens, Baluch, Nuristanis, Pashais, etc.). The religious distribution comprises Sunnis 84%, Shiites 15%, others (Ismaelis, Hindus, Sikhs) 1%.

⁴ For a presentation of Hazara culture and history, see Bacon, Elizabeth E., “The Inquiry into the History of the Hazara Mongols of Afghanistan,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7, no. 3 (1951): 230–247CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Obok: A Study of Social Structure in Eurasia (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Canfield, Robert, Hazara Integration into the Afghan Nation: Some Changing Relations between Hazaras and Afghan Officials (New York, 1971)Google Scholar and Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush (Ann Arbor, 1973)Google Scholar; Mousavi, Sayed Askar, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study (Richmond, 1998)Google Scholar; Poladi, Hassan, The Hazâras (Stockton, CA 1989)Google Scholar; Schurmann, Herbert, The Mongols of Afghanistan: An Ethnography of the Moghôls and Related Peoples of Afghanistan (La Haye, 1962)Google Scholar.

⁵ Monsutti, Alessandro, “Nouveaux espaces, nouvelles solidarités: la migration des Hazaras d'Afghanistan,” in Les défis migratoires: Actes du colloque CLUSE, Neuchâtel 1998, ed. Centlivres, Pierre and Girod, Isabelle (Zurich, 2000): 333–342Google Scholar and Guerres et migrations: réseaux sociaux et stratégies économiques des Hazaras d'Afghanistan (Neuchâtel & Paris, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁶ World Bank, Afghanistan's International Trade Relations with Neighboring Countries (2001), http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/SAR/sa.nsf/Attachments/8/$File/intltrade.pdf

⁷ Just to have a point of comparison, the ICRC's total 1995 budget for activities in connection with the Afghan conflict was 41.3 million Swiss francs, about 35 million dollars at that time; see ICRC, ICRC Activities in Afghanistan: 1994-5 February 1998 (Geneva, 1998).

⁸ For a more detailed estimation, see Monsutti (2004): 247–254. This infusion of cash and goods from Iran and the Gulf region was already massive in the 1970s. After the famine of 1971–72, migrants remitted to Afghanistan from 100 to 300 million dollars every year (Etienne, Gilbert, “Afghanistan, de l'éclaircie à la tragédie,” Développement rural en Asie: les hommes, le grain et l'outil (Paris, 1982): 47Google Scholar.

⁹ Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1944)Google Scholar and “The Economy as Instituted Process”, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Polanyi, Karl, Arensberg, Conrad M., Pearson, Harry W. (New York & London, 1957): 243–270Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Tapper, Richard, Pasture and Politics: Economics, Conflict and Ritual Among Shahsevan Nomads of Nothwestern Iran (London, 1979): 126Google Scholar.

¹¹ Tapper (1979): 131.

¹² Monsutti (2004): 111–115.

¹³ Atayee, M. Ibrahim, A Dictionary of the Terminology of Pashtun's Tribal Customary Law and Usages (Kabul, 1979): 95Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Another very interesting term is khwar-zada (ZS or ZD)—or jeya used in some places such as Shahristan—, which Hazaras tend to use for every man whose mother is from ego's lineage, even if older (especially for the father's sister's children, FZS or FZD). Schurmann (1962): 140 considers it to be a legacy of the Omaha terminology of the old Mongols.

¹⁵ The first two terms may also be used in the love vocabulary (dust dashtan means for instance “to love”).

¹⁶ Barth, Fredrik, Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy (Prospect Heights, IL 1961): 93–100Google Scholar; Tapper (1979): 147–152.

¹⁷ Ferdinand, Klaus, “Nomad Expansion and Commerce in Central Afghanistan: A Sketch of Some Modern Trends”, Folk 4 (1962): 123–159Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ See for instance Pitt-Rivers, Julian, “The Kith and the Kin,” in The Character of Kinship, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge & London, 1973)Google Scholar; “Ritual Kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans,” in Mediterranean Family Structures, ed. Peristiany, J. G. (Cambridge & London, 1976)Google Scholar; The Fate of Sechem or The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Spooner, Brian, “Kinship and Marriage in Eastern Persia,” Sociologicus 15, no. 1 (1965): 22–31Google Scholar.

²¹ Heslot, Sylvie, La terminologie de la parenté en Afghanistan: approche dialectologique (Paris, 1984–85)Google Scholar.

²² In Southern Hazarajat, it must be noted, lineages are split in different hamlets (Monsutti, 2004: 89–134). The situation corresponds to what Roger M. Keesing describes in the following terms: “A community consists of several descent groups. Some or all of the local descent groups are related by common descent to groups in neighboring communities. Hence they have external ties of kinship and local solidarity with their neighbors,” Kin Groups and Social Structures (Fort Worth and Chicago, 1975): 43.

²³ Afghans use the term begana, “strangers,” as opposed to az khod, “from ourselves.”

²⁴ Sahlins, Marshall, “On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange,” in The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, ed. Banton, Michael (London, 1965): 139–236Google Scholar and Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Sahlins (1965): 151–152.

²⁶ All of the names in the paper are fictive.

²⁷ At that time, it was about $55 in the bazaar of Quetta.

²⁸ Comparing to the US dollar, the devaluation of the afghani is much more rapid than that of the Pakistani rupee.

²⁹ Goft-o-gu, “Panahandegi va mohajerat,” Goft-o-gu 11 (1996): 3–113.

³⁰ UNHCR, Afghan Refugee Statistics (Islamabad, 1998).

³¹ Labib, Subhi Y., “Capitalism in Medieval Islam,” Journal of Economic History 29, no. 1 (1969): 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Goody, Jack, The East in the West (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ During my fieldwork in the 1990s, the situation was totally different from what Ferdinand (1962) described. If the Pashtun nomads and traders kept the monopoly of transport in the so-called Pashtun belt (the south and southeast area of Afghanistan), they did not venture into Hazarajat anymore. In a way, we are back to the situation of almost exclusive territorialism which preceded Abd al-Rahman's conquest of the region; see Barth, Fredrik, “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance,” Features of Person and Society in Swat: Collected Essays on Pathans. Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth, Volume II (London, 1981): 111–113Google Scholar. War opened opportunities of political and economic empowerment for the Hazaras and the Pashtun nomads have lost their economic influence on the Hazara farmers. They no longer went to pasture in Hazarajat until the Taliban took over the region in 1998. Severe feuds over land have occurred and many cases are still unsettled since the establishment of a new government at the end of 2001.

³⁴ The Pakistani currency is the rupee. The Iranian currency is the rial, but people usually talk of toman (1 toman = 10 rials). The Afghan currency is the afghani. In the 1990s, two kinds of notes circulated: the government money, called dawlati (from dawlat, “state”) and the Dostum money, called dostumi. The value of dostumi was lower and it was sometimes difficult to use it out of the area controlled by Dostum and Hezb-e Wahdat.

³⁵ For the ancient Greeks, the term sumbolon, from the verb sumballo meaning “to put together, to reunite,” designated every object divided in half kept by two parties, and which allowed for recognition of a commercial representative or a diplomatic envoy. Among the Afghans, this practice is widespread (the signs of recognition are called neshani) and is completed by the extended use of secret codes (ramz); see Monsutti (2004): 222, 272–273).

³⁶ Afghans often say mosafer (pl. mosaferin), which means literally “traveler” but is used more generally to designate the migrants.

³⁷ It may be much higher between North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia when the transfer is done by a full time hawaladar and when the social ties between the different protagonists are not so close.

³⁸ For instance, in the summer of 1996, the same throat pastilles cost Rs. 6 in Quetta and Afs 4000 in Ghazni, which represented a difference of 66%.

³⁹ The circulation of people, money, and commodities has sometimes been reduced, during more than 20 years of war, but has never stopped entirely, even at the time of the blockade imposed on Hazarajat by the Taliban between the summer of 1997 and the autumn of 1998.

⁴⁰ For a general sketch of a similar system, called hundi, in South Asia, see Eichfeld, Andy, The Hundi System: A Model of the Informal Channel for Remittances in the Middle East and South Asia (Chicago, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Pierre Bourdieu, “La parenté comme représentation et comme volonté,” Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (Genéve, 1972): 90 [Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977)]. Regarding the issue of practice and rule in kinship, see also the updated version “Les usages sociaux de la parenté,” Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980): 271–331 [The Logic of Practice (Cambridge, 1990)].

⁴² Labib (1969): 91.

⁴³ Adelkhah, Fariba, Etre moderne en Iran (Paris, 1998)Google Scholar and “Un évergétisme islamique: les réseaux bancaires et financiers en Iran,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 85–86 (1999): 63–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ In Iran, but also in Afghanistan, the expression to designate a loan without interest is qarz ul-hasana, which means literally “good loan” (Adelakhah 1998: 87).

⁴⁵ One can make the same remark at the political level: members of a family become affiliated to different factions in order to have someone among the winners however the situation evolves.

⁴⁶ An internet search through Google (www.google.com/), September 20, 2002, gave me 10,600 entries for the term hawala. If some texts underscore the positive role played by this remittance system, most consider it a tool of money laundering and terrorism.

⁴⁷ Mauss, Marcel, “Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, 1985[1923–24]): 147, 148Google Scholar [The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London, 1970)].

⁴⁸ Polanyi (1944, 1957).

⁴⁹ Sahlins (1965): 139.