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Migration as a Rite of Passage: Young Afghans Building Masculinity and Adulthood in Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Alessandro Monsutti
Alessandro Monsutti*
Affiliation:
Graduate Institute of Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland
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Abstract

Migration is part of the Afghan social and cultural landscape. In spite of the unprecedented wave of returns following the fall of the Taliban regime and the establishment of a government backed by the international community, multidirectional cross-border movements will not come to an end. This paper focuses on the case of Hazara male migrants moving between the mountains of Central Afghanistan and the cities of Iran. For many young men, migration offers the opportunity to broaden their social networks beyond narrow kinship and neighborhood ties. It may be conceived as a necessary stage in their existence, a rite of passage to adulthood and a step toward manhood: the perilous journey may be understood as a spatial and partially social separation from the families and homes which contributes to cut the links with the period of childhood; their stay in Iran, during which they have to prove their capacity to face hardship and to save money while living among itinerant and temporary working teams, represents a period of liminality; at their return to their village of origin, they will be reincorporated as adult marriageable men, although they will keep commuting between Afghanistan and Iran for part of their life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 167 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2007

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Footnotes

1

This paper is based on several field researches in Iran supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in 1996 and 1998, by the Mellon Foundation in 2003 (for a project of the Refugee Studies Centre of Oxford supervised by Dawn Chatty and entitled Children and Adolescents in Sahrawi and Afghani Refugee Households in Algeria and Iran: Living with the Effects of Prolonged Conflict and Forced Migration), and by the MacArthur Foundation in 2004 (for a personal project entitled Beyond the Boundaries: Hazara Migratory Networks from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran toward Western Countries). I would like to thank the reviewer, M. Jamil Hanifi, and Sarah Kamal for their helpful comments.

References

2 Colville, Rupert, “Afghan Refugees: Is International Support Draining Away After Two Decades in Exile?” Refuge 17, no. 4 (1998): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See the UNHCR site: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/afghan?page=chrono and http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=SUBSITES&id=421316072 (26 July 2006).

4 Turton, David and Marsden, Peter, Taking Refugees for a Ride? The Politics of Refugee Return to Afghanistan (Kabul, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 On those questions, see Monsutti, Alessandro, “Cooperation, Remittances, and Kinship among the Hazaras,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 2 (2004): 219–240CrossRefGoogle Scholar; War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan (New York, 2005); and Stigter, Elca and Monsutti, Alessandro, Transnational Networks: Recognising a Regional Reality (Kabul, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Jamil Hanifi, M., “Anthropology and the Representations of Recent Migrations from Afghanistan,”in Rethinking Refuge and Displacement: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, ed. Godziak, E.M. and Shandy, D.J., VIII (Arlington, 2000), 291–321Google Scholar. This author considers in a historical perspective the political economy of the whole region of which Afghanistan is a part. He argues that all the Afghans who left their country in the 1980s and 1990s cannot be univocally labeled as refugees, as they have followed ancient patterns of economic migration.

6 The destinations often differ from one community to another. Shiites tend to go more to Iran than to countries with a Sunni majority. The Hazaras, who are predominantly Shiites, constitute in particular more than 40 percent of all the documented Afghans in Iran, but only a tiny minority in Pakistan and in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula; see Abbasi-Shavazi, Mohammad Jalal, Glazebrook, Diana, Jamshidiha, Gholamreza, Mahmoudian, Hossein, and Sadeghi, Rasoul, Return to Afghanistan? A Study of Afghans Living in Tehran (Kabul, 2005), 18Google Scholar.

7 The notion of rite of passage had been proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Gennep, Arnold Van, Les rites de passage: Étude systématique des rites… (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar, rev. ed., and then reframed by Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London, 1969)Google Scholar and Bourdieu, Pierre, “Les rites comme actes d'institution,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 43 (1982): 58–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These are rituals and ceremonies performed at major junctures of social life, like birth, marriage or death. Each rite generally involves three stages: separation, transition (or liminality), and incorporation.

8 Actually, the presence of the Hazaras in Iran goes back a long way before the 1978 coup, as they were probably involved in the massive population transfers of the eighteenth century, especially in the reign of Nader Shah Afshar (1736–1747). See Perry, John R., “Forced Migration in Iran during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Iranian Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 199–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Captain Napier, a British intelligence officer who traveled in northeast Iran in 1874, noted the presence of Hazaras in Khorasan before the subjugation of Hazarajat by Abdur Rahman (1891–1893), even if the identity and the religious affiliation of such a group are not totally clear. Napier, G. C., Collection of Journals and Reports from Captain the Hon. G. C. Napier (London, 1876)Google Scholar. See also Gazeteer of Afghanistan: Herat, vol. 3, 4th ed. (Calcutta, 1910).

9 See Colville, , “Afghan Refugees: Is International Support Draining Away After Two Decades in Exile?” Refuge 17, no. 4 (1998): 6–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Abbasi-Shavazi, Glazebrook, Jamshidiha, Mahmoudian, and Sadeghi, Return to Afghanistan?, 16.

10 U.S. Committee for Refugees, World Refugee Survey 2004 Country Report, http://www.refugees.org/countryreports.aspx?subm=&ssm=&cid=118, quoted in Abbasi-Shavazi, Glazebrook, Jamshidiha, Mahmoudian, and Sadeghi, Return to Afghanistan?, 10.

11 See Monsutti, Transnational Networks: Recognising a Regional Reality, 145–172, and Stigter, Elca, The Kandahar Bus Stand in Kabul: An Assessment of Travel and Labour Migration to Pakistan and Iran (Kabul, 2004)Google Scholar; Transnational Networks and Migration from Herat to Iran (Kabul, 2005); Transnational Networks and Migration from Faryab to Iran (Kabul, 2005).

12 The movement of persons never came to a complete halt, however, as the blockade mainly affected goods.

13 See two AREU's reports already quoted: Elca Stigter, Transnational Networks and Migration from Herat to Iran and Transnational Networks and Migration from Faryab to Iran.

14 Taftan and Mirjaweh are small frontier towns, respectively in Pakistan and Iran, while Zahedan is the capital of the Iranian province of Baluchistan va Sistan.

15 Countless stories circulate about widespread physical abuse at the two infamous internment camps of Tal-e Syah (near Zahedan) and Sang-e Sefid (near Tahebat). By an irony of fate, these two names translate as “Black Hill” and “White Stone.”

16 Comparatively, ten years later, the costs of entering Iran directly from Afghanistan usually range between $150 and $180 but may be as high as $300 if the migrant is, for instance, traveling from Faryab. See Stigter, From Herat to Iran, 24; and From Faryab to Iran, 24.

17 All the names have been changed to protect my informants.

18 See Abbasi-Shavazi, Glazebrook, Jamshidiha, Mahmoudian, and Sadeghi, Return to Afghanistan?, 10–11, 13.

19 Men are in a clear majority (71.2 percent against 28.8 percent for women) and 65 percent of Afghans in Iran are unmarried, according to some 1990s figures; see Khajehpour-Kouei, Bijan, “Panahande paziri-ye shahrvandan-e tehrani,” Goft-o-gu 11 (1996): 26Google Scholar, and Farhang, Omid, “Karigaran-e afghani, sazandegan-e binam va neshan-e iran,” Goft-o-gu 11 (1996): 47Google Scholar.

20 Khosrokhavar, Farhad and Roy, Olivier Iran: comment sortir d'une révolution religieuse (Paris, 1996), 251Google Scholar.

21 In the late 1990s, he lost the equivalent of several thousand dollars when the Iranian accountant of the company which employed him disappeared with the wage of the whole working team.

22 On the hawala system, see Monsutti, “Cooperation, Remittances, and Kinship among the Hazaras,” and War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan, 173–205.

23 Bourdieu, Pierre, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (Paris, 2000), rev. ed., 86–99Google Scholar, and Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980), 279, 282–284.

24 See, for instance, Turner, The Ritual Process.

25 For the Kikuyus of Kenya, see, for instance, Droz, Yvan, “L'ethos du mûramati kikuyu: Schème migratoire, différenciation sociale et individualisation au Kenya,” Anthropos 95 (2000): 87–98Google Scholar. For Southern India, see Osella, Filippo & Osella, Caroline, “Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (2000): 117–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 For instance, Mohammad Ali, already mentioned, does not want to send his older son to Iran. He has been criticized by some relatives and neighbors, who say that through migration, young men learn things which cannot be found in books.

27 I discuss this issue elsewhere; see Monsutti, War and Migration, 77–82, 98, 227–233.

28 Tapper, Nancy, Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society, (Cambridge, 1991), 21–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The term namus (from the Greek nomos, “law;” it was used to designate the angel who brought God's revelation) refers in Afghanistan to women's shame and men's honor and expresses the idea that the honor of the men is defined by their capacity to control women's sexuality. See Ibrahim Atayee, M., A Dictionary of the Terminology of Pashtun's Tribal Customary Law and Usages (Kabul, 1979), 65Google Scholar; Glassé, Cyril, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam (London, 1991), 298Google Scholar; Tapper, Bartered Brides, 22–23.

30 See classical works such as Bourdieu, Pierre, “Le sens de l'honneur”, Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle (Paris, 2000), rev. ed., 19–60Google Scholar; Pitt-Rivers, Julian, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar; Honor and Grace in Anthropology, ed. J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers (Cambridge, 1992).

31 Abbasi-Shavazi, Mohammad Jalal, Glazebrook, Diana, Continued Protection, Sustainable Reintegration: Afghan Refugees and Migrants in Iran (Kabul, 2006), 7Google Scholar.

32 The important role that women play in establishing relations of friendship is illustrated by the Pakistanis in Great Britain. Settled in a new context, families that arrived from Punjab have set up large networks going beyond kinship ties. See Werbner, Pnina, The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among the British Pakistanis (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.