Michael J. Casimir (2010) Growing up in a Pastoral Society: Socialisation among Pashtu Nomads in Western Afghanistan

Abstract

Michael J. Casimir (2010) Growing up in a Pastoral Society: Socialisation among Pashtu Nomads in Western Afghanistan. Kolner Ethnologische Beitrage Heft 33. 88 pp. ISSN 1611-4531, http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/3046/1/Heft33_Casimir.pdf This booklet is a short, richly detailed and lavishly illustrated presentation and discussion of fieldwork conducted among the Pashtu in western Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Casimir, who is also editor of the K61ner Ethnologische Beitrage series in which this booklet appears, suggests that despite the delayed publication, it has three merits: as data documenting children's socialisation that is unlikely to have changed dramatically in the interim; as an historical document describing how it was at that time; and as information for future studies on socialisation, among which studies of nomadic pastoralist societies are rare. I found these three merits in this booklet, and read it also with interest in relation to another merit, to which it turns in its conclusion: its contribution to contemporary concerns about including pastoralists in formal education. I edited the collection (Dyer 2006) for which this paper was originally conceived, and for which it grew too long--a brief history of the publication that is noted in its preface. Having read the original draft, it was a pleasure to reread the final publication in Kabul in July 2012, while I was working with the Afghan government, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and other agencies on developing policy strategies for educating pastoralists. This booklet carries a wealth of information about informal education and the knowledge associated with being a successful pastoralist that deserves to be much better understood, and makes an important contribution in that respect. In the Millennium Development Goal era, strategies for education inclusion largely assume that formal, fixed-place schooling is the most appropriate vehicle by which to deliver pastoralist children's right to education (Dyer 2012; Kratli and Dyer 2009). In global education policy circles, too little consideration is given to exactly what Casimir details here: the sophisticated and extended apprenticeship learning to be a successful pastoralist that children are inevitably expected to forfeit if the dominant policy strategy for education inclusion is pursued. Following a brief summation of a Piagetian theory of learning which provides the conceptual frame for the data presented, the booklet provides background information on the West Afghan Nurzay Pashtuns (chapters two to three) and then moves into detailed description of children's enculturation and socialisation (chapters four to twelve), with a summing up chapter (thirteen) that precedes a chapter linking the discussion of socialisation with issues related to formal education (chapter fourteen). The empirical chapters are indeed, as the author intended, a rich source of information, offering detailed insights into life and socialisation in the pastoralist camps, and how enculturation reflects parental belief systems and cultural values. There is rich description of beliefs and practices surrounding a child's early life--of the swaddling of children, breastfeeding and birth control, and sibling roles. Casimir then covers concepts of child maturation and development, examining first ideas of innate qualities (what is 'in the blood'-nature) and training and explanation (culture-nurture) to explore how social identities are formed in an extended process of informal education. …