Migration as a Rite of Passage: Young Afghans Building Masculinity and Adulthood in Iran1

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. 1This 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.