Mitigating Kuchi Settlement Issues in Kandahar [or] Reflections on Ethnic Group Identities and the Confound of Emotion

Abstract

My work with displaced Kuchi nomads in Afghanistan has obliged me to give considerable reflection to the above insight. My experience revealed what I have come to consider unwarranted theoretical assumptions in the anthropological literature that flow naturally from notions about reason deeply ingrained in our cultural orientations and the vernacular forms that express it. I believe that evading the bounds of such assumptions may well require cultural and linguistic extensions that consider emotion every bit as important as thought, an extension that assumes the two as inextricably one.