Structural Violence in Afghanistan: Gendered Memory, Narratives, and Food

Abstract

Afghanistan has been subject to political amnesia by the occupying powers of the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Using the Taliban as a reference point, they have ensured that they are not implicated in the everyday and structural violence to which the people of Afghanistan have been subject over the past three decades. But Afghan women remember. Based on my ethnographic research in Kabul (in fall 2008 and 2009), I show how women in Afghanistan engage in memory work through narratives and food preparation within spaces of devastation. I argue that through these mediums, structural violence becomes knowable. I also argue that memory work is a politicized enterprise through which people remember to seek justice, in the process evoking the attention of a listening audience. This focus fosters a conversation on how the anthropology of violence can engage with issues of representation and engaged accountability.