Overview

Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.

Full Product Details

9781478033622

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Seeking the truth of the Kabul lie Fatima Mojaddedi surrounds herself with theorists, like any good anthropologist. But she does not let these men (Freud, Foucault, Benjamin) get in the way of her sisterly journey. Going in, I knew little about Afghanistan. Reading her book, however, I wished to be there, and indeed, learned I was born there.""--Rudolf Mrázek, author of, A Certain Age and Complete Lives of Camp People

Author Information

Fatima Mojaddedi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

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