Daily Life and Values in Afghanistan and the United States

Social Structure

Tribal affiliation is still the most significant organizing principle in parts of rural Afghan society. Tribal units have strong patrilineal organization – something that perhaps comes almost by nature to nomads and those with a remembered and idealized nomadic past. The patrilineal principle is also strongly supported by Islam. Leading families are recognized on the basis of land or livestock ownership, their reputation for religious leadership, or for having furnished men who exhibit the ideal Afghan personality type of the warrior-poet.

Afghans may operate at many different levels of group identification. The cultural pattern is one of competition between equivalent units but uniting with these competitors against outsiders. This begins at the level of competition between male first cousins and works its way up through lineages, subtribes, tribes, to ethnic group rivalries. The pattern allows nearly all Afghans to unite, at least at times, against outside threats, as was to great extent the case against the Soviet invasion.

Among the Pashtun, the jirga, an assembly of all the adult males, decides important matters by vote at village level or at the local division of a Pashtun tribe. (This pattern has also spread to a great many non-Pashtuns.) Larger units function by assemblies of local leaders. It has been a long-standing tenet of Afghan society that ultimate sovereignty rests in a national loya jirga, convoked of notables from the whole country, as with the assemblies that approved the constitutions of 1931, 1964, and 1977, and that which established the interim government in 2002.

The Cultural Orientation Project--http://www.culturalorientation.net, for more information contact sanja@cal.org
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