Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan by Julie Billaud (review)

In the introduction to her ethnography, Julie Billaud writes that “[the] book is an attempt to capture the nature of the ‘reconstruction’ project in Afghanistan, using the category ‘woman’ as an entry point into broader questions around sovereignty, state building, and democratization” (6). Indeed, Kabul Carnival explores a wide array of contexts and themes, and spans more than one unit of analysis (from a female member of Parliament to young university students, from the internal dynamics of a state ministry to local media production, and more). It builds on the previous literature that concentrated on the long line of Afghanistan’s uninterrupted conflicts since 1978, yet claims to depart from them in its interpretation of the concept of culture. Billaud wants to eschew an Orientalist understanding of Afghan culture as a static and “unavoidable” hurdle, instead viewing it as a constantly contested and negotiated ground for social construction. She also looks to the traditions of postcolonial, peasant, and subaltern studies to show how the rural majority of the Afghan population was, in fact, historically (and is to this day) forced into embracing “progressive” ideologies springing from “exogenous” sources (namely, the Western capitalistic world). Kabul Carnival also engages contemporary transnational studies in reiterating the de facto colonial mindset that informs the countless institutional and non-governmental efforts at reconstruction and nation-building in Afghanistan. Billaud faults these efforts for propagating what she considers neoliberal values among the local population, irrespective of the social and cultural background of the targeted groups. The lens through which all these layers of analysis are looked upon is the “category” of woman, in its ethnographic instantiation.

The broader symbolic context in which Billaud places her analysis is that of the carnivalesque, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984). Bakhtin describes those ritual moments in medieval France when social roles and public personae were allowed (by the dominant classes) to be temporarily overturned and “suspended.” For Bakhtin, the context of subversion in which carnivalesque rituals took place represents a locus of spiritual and social expression and construction. Billaud views Afghanistan’s current social and political reality as trapped in this liminal space of inversion and subversion. The foreign humanitarian intervention holds a “theatrical dimension,” as well as a farcical and less-than-honest aspect, in which Afghans themselves choose to participate hoping to reap any possible benefits. In the end though, just as in France’s medieval rituals, the farce contributes to reinforcing the traditional power standings and overall status quo.

The book opens with a historical excursus on a century of state policies regarding gender roles and women’s conditions in Afghanistan. While the plight of women was a crucial trope in promoting narratives of progress and national identity, all such state policies not only failed, but generated popular revolt. In Billaud’s opinion, this backlash shaped particularly oppressive and gendered cultural idioms in order to express the (male) population’s resistance to a top-down imposition of power.

After introducing the historical foundations on which her research rests, in Chapter 2 Billaud starts presenting her ethnographic material, collected in different environments in Kabul, during roughly nine months of fieldwork in the country in 2007. During this time, Billaud was also getting acquainted with Dari, the lingua franca of her fieldsite. The chapter chronicles the experience the ethnographer had in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, by which most projects for raising women’s self-awareness and self-empowerment were implemented. Billaud argues that the international reconstruction machinery in Afghanistan works on the premises of a Western neoliberal ideological agenda, promoting concepts such as freedom, progress, rationality, individual empowerment, and gender equality. However, she contends that it hardly pays any attention to the (divergent) lived experiences and expectations of citizens in Afghanistan, who are considered by development workers as backward, primitive, and in need of being educated and trained in the “right way” of doing things.

A major field in which Afghans supposedly need to be trained in the “right way of doing...