Research

Land of Discord

The caption for the photograph used on the cover of this magazine in November 1980 reads: "A village potter on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan."

handmade embroidered caps against red backdropErika Pell

The intricate workmanship and brilliant colors of these embroidered caps illustrate the other side of Afghanistan.

It had always been one of our best covers, the tense concentration of the artisan balanced by the elegant lines and arcs of the photograph's composition. The image took on a new meaning after September 11, however, as I struggled to accommodate this peaceful vision of village life with September's atrocious acts and the ensuing war in Afghanistan.

The photographer was archeologist Frederick Matson, for whom Penn State's Matson Museum of Anthropology was named, and it was to the museum I turned for guidance. After more than 20 years of research in Afghanistan, Matson and his colleagues, adjunct professor Louis Dupree and his wife Nancy Hatch Dupree, had amassed one of the largest collections of Afghan artifacts in America. That collection forms the centerpiece of Penn State's anthropology museum.

Claire McHale Milner, director of the museum, walked me through the public exhibit on several occasions last fall and winter, even opening the store rooms, where researchers can study many more objects. She too, she explained, had been driven by the terrorist attacks to reexamine the artifacts, to query these tangible signs of culture, to explore our shared humanity. "We talk about teaching diversity, and that's exactly what this museum is about," she explained. "It offers a core of teaching diversity in a way students can't experience in any other way. You can have sympathy for the Afghan people despite the horrific events that have occurred."

The public exhibit fills a small alcove. Entering its world, I noticed first the brightness of the colors—cloth dyed vibrant purples and reds. Then the clothing's richness of detail, the embroidery in effusive patterns of metallic threads and mirrored beads.

One handsome fringed and embroidered cloth was made for a wedding, I read. When I asked about it, Milner retrieved Nancy Hatch Dupree's notes from a file. This collection was made in the summer of 1972 (18 July - 6 Sept.) in the village of Aq Kupruk, a village in Balkh Province, some 4 hours south of Mazara-I-Sharif, a major city in northern Afghanistan, she wrote, while her husband was filming an ethnographic movie. Nancy Hatch Dupree's feisty, independent character shows through as she added, I wish I had never heard of ethnographic movies, but I made many true friends among the ladies.

When Louis Dupree asked about the founding of the town, an old man replied simply, "People have lived here since the world began." Dupree himself found evidence, he wrote, of continuous occupation going back at least to the Upper Paleolithic (probably 15 to 20 thousand years ago), and the area may indeed have been one of the very early centers for the development of agriculture (wheat and barley) and the domestication of animals (sheep, goats, and cattle). Also, for centuries, a nomadic route went through Aq Kupruk.

As Nancy Hatch Dupree explained, The village is predominately Tajik, with a large Uzbak component. Tajik and Uzbak mingle freely but not much marriage between them. Hazara live in the mountains south of Aq Kupruk. Twice a year groups of Pushtun and Baluch nomads pass through and camp for a few days on the outskirts of the village.

The women, she went on to say, "are never idle," spinning, weaving, sewing, and embroidering. Both the Tajik and Uzbak embroider the same designs. Four or five Uzbak ladies, however, specialize in drawing the designs, freehand, on the material. Most of the Tajik ladies go to them with their material and a long social day is spent deciding just which patterns will be drawn. Louis Dupree added, The mixed ethnic picture in Aq Kupruk is again reflected in clothing, which can no longer be used to identify a specific group. Uzbeks wear the Tajik turban cap (kola) and Tajiks wear Uzbeki headgear, while anyone who can afford a gold-embroidered turban from Qandahar wears one.

Nancy Hatch Dupree had sent back more than 30 embroidered caps, for future researchers "interested in design." What interested me more, now, was the mingling of the tribes. Newspaper accounts of the war in Afghanistan had led me to believe the country was sartorially divided: bad guys wore turbans like Matson's potter, good guys wore the caps. At least in the 1970s, it wasn't as simple as that.

The Afghanistan exhibit had been prepared in 1998 by a team of 15 undergraduate students taking Milner's Anthropology 101. The students had sorted through the entire collection, asking, What can we learn about these people, what do these materials say about them? They were looking for a theme. "We ended up with the phrase, 'Land of Discord,'" said Milner, "because this is a part of the world that has been invaded many, many times, beginning with Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan."

The Western World knows little about the peoples and cultures of Afghanistan, the opening text of the exhibit read. It made me think of a comment Penn State English professor Michel Bérubé had made in an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 5: Public ignorance is at once a luxury and a travesty. We can no longer afford to leave such matters to our elected officials and a small handful of foreign-policy "experts," whose capacities for moral judgment and historical reflection may, in fact, be no greater than our own. For if democracies are going to respond to terrorists as democracies, then we all have the right—and the obligation—to determine what form that response should take.

The museum, it seemed to me, was the first step toward curing that public ignorance. Milner agreed. She steered me past a case containing Matson's potter, this time smiling up at me, photographed in a different pose, with his finished pot. Red earthenware, it (or a lookalike) stood on the shelf next to the photograph, its shoulders white with a swirled design.

We avoided, too, the mannequin wearing a burqa, that symbol of the enslavement of Afghan women, and stopped in front of a case containing men's clothing. There was an embroidered coat, a variety of hats, moccasin-like sandals with soles made from tires, and embossed leather slippers with an Arabian-nights curve to their tips, and the trappings for a horse: saddle cloth, stirrups, tasselled bridle, and whip, with a photograph of men playing buzkashi, a rugby-like game on horseback.

Milner pulled my attention toward the sandals. "Afghanistan's also a very impoverished place," she said. "When you look at the news, you see these same sandals, these same homemade rubber-tire sandals. This stuff comes from the 1950s and '60s, but their economy hasn't changed very much. There are still people living on the barter system. Of course they have modern weapons, but the knowledge that they're wearing these sandals helps you to understand the context."

On the edge of the exhibit, placed to be seen first, is a painted mural from the side of a panel truck: It shows Russian fighter planes and tanks backed by snowy mountains. It is not beautiful, or even useful. I couldn't marvel at its bright colors or intricate workmanship. I would not have shipped it home, myself.

But it belongs here, Milner argued. "What we are trying more and more to do is not leave people with the idea that we have groups stuck in time. Even groups that are isolated have T-shirts. They participate in the global economy. The lorry panel might be jarring to the viewer because it's so different, but they're not completely separate communities. It's a mistake a lot of museums make. Here we're constantly going back to exhibits to make sure people realize there are changes and continuity at the same time—not pristine cultures frozen in time."

It was time to face the burqa. It was part of a wedding trousseau Nancy Hatch Dupree had commissioned. When a young woman she knew was about to be married, she had convinced the kinswomen to make duplicates of everything, including this finely stitched burqa of gossamer pale-green silk with a lattice-work veil and embroidered cap.

"May I touch it?" I asked. It was beautiful in spite of what it symbolized.

Milner smiled, "No." It was a museum exhibit, after all.

I had seen ones just like it on the news, and wondered at the woman suffocating beneath. Wondered, as well, when, with the fall of Kabul, not all the liberated women of the city chose to show their faces to the sun. Now, in the museum, I could understand, at least in part, the freedom represented by the veil, by the lovely, elegant drape of this rippling silk. Beneath a burqa lovingly made and freely worn, any woman was beautiful.

And rich, I learned in a report Milner gave me that Louis Dupree had filed for the American Universities Field Staff in 1966. He wrote: The wearing of the burqa, once an exclusively citified custom, reaches down to some towns, especially in north Afghanistan, as a prestige item, which in itself contradicts one of the original reasons for the burqa: that is, that rich and poor women could look alike, for the garment hid both wealth and poverty. Even in the past, however, those who could afford them purchased fancy embroidered silk burqas instead of plain cotton ones. The original function of modesty and egalitarianism before Allah has been lost, and the wealthier Uzbeks (who are stricter than the Tajiks) clothe their women in fancy burqas when they come to town.

I gazed at the gorgeous silk, hanging in pleats from the mannequin. When Milner's back was turned, I ran a hem through my fingers. The burqa was exquisite and exorbitantly feminine. I would hate to be forced to wear it, I knew. But I might choose it for myself, if I were an Afghan woman, knowing its history and traditional meaning, without intending to give up my freedom.

After September 11, Milner was asked by a museum colleague if she planned to take the "Land of Discord" exhibit down. "I realized we potentially faced some controversy, but I didn't consider dismantling it because this is a part of the world we need to know about," she said. "What goes on there is of worldwide importance. On the scale of world history, Afghanistan's been enormously important, yet we knew relatively nothing about it." (Or, as one editorial in the New York Times phrased it, quoting an American diplomat: We do not have a profound understanding of the Afghans. We haven't been inside the country for 10 years, so we have to rely on the Afghans who come to the West. We don't know the tribes right now. We don't know the tribal leadership. We don't know beans.")

As we stood before the cases holding Nancy Hatch Dupree's duplicate trousseau, Milner pointed out the carved wooden platform shoes, their flared heels and chunky soles something American undergraduates might wear. I remarked on the child's cap, berry-red with swirls of embroidery and beadwork and topped with a plume of dyed feathers.

Through a New York Times article in November, "Afghan Art Dispersed by the Winds of War," we had learned that Nancy Hatch Dupree was still working in neighboring Pakistan, as vice chairwoman of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage. According to an Australian news service on the Internet, she had been evicted from Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979; since 1989, she had lived in Peshawar; at 75, "she is now regarded by Afghans as the one foreigner who understands them best. They call her 'the Grandmother of Afghanistan.'" The Boston Herald, writing about her efforts to save the country's art and artifacts, quoted her as saying, "If the culture of a nation dies, its soul dies with it."

In the Matson Museum of Anthropology, the collection she and Louis Dupree and Frederick Matson had carefully acquired preserves part of that soul for the future.

Looking through her papers, I discovered that the feathered cap I had admired was not part of the trouseau, but from a "cradle set." This collection was made especially for me, she wrote. A project the women themselves suggested when they saw what I was collecting. They were greatly taken with the idea of a museum being interested in what they wear and make.

They had a marvelous time planning, selecting, and making. I was errand boy—sent to the bazaar many times a day for many days. Scolded when I brought back the wrong thing, I would return to the shopkeepers who in turn took a great interest in helping me select what they thought would be most appropriate. And fun was had by all! I doubt if a similar collection exists. This collection should be kept together.

Claire McHale Milner, Ph.D., is curator and director of exhibits for the Matson Museum of Anthropology, 209 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA 16802; 814-865-2033; cmm8@psu.edu. In addition to Frederick Matson, Nancy Hatch Dupree, and Louis Dupree, State College residents Arthur and Etta Mekeel, who had worked for USAID in Afghanistan, also donated objects and photographs to the collection. Spelling of Afghan names are those used by the Duprees.

Last Updated May 1, 2002