Understanding Pashtunwali
PhD Project
Pashtunwali occupies a central place in both academic and popular representations of Pashtun society. It has often been described as a moral ideal, a customary law, an ethnic self-portrait, a cultural tradition, or the unwritten constitution of the Pashtun people, with such descriptions often treating Pashtunwali as an idealized, fixed, and internally coherent system. This project begins from the premise that such essentializing frameworks may obscure more than they reveal about Pashtunwali. It therefore asks whether Pashtunwali might be better understood as a regime of normativity: a stabilized yet contingent arrangement of normative knowledge as it takes shape in concrete social settings. How might this shift in perspective alter the prevailing understanding of Pashtunwali, and the ways it is invoked, contested, and sustained in everyday life?
To pursue this question, the project asks how knowledge of normativity is socially produced by the Pashtuns. How do actors generate new norms through engaging with their existing normative repertoires? Rather than assuming Pashtunwali as a pre-given ideal, this project examines how Pashtunwali is continuously constructed through the cultural translation of knowledge of normativity and thus rendered open to change.
The project proceeds in two interconnected steps. First, it examines how Pashtunwali has been made intelligible in existing literature by Pashtun intellectuals, colonial administrators, anthropologists, historians, and policymakers. What conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches have shaped these representations, and with what epistemic effects? Second, it turns to ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Pashtun social settings in Pakistan, focusing on inter-tribal feuds as key sites for observing Pashtunwali in practice. How do actors involved in conflict and mediation invoke, negotiate, and stabilize norms in these situations? In what ways do they collectively produce and translate knowledge of normativity? By addressing these questions, this project not only contributes to a rethinking of Pashtunwali, but also offers a methodological contribution to the broader study of normative orders.