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Baloch Identities: A Matter of Descent or Mentality?

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/21520844.2013.831715

2152-0852

Just Boedeker,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

Abstract Emanating from the questions “What is a Baloch?” and “What is a Baloch tribe?” this article discusses different aspects of Baloch group identities by going beyond an essentialist interpretation of Baloch identity. Based on extensive ethnographic field research and archival research, the integration of foreign groups into the Baloch tribal system (referred to as “Balochization”) is explored. Although Baloch groups are often described as a genealogically organized people, the incongruent genealogies of various Baloch tribes do not reflect a coherent idea of descent but indicate the respective political considerations and desired affiliation of tribal groups. There are few obstacles for the inclusion of foreign groups into the flexible Baloch social structures, in which clear-cut differentiations among notions of ethnicity, tribal affiliation, and lineage are not made. This flexibility in social belonging enables Baloch groups to adapt to and deal with the changing political, social, and economic circumstances of bordering states. The precondition for being a Baloch is a distinctive mentality regarding values, rules of behavior, and solidarity with ideas of rebellion against intrusion from the outside. These idealized values and rules of behavior are largely shared with the neighboring Pashtuns. However, in contrast to the Pashtun case, a Baloch pedigree plays only a secondary role in this mentality. KEYWORDS: Balochistandescentethnicityidentitymentalitytribe Notes 2Eickelman cited this dialogue from Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 168. 1Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 123. 3Clifford Edmund Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542–3) (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1994), 48–49, 447–54. 4This interview was conducted on May 3, 2012, in Quetta. 5A sardar is a Baloch tribal leader. 6Erwin Orywal, Die Balūč in Afghanisch-Sīstān: Wirtschaft und sozio-politische Organization in Nīmrūz, SW-Afghanistan [The Baloch in Afghan Sistan. Economy and Socio-political Organization in Nimruz, Southwest Afghanistan] (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982), 67–68. 7W. Ivanov, “Notes on the Ethnology of Khurasan,” Geographical Journal 67, no. 2 (1926): 146, f.n. §; Georg Morgenstierne, Report on a Linguistic Mission to North-Western India (Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende Kulturforskning, 1932), 8–9; Brian Spooner, “Politics, Kinship, and Ecology in Southeast Persia,” Ethnology 8 (1969): 147; Fredrik Barth, “Ethnic Processes on the Pathan-Baluch Boundary,” in Features of Person and Society in Swat: Collected Essays on Pathans, ed. Fredrik Barth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 2:93–102; Just Boedeker, “An Inter-ethnic Conflict in the Cultural Environment of the Baloch National Movement in Present-Day Afghanistan,” Iran and the Caucasus 13, no. 2 (2009): 361–62. 8Especially inside of Afghanistan, the discussion on the affiliation of the Brahūī with the Baloch is a very emotionally loaded topic. Just Boedeker, “Nation or Tribe? Some observances about Baloch Group Affiliations in 2008 and 2010,” Orient: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Politik Wirtschaft und Kultur des Orients [Orient: German Journal for Politics, Economics and Culture of the Middle East] 53, no. 2 (2012): 78. 9Martin Axmann, The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baluch Nationalism 1915–1955 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21. 10Fred Scholz, Nomadism and Colonialism: A Hundred Years of Baluchistan 1872–1972 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 48–54; Erwin Orywal, Krieg oder Frieden: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung kulturspezifischer Ideale—Der Bürgerkrieg in Belutschistan/Pakistan [War or Peace: A Comparative Study of Culture-specific Ideals-The Civil War in Balochistan, Pakistan] (Berlin: Reimer, 2002), 146–60. 11 Imperial Gazetteer of India, new ed., vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 266, 288–89. According to the figures given by Orywal, this is definitely not the case today (Krieg oder Frieden, 148). 12While I was flying from Islamabad to Quetta on April 6, 2012, I sat next to a Pashtun who stated that the Brahūī are in fact former Pashtun tribes and are therefore by origin neither Brahūī nor Baloch, but Pashtun. When I told this to my Baloch interlocutors in Quetta, they told me that this was a common argument by the local Pashtuns, who make such claims in order to be in the majority in the province. 13Morgenstierne, Report on a Linguistic Mission, 8–9. 14Barth, “Ethnic Processes,” 93. 15Ibid., 98. 16Ibid., 98–100. 17Philip Carl Salzman, “Why Tribes Have Chiefs: A Case from Baluchistan,” in The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan, ed. Richard Tapper (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 267. 18Spooner distinguished between ḥākomzāt, balōč, šahrī, and ġolām (“Politics, Kinship, and Ecology,” 140; and “Baluchistan: I. Geography, History, and Ethnography,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 3, ed. Ehsan Yarshater [New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1989], 622–23). While the ḥākomzāt comprises the chiefs and their immediate families, the social category balōč (used in a different way than the ethnic term Baloch) comprises nomads or descendants of nomads. The term šahrī signifies settled cultivator and ġolām groups that entered Baloch society as slaves. While these terms are common in the southern regions of the Baloch settlement areas (in particular Makran), in the areas of the Sarḥadd and Sīstān, these social classes are hardly known and play no role. 19Ivanov, “Notes on the Ethnology,” 146, f.n. §. 20Lutz Rzehak, “Ethnic Minorities in Search of Political Consolidation,” in Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands, ed. Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 148. 21For example, Orywal, Die Balūč in Afghanisch-Sīstān, 219–22; and Robert N. Pehrson, The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1966), 17. 22This interview was conducted on May 20, 2012, in Khash. 23Spooner, “Politics, Kinship, and Ecology,” 147. 24Ibid. 25Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 618–19; Selig Harrison, In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981), 17–18. 26Spooner, “Politics, Kinship, and Ecology,” 150. 27Abdurrahman Pahwal was one of the few Baloch intellectuals in Afghanistan who originated from Ibrahimabad, district of Kang, in the present-day province of Nimruz. He spent most of his lifetime in Kabul, where he worked in the Pashto department of the Academy of Science at Kabul University and for the national radio and TV broadcaster in the Balochi program. During the battles of the Mujahedin alliances (1992–1996), Pahwal felt impelled to leave Kabul and went, after thirty-eight years, back to his native province, Nimruz. During the period of Taliban rule, he decided to go to Iran, where he stayed until 2001, when the former Mujahedin alliance came back into power in Nimruz. He then stayed in the provincial center of Nimruz, Zaranj, until he passed away on April 19, 2003. (Lutz Rzehak, Die Taliban im Land der Mittagssonne: Geschichten aus der afghanischen Provinz [The Taliban in the Land of the Midday Sun: Stories from the Afghan Province] [Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004], xiii–xvii.). He published several books, articles in journals, and two manuscripts for dictionaries (Balochi Galband: Balochi Pashto Dari English Dictionary, ed. Lutz Rzehak and Bedollah Naruyi [Peshawar: Al-Azhar Book Co., 2007]—published posthumously—and “Qāmūs-e qabāyel o tīrhāye Baločha” [unpublished manuscript, 1999–2000]). In his “Dictionary of the Baloch Tribes” that Lutz Rzehak kindly made available to me, Pahwal listed more than 900 Baloch tribal terms of different scope and significance. This dictionary that Pahwal probably composed over a longer period of time serves as an important primary source for my project. 28Pahwal, “Qāmūs-e qabāyel,” 54. 29Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 618–19. I was also told that it was a Sīstānī group (see appendix; the group is categorized as Barakzī because in spoken Balochi, –zī corresponds to the Pashto suffix –zāī). 30I conducted this interview on September 2, 2009, near Zabol in Iran. 31Pahwal, “Qāmūs-e qabāyel,” 136. 32Ibid., 44. 33I conducted this interview on April 29, 2012, in Quetta. 34Lutz Rzehak, Doing Pashto: Pashtunwali as the Ideal of Honourable Behavior and Tribal Life among the Pashtuns (Afghan Analysts Network Thematic Report, January 2011). 36For a more detailed discussion of this term, see Rzehak, “Ethnic Minorities,” 145. 37Boedeker, “Nation or Tribe? Some Observances about Baloch Group Affiliations in 2008 and 2010,” 81–2. 35Pahwal, “Qāmūs-e qabāyel.” 38Just Boedeker, “Cross-Border Trade and Identity in the Afghan-Iranian Border Region,” in Subverting Borders: Doing Research on Smuggling and Small-Scale Trade, ed. Bettina Bruns and Judith Miggelbrink (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), 43–4. 39Bosworth, History of the Saffarids, 68–9. For a more comprehensive account of this phenomenon, see D. G. Tor, Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry, and the ‘Ayyār Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World, Istanbuler Texte und Studien, ed. Orient-Institut Istanbul, vol. 11 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), especially his definition of the historic term ‘ayyār and its different connotations (pp. 34–5). 40Bosworth, History of the Saffarids, 69. 41See also Rzehak, “Ethnic Minorities.” 42I conducted this interview on July 10, 2010, in Kabul. 43Rzehak, Doing Pashto, 21. 44Some authors like Barth describe the social system of the Baloch as more hierarchical than that of the Pashtun (Barth, “Ethnic Processes,” 98–100; see also Imperial Gazetteer, 290). According to my own observances, the position of the tribal leader (sardar) is much more powerful in some areas in Pakistan (probably a consequence of the British Sandeman system), while in the border areas of Afghan and Iranian Sistan and the Sarḥadd, it more closely resembles the egalitarian principle of primus inter pares. 45See Rzehak, Doing Pashto. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJust Boedeker JUST BOEDEKER is a social anthropologist based at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. He would like to thank the State of Berlin for the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium he received between July 2008 and April 2011; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which contributed funding to his travels; and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which has financed his employment since May 2011 at Crossroads Asia network at ZMO.