Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier.

• Author: Smith, Scott
• Position: Review

Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier David Edwards (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996) 307 pp.

The fact of anarchy has overwhelmed all other facts in Afghanistan. The war, the collapse of official record-keeping institutions, the tendency of armed factions to promote propaganda--all have made it so that there is little or no objective information about Afghanistan. As a result, most of the reporting from that country has been anecdotal, and most of the books written about it have been barely disguised memoirs.

In Heroes of the Age, David Edwards, an anthropologist at Williams College, has attempted to write something penetrating about Afghanistan without relying on hard facts or resorting to the memoir form. His failure is both interesting and disappointing.

It is interesting because his approach is innovative. Edwards has chosen three narratives about three great Afghan men, each exemplifying one of the three cultural principles that, according to Edwards, animates the contest for legitimacy in Afghanistan. These three principles are honor, Islam and "rule;" the subjects of the narratives are a local tribal leader, a famous mullah and Abdur Rahman Khan, king of Afghanistan between 1880 and 1901. Edwards' premise is as much about morality as it is about the practical applications of power. He suggests that the contrasting moral attitudes toward these different sources of authority, seen through narratives told by Afghan refugees, disclose a "deep structure" of "moral incoherence." This incoherence in turn helps to explain the nearly two decades of fighting in Afghanistan.

The value of Edwards's study is primarily in bringing to the fore the importance of culture in the current conflict. Afghanistan has been more isolated than almost any other country from the sweep of development and modernity. It has retained a cultural identity that is unique, dominant and must be part of any explanation of the war. Concepts such as honor and hospitality, which have little place in Western socio-political analysis, are key to understanding Afghan politics and society, while concepts that form the basis of our political theory, such as the nation, state, political parties and constituent politics, have little relevance in Afghanistan. The narratives provide a unique window into the importance of these concepts, and Edwards's sociological analysis of them shows how they affect state and society.

Edwards's excellent...