ABSTRACT
Understanding the relation of tribe and state in Afghanistan depends on first grasping the dynamics of tribe. This is not to suggest that tribe is historically or logically prior to the state: by all available evidence, Pakhtun tribes share with other similar formations throughout the Near East a history of development in settings where metropolitan states figure prominently, and the present configuration of Pakhtun tribes emerges from their contribution to the collapse of the Safavid and Moghul empires in the eighteenth century. Nor does it mean that tribe explains state, as a continuation of tribalism by other means, as has been claimed in the case of Afghanistan. 2 But the two are organically connected in some subtle ways beyond their particular institutional junctures. To expose this connection, which is the actual empirical context of tribe-state relations, I will outline the nature of Pakhtun tribalism with particular reference to nontribal – even, in a sense to be explained, anti-tribal – formations.
