Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the challenges posed by an anthropological study of representations of the self in literature, with a focus on the lyric poetry and poetic practices of Persian-speaking Afghan refugee intellectuals in Iran.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the anthropological study of literary representations of the individual and collective self in lyric poetry. It proposes that literary traditions, like Jung's dream house, are symbolic treasure troves of genres, tropes and rhetorical conventions that enable or constrain imaginative expression. An anthropological approach to literature must address epistemological problems about the degree to which literature 'reflects' social reality. To what extent is that reality - and indeed, the very concepts of imagination and self - mediated by literary conventions, audiences and moral economies of creative expression?

I address these questions in the context of the contemporary poetry of Shi'a, Persian-speaking Afghan refugees in Iran. While sharing a language, religion and literary canon with their hosts, Afghan refugees remain socio-economically marginal in Iran. A group of young, Iranian-educated intellectuals has embraced literature as its primary discursive tool, and in the past decade lyric poetry has become a major expressive mode, in sharp contrast with the epic war poetry of the previous generation.

This paper, based on a year of fieldwork with Afghan poets in Iran, examines the rhetorical strategies, genres and personality tropes adopted by a number of young Afghans to represent their individual and collective selves from the margins of Iranian society. These range from appeals to Islamic brotherhood to an alienated exilic identity; from an expansive cosmopolitanism to assertive, sexually provocative feminism. These must be read in the context of modernist developments in Persian poetry in the past century, as well as the millennium-old Persian literary canon.