138 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45 (2013) Elite Pasts and Subaltern Potentialities JAMES CARON Department of Languages and Cultures of South Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, U.K.; e-mail: james.caron@soas.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S002074381200133X In narrating Afghanistan’s 21st century, future historians might bracket the first decade with the two Bonn conferences of 2001 and 2011: great-power delegates and handpicked elite Afghans meeting to plot Afghanistan’s transitional place in the international system. In contrast, Afghan popular and intellectual cultures alike have often voiced alternate his- tories. For example, Malang Kohistani, a contemporary working-class singer of Kabul’s hinterland, sees top-down Afghan integrations into globality not as a fundamentally new construction of institutions that promise prosperity for a nation-state and its people but rather as one more intrusive disruption—in a chain of similar events beginning over 2,000 years ago with Alexander—in everyday people’s continuous, bottom-up efforts to ensure their livelihoods, in part through developing horizontally organized trade networks. 1 And indeed it is not only post-2001 statist intervention that has attracted such popular responses, but this is also a longstanding critique among both urban and rural Afghan intellectuals. In some ways Malang Kohistani echoes Malang Jan, the renowned 1950s sharecropper-poet of Jalalabad, as well as various more elite authors. Atlantic-centric and Kabul-centric perspectives have dominated the historiography of Afghanistan since the earliest colonial representations of the area, including Mountstuart Elphinstone’s 1815 account. Cutting across their mutual distrust for each other, a long- standing traffic between British and Afghan officials and potentates, and an overlap of their social and political circles, led to shared perspectives at least where their hinterlands were concerned—inscribing discourses of fractious otherness onto rural populations that have rarely been shaken in either Persian or English history writing. Serious, system- atic inquiry into rural lives has too frequently been substituted by abstraction-driven pronouncements on the natures of rural groups. Academic writing has sometimes lagged behind certain practice-oriented fields such as development studies in rethinking statist perspectives and seeking broader-based local and regional social histories. For example, a 2002 report by Adam Pain and Jonathan Goodhand for the International Labour Organization (ILO) attributed the lack of basic information on Afghan livelihoods to Western assumptions about Afghanistan and Afghan administration styles that de-emphasize quantitative data. 2 At the same time, the report’s introduction provided an alternate history of Afghanistan, a view centering on livelihoods and mobility and on integrating global and local positionalities, an approach also advocated by R. D. McChesney in his contribution to this roundtable. Building on already published material, we find in the 2002 report a nuanced social- historical narrative: as urban Afghanistan has been increasingly integrated into the global economy, rural Afghanistan appears to have become progressively localized. Marginal comments from dozens of sources allow us to flesh out the picture further: from the 1930s to the 1950s, formerly mobile traders invested more frequently in land, which increased