Abstract
This essay offers an explanation for the highly stylized and expressive defacement of political campaign posters in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, that occurred during the 2009 presidential elections at the height of NATO’s war in the country. I argue that the practice of mutilating faces of candidates displayed on posters and the targeting of specific facial features is the handiwork of Islamist-tribal symbolic code Islamic iconoclasm, and sympathetic magic. It is the latter that animates the images of candidates thereby making them subjects shamed and dishonored through the violence of defacement, a practice that mimics the more painful symbolic inscriptions etched mostly on the faces of breathing women in Afghanistan.
‘That’s democracy,’ I said, half committed.
I was responding to a group of young Afghan men who approached me at an intersection in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. The young men were curious about why I was photographing campaign posters of Mohammad Sarwar Ahmadzai, a presidential candidate during the 2009 election, whose face was brushed over with dark blue paint.
‘Is this all you khariji [foreigners] take pictures [of]?’ . . . was the rhetorical question posed to me; then I was chided, ‘You send home and this makes Afghans look bad!’
I was also told that the institution behind the wall crowned with high razor wire did not support the candidate whose face had been covered with paint. Territoriality seemed to release the flow of creative juices, or at least that is how I pictured it.
These Afghans were concerned that my photographs would give others a bad impression of their country, one that has been ravaged by war for the last 30 years. The latest pits the United States and its allies against insurgents supporting the former Taliban regime and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. These marked-up campaign posters that I photographed appear to undermine the narrative and practices of a civil democratic process that, if followed through, would show the world that the country was moving in the ‘right direction.’ I tried to smooth things over with those that had gathered around me by encouraging an alternative viewpoint, one that would allow the luster, irony or humor to come through the defaced posters. I assured my friends (we later smiled and shook hands) that similar forms of unofficial, passionate expression of dissent and angst appear in landscapes of ‘America.’
Defaced campaign posters in Kabul.
I tried to describe to them graffiti: a popular form of unofficial, unsanctioned expression adorning the walls of many US inner cities that has the power to form and solidify a diversity of cultural and political identities and territorial boundaries, and be a mode of public protest. 1 Though my description was much less precise, leaning more towards pidgin, it seemed they tried to re-consider the meaning of the color schemes and designs of political passion in the landscape, and therefore my intentions. But, I knew that these markings were not at all like typical American graffiti – the catch-me-if-you-can, playful tags for fame or the markings of scatological wit that makes adolescents smirk and giggle.
I had walked the streets of Kabul over and again to photograph this particular patchwork of posters. No, these were different: these marks were specifically aimed to maim the likeness of beings. The faces on the posters had their eyes, noses and mouths ripped off, meticulously scratched out or covered over with paint or some other tinctured substance. In some posters just heads were blackwashed.
This peculiar practice marked the political landscape of Kabul during the 2009 campaign for the presidency of Afghanistan. 2 When campaigning first began, cars and pick-up trucks with loudspeakers pushed through the capital to press people to vote. Then, posters, and more posters shot-up on the ubiquitous earthen and brick walls, windows, telephone and electric poles, billboards and their leg supports, and on the corrugated metal walls of shipping containers.
The campaign was broadcast onto the landscape. Most Afghans are poor and illiterate, and do not own a TV set, let alone a cable or satellite hook-up. Campaign posters displayed a variety of icons such as apples, hatchets, motorcycles, desk lamps, pens and even gift boxes with tidy ribbons all representing different political parties or specific policies promoted by individual candidates. All posters featured a prominent photograph of a candidate; one particular poster of a female candidate even had multiple technicolor images of herself a la Andy Warhol. Voters saw the same symbols and portraits on the ballot sheets when they cast their votes. The electoral process depended on voters’ recognition of image and icon. The landscape of Kabul became the screen on which the texts and images of the election moved in and out of the ordinary person’s visual field. It also became an arena of political conflict.
The election campaign was particularly contentious because President Hamid Karzai fell out of favor with the international coalition fighting and funding the war and bankrolling the development of the country. He fell out with the Afghan people because of what they perceived as his unwillingness to tackle corruption, among other things. Time, it seemed, was ripe for new leadership disassociated from the abuses of war-lordism, remunerative repatriation, and nepotism. This ramped-up emotional intensity easily looped around a densely populated Kabul. With 42 candidates riotously displaying their faces in the landscape, the opportunity for immediate political participation and smear campaigning by those with high levels of politics in their blood, could not be passed up.
The passion for political participation can provoke such practices but it does not fully explain this highly stylized and expressive form of reader-response to campaign posters. Rival posters are not simply removed or covered over with others, they are targets of defacement on which certain features on the faces of candidates are intentionally mutilated. What might account for this peculiar practice of political culture in the landscape of Kabul?
Iconography of landscape
One productive and enduring method of research that can be used to help explain this cultural practice begins with the assumption that landscape is a medium of communication composed of configurations of signs and symbols rife with meaning. These configurations or ‘texts’ make sense to people only in relation to other signs and symbols that are consciously or unconsciously brought to bear on them. Scholars of landscape also construct frameworks of interpretation but use these to delineate and expose the web of textual relations that give significance to thought and behaviors within a given community or society. Interactions among cultural texts – their intertextuality – shape meaning and structure landscapes while highlighting landscape’s agency in the production of culture, and in communicating ideas and naturalizing thought and behavior. 3 One specific interpretive strategy developed by cultural geographers influenced by semiotics and art criticism aims to understand the iconography of landscapes by explaining and showing how pictorial images of all sorts influence the look, feel, meanings and (dis)order of palpable landscapes. 4 Sometimes iconographers focus on a particular element in a landscape such as a building, memorial and/or signage, and through intertextual research they can link an element of landscape to other facets of place, culture and society. By applying an academic framework of interpretation, scholars can uncover-construct a context of plausible associations that will offer insight into why certain elements are part of a landscape and how they make sense to insiders, outsiders and those in-between.
Islamist-tribal symbolic code, iconoclasm and sympathetic magic
To decode the significance of the defaced campaign posters that were once part of the landscape of Kabul, always the epicenter of Afghanistan’s national elections, I rely on a specific framework of interpretation developed by Dawn Perlmutter, a specialist in the anthropology of violence, who lays out a web of relations consisting of a broad complex of cultural practices and meanings. She has extensively researched punitive violence in Islamic societies such as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and has identified what she calls an Islamist tribal symbolic code that merges ‘tribal honor code, Sharia law and Islamic rites of purity that inculcate a shame based ideology triggered by sacred and profane symbols.’ 5
Perlmutter argues that the code incites an ‘irrepressible impulse to alleviate shame and a sacred duty to restore honor, serve vengeance, preserve purity, maintain tradition, and save face.’ 6 Therefore, judicial and extra-judicial violence such as ‘burning, stoning, disfigurement, dismemberment, beheading, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, cutting off noses, slicing off ears and other atrocities’ 7 are essentially acts of iconoclasm – a word derived from the Greek eikōn meaning ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ and – klastēs meaning ‘breaker’ – that ultimately aims to stigmatize, shame and dishonor a person who has engaged in taboo such as breaking kinship rules, grooming and dress codes, and/or undermining tribal proscriptions, state or religious laws. ‘Symbolically, mutilation is the archetypal sign of dishonor. From a strategic perspective, a mutilated victim is forever stigmatized, a living personification of shame, a walking sign of dishonor, and a political advertisement of who is in power.’ 8
Iconoclasm and stigmatization are not executed only on human flesh. According to Perlmutter, the transcultural psychological phenomenon of ‘sympathetic magic’ impels the projection of power onto inanimate objects such as photographs, campaign posters, statues, effigies and images of sacred, powerful or venerated people whose deeds have been perceived as profane. In Afghanistan, burning effigies of recent US presidents is not unusual. Media coverage of the US Iraq war often showed Iraqis trampling on portraits or smacking with shoes and slippers fallen statues of Saddam Hussein. ‘Sympathetic magic is a primal tradition of magical thinking that implies that you can injure, humiliate, or murder a person by injuring or damaging an image of him . . . Murder and mutilation in the form of honor killings, ritual violence and iconoclasm cleanses the taboo, breaks the power of the image and the spirit of the person.’ 9
Defacing
Whether practiced on human bodies or on images on campaign posters the locus of Islamic iconoclasm in Afghanistan tends to be the face. In many past and present cultures the face has been synonymous with honor and purity. Its composition reflects the moral and spiritual character of a person. 10 Prominent marks or blemishes, disfigurements or distortions are seen as irredeemable character flaws even if the cause of the stigma is a common highly communicable disease. In Afghanistan, for example, Cutaneous Leishmaniasis or ‘Kal Dana’ (‘the year-long sore’) is now a common infection that can leave large, deep scars that traumatize victims, and make women unsuitable for marriage. 11 Although easily cured with proper medical treatment, in 2009 nearly 65,000 people were infected in Kabul alone. Nevertheless, English expressions such as ‘save face,’ ‘lose face,’ ‘face saving formula,’ and ‘blackening the face’ have their equivalents in Islamic-tribal societies beholden to the symbolic code but the formulas yield mutilation and disfigurement by individuals of individuals – and their representations.
A face losing/saving formula was used in March of 2001, when the Taliban regime destroyed two of the world’s largest standing Buddhas that were carved into a plateau in the Bamiyan Valley, a segment of the ancient Silk Road during the 6th and 7th centuries. The statues – center pieces that define the area as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – were under threat from the Taliban and others even before their declared war on idols. When the Taliban gained control of the area in 1998, the ancient relics, whose faces had already been flattened from the chin up by earlier iconoclasts who may not have been Muslims, were further vandalized even as preparations were underway for their total destruction. Soldiers burned tires on top of the head of one in an attempt to blacken the face of the Buddha thereby bringing shame upon it and undermining its power. 12
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, sulfuric acid, usually drawn from car batteries, is mixed into the ‘formula’ but with similar physical and symbolic effect which is to burn off the dishonor and shame of an individual, family or community by maiming and disfiguring the face of those who have broken cultural taboos. Women bear the brunt of these attacks.
Acid is poured or sprayed on faces of people who have refused arranged marriages, engaged in a ‘love’ relationship, been victimized by rape and/or refuse to be veiled; or on those of school girls and their teachers who ignore restrictions on female education enforced by Islamic-tribal communities such as the Taliban. The ruptured faces signify the transfer of dishonor and shame to the mutilated victim, its acrid manifestations permanently visible (Figure 2).
Campaign posters.
Acid attacks can also lead to blindness; however, the gouging out of eyes is a specific symbolic expression that intentionally aims to undermine the life force of the icon by taking out its eyes. They are ‘the clearest and most obvious indications of the vitality of the represented figure. The livelier the eyes seem the livelier the body. Take away the eyes and remove the signs of life . . . Everyone senses that to deprive the image of its eyes, in particular, is to deprive it effectively of its life.’ 13 Moreover, once the miscreant’s eyes are gone, the perceived dishonor and shame cast upon community, family or individual will no longer have witnesses, in a symbolic sense, but in one which reminds others that some memories best remain unseen (Figure 3).
Campaign posters.
Cutting out tongues and chopping off ears achieves the same objectives: In order to alleviate the feelings of humiliation and restore a sense of honor, the offended has to destroy the organs that saw it, heard it, and could talk about it. Strategically it sends a message to others to keep their eyes shut, their ears closed and their mouth sealed . . . Symbolically, the mutilation of eyes, ears, and tongues is the literal manifestation of see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
14
The nose, the most important feature of the face, assessed with much seriousness in South Asia, for its symmetry, length and form can delimit aspirations for marriage since it is the most publically exposed physical aspect, and is the ‘main focus of female shame and punishment.’ 15 Almost all incidences of nose cutting occur because of some real or imagined sexual transgression involving pre-martial promiscuity or marital infidelity or unresponsiveness culminating from a forced marriage. The nose has a deep cultural history in the region, and its manipulation such as with wearing nose rings, and mutilation that includes tearing off nose rings (which is a symbolic form of rape), can be found in Hindu mythology and ancient legal texts, Pashtu folk tales and tribal oral tradition. ‘You have cut my nose,’ ‘may your nose and ears be cut,’ ‘not letting a fly sit on your nose,’ ‘keeping your nose,’ and ‘rub one’s nose one hundred times in the ground’ – are all versions of Afghan and South Asian idioms that suggest that to have a noseless face is to have no face. 16 Without the nose, the face and therefore the complete person loses his or her integrity. The gaping hole is the archway into a metaphorical dark interior – ‘a body grave’ 17 (Figure 4). The disgusting chasm oozing with snot – which, incidentally, connotes the female genitalia and its secretions – a thought that is supposed to discourage sexual activity – reflects the anger and disgust of a shamed and dishonored husband, family and community. Women become faceless because without the nose they are forced to cover what remains of the face forever.
Campaign posters.
The most infamous defacement in Afghanistan has been that of Aisha, a young woman (featured on the cover of the August 2010 issue of Time magazine) who was accused by her husband of shaming him. He punished her in kind. She is now living in the United States undergoing reconstructive surgery. Her father-in-law who held her down while his sons cut-off her nose and ears was just released from prison after serving six months, while her husband and brother-in-law are nowhere to be found. However, mutilation is not restricted to women alone. Noses and ears of men who are deemed to have brought about dishonor to their clan are also not spared. A man can have his nose and/or ears sheared off if he is proven to be a spy or on the wrong side of an inter-family or tribal dispute or national conflict.
Conclusion
Although Afghanistan has a strict Islamic prohibition on idolatry that even makes the depiction of humans or animals in paintings and sculpture absolutely forbidden, it might seem somewhat ironic that Kabul would be veiled with faces during election campaigns. The irony diminishes when brief-clad body builders, Bollywood movie stars, and large building-size banners of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud are on display throughout major cities (Figure 5). Obviously Islamic iconoclasm is not a ‘monolithic and pathological Muslim response to the image,’ but rather appears in ‘iconoclastic moments’ that vary in intensity depending on historical and cultural circumstances. 18 For the last 10 years western capitalism’s commodity fetishism and/or modernism’s cultural homogeneity have shaped the look, feel, meanings and (dis)order of Kabul’s landscapes, and reactions to them.
A painting of Arnold Schwarzenegger (with a halo) alongside a campaign poster showing incumbent President Hamid Karzai with his vice presidents.
In any case, Perlmutter opts for a more penetrating ideological tension at the heart of this religious prohibition. She would argue that the political iconoclasm displayed on Kabul’s campaign posters is an act of religious idolatry. Defacers give the icon qua idol an intense power worthy of their fear inspiring reactions that aim to shame and dishonor the individual and undermine their power. In other words, the signifier becomes the signified, and, therefore, ‘this line between iconoclasm and idolatry dissolves.’ 19 Yet, ‘[a]ll we are breaking is stone,’ said the Supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, after destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
As Afghanistan grinds its way towards another presidential election scheduled for 2014, also the year NATO more or less exits the country, we are sure to see new faces in the scene and a gruesome round of defacement motivated by Islamist tribal code, which seems to dissolve the lines between the seen, unseen and scene, or, to put it another way, the boundaries between cultural texts. Other frameworks of interpretation may provide more plausible explanations for defacement, other texts may supplement my reading of this landscape. Both possibilities should lead us to the conclusion that landscape is ‘like a flickering text displayed on the word-processor screen whose meanings can be created, extended, altered, elaborated and finally obliterated by the merest touch of a button’ 20 – or cut of a knife.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Hayden Lorimer, Dr Ary J. Lamme, III and Annant Whalen for their comments and encouragement.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.