Ashraf Ghani is an Anthropologist

Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.  

There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it’s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz. 

I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the time, as editor of the society's journal, Cultural Anthropology.  His lecture was awful, and precisely of the genre that is given by elite academics who have one foot or more in the world of power.  

So too, one certainly cannot say that Ghani qua Afghanistan’s president was either representative of anthropology or in any way democratic.  Indeed, there is no evidence his conduct in office was informed at all by what he previously had studied and taught in anthropology.  He governed bereft of, and seemingly with no concern to build, popular support.  His tenure as president was fully dependent on the awful violence of the US military, and once the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan this spring and summer, his presidency collapsed almost instantly, leaving him to flee Kabul.  Simply put, Ghani in his conduct—that is, assessed in Arendtian terms—was a garden variety US puppet, notwithstanding his considerable anthropological knowledge.  

This is not to say that Ghani's academic background did not matter.  All too clearly it helped start and thereafter propped up the notion that he possessed relevant academic expertise for the role US elites deluded themselves into thinking he might play.  Expertise, we were told, in “failed states” and—presumably—in how to un-fail them.

Ghani should, in sum, be a cautionary tale: credentialed experts will not save us.  He also serves to warn us that no discipline can inoculate us from the rot that befalls those who become reified “insiders”—as distinct from persons practicing “outside-inside-outside politics,” meaning always starting from and returning to social communities marginal to power.  It is only such a practice, rather than stature as an educated elite, that is a reliable basis for democratic praxis for persons exercising state power.

So yes, Ashraf Ghani is an anthropologist and one possessed of an impressive academic pedigree.  His service as Afghanistan’s president does no credit to either our discipline or elite academia, but we should not pretend he is not ours.  Rather, we should remember “Ashraf Ghani the esteemed anthropologist,” precisely to remind ourselves how desperately we need to forge a radically new relationship between academia and the world.