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&
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