Iranian Journal Of Antheropology

Iranian Journal Of Antheropology

Life in a Game of Many Snakes and Few Ladders: An Ethnography of the Ordinary in the Lives of Hazara Afghan Migrants Living in Iran

Document Type : Research Paper

Author
Elmirasadat Alihosseini
PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto, Canada, Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
10.22034/jasi.2026.2087704.1621
Abstract
Following the recent wave of deportations of Afghans from Iran, the phrase “the Afghan human” has repeatedly appeared in public discussions and written commentaries. This article begins from that repetition and asks: when we speak of “the Afghan human,” through which relationships and forces is this person understood? I argue that in many accounts of deportation, the relational horizon of the human is rapidly narrowed. Among the diverse network of relations that shape refugee life, one relationship tends to dominate: the relationship to law and to the agents of the Iranian nation-state. As a result, family, neighborhood, UNHCR, neighboring states, war, poverty, and the long history of protracted migration often disappear from view.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among Hazara Afghan families in Iran, this article shows that legal precarity, deportation, and poverty cannot be understood through law alone. These experiences do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they sediment within everyday life and acquire meaning through familial, marital, parental, neighborhood, and caregiving relations. Focusing on the births of three children in the lives of Leila and Ahmad, the article examines how civil war and displacement continue years later and miles away from the battlefield, persisting in bodies, names, identity documents, memories, and social relationships. The central finding of the article is that protracted migration becomes a form of life in its own right: a condition in which law, war, and poverty are experienced and continually reconfigured not outside, but through, multiple forms of relationality.
Keywords
Afghan Hazara migration
Ethnography of the ordinary
Kinship
Legal precarity
Protracted war
Subjects
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Iranian Journal Of Antheropology
Volume 22, Issue 41
February 2026
Pages 103-127