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

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Paper

Author
Elmirasadat Alihosseini
Postdoc at University of Tehran
10.22034/jasi.2026.2087704.1621
Abstract
Following the wave of deportations of Afghans from Iran, the phrase “the Afghan human” has recurred in writings and discussions. It evokes a relational understanding of the human, in which the self is formed not in isolation but through others. Yet in most accounts of deportation, this horizon is narrowed. Of all the others that shape a refugee’s life, only one relation is foregrounded: the relation to law and to agents of the Iranian nation-state. Even this relation is framed apart from the long history that produced it and only within the present “crisis.” What drops out is an understanding of Afghans as people entangled in networks of family, neighborhood, the UNHCR, neighboring states, and more. Protracted migration, now a form of life, cannot be explained solely through law and legal restriction.
Encounters with the state and the aftereffects of civil war do not occur in a vacuum. They settle into everyday life, shaping how relations are sustained, how the self is understood, and how one lives with others. The everyday is not merely the scene of legal encounters or wartime violence, but the terrain in which their effects settle. Through the story of three births in an Afghan migrant family, this text opens legal precarity, deportation, and poverty within this horizon. Its focus is not the abstract, human-rights figure of “the Afghan human,” but the lives of Leila and Ahmad: how war and displacement have settled into their lives, and how they recalibrate their ways of being with others.
Keywords
ethnography of the everyday
Afghan Hazara migration
protracted war
Iran
Subjects
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Iranian Journal Of Antheropology

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 June 2026