Sylvia's Journal

I picked up a book about the performance of emotion among the Pashtoon women in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan. It is a wonderful piece of ethnographic writing about the misfortunes that have befallen women, the ‘performance of grief.’ The scholarly but easy to read book presents a counterpoint to the more commonly known narrative of Pashtoon men with their code of honor, revenge killing and all that.

The opening chapter about doing ethnographic fieldwork is fascinating because it explains something about being a foreign female in these lands. I have always considered myself and my non Afghan sisters somewhat of a third gender but I now realize that this is not entirely correct.

We can be among the men and the women and move around, seemingly, in either world. But I am learning now that this is not true. The author explains how being among men, as a woman, in the highly segregated places of her fieldwork, she could never get close to the women unless she stopped moving back and forth between the men and the women. It is as if one is not entirely a woman until one moves into parda (purdah) with the local women and behave with modesty (downcast eyes), subservience and shyness when in the company of men (who would be close relatives, not strangers as that would be taboo).

Although I work and live among a group of Afghans who are highly educated and used to this Western mingling of the sexes, I have an inkling that for some this behavior may be problematic, more so because it could never be expressed. I am not behaving as a woman should in that (granted, very rural and not very educated) culture, rarely casting my eyes down, unless I am walking on uneven ground, never subservient. I can’t help but think that my behavior grates on some men here.

One chapter is about the expression of emotion and I realized instantly that our glorification of Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence writing is fine within a western context but entirely inappropriate in this culture. Expression of emotion is a ritual performance, highly gender-dependent, learned early in life by girls and boys, and a collective rather than an individual experience as it is in the west. It is as if a new window has been shoved in front of me with someone whispering, ‘here, look through this, now what do you see?’

I look through this new window pane at my experience of the last 10 days and begin to glimpse why I am having a hard time. I am seeing emotions expressed in behaviors that to me dictate the need for talking things over. It is part of the western management credo in which I am so thoroughly trained: when the surface appears to hide things that are swarming and squirming underneath, investigate!

Now I am trying to look through that new window again and I see steady rituals, maintained over 100s of years with protagonists and extras who all know their place, their role and the rituals they ought to perform. And suddenly there is me, throwing a monkey wrench into the works. Could that be?

I think about my male predecessors and wonder why they never talked to me about these things. Were there any clashes at all? And about what? Or did they just let things slide because of the discomfort that confrontation would bring?

This morning when I woke up I thought about a phrase from Ron Heifetz, noted surgeon/psychiatrist/cellist and most famous as leadership developer at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Heifetz always talks about adaptive work (as contrasted to technical work where there are experts who know the answer). Framing the adaptive work is the work of leaders and the compelling challenge is always, “how can we learn our way out of this mess?”

I recognize that Heifetz is the product of an individualistic society, and so am I. We believe that individuals can change on their own. And here I am in a very collectivist society where an individual who chooses his or her own path takes enormous risks.

My adaptive work, then, in the next 13 months, will be to figure out how to ask the questions that lead to self-initiated and self-propelled change (not imposed) in this context. It requires, among other things, learning at least one of the languages of this place. I need words.