News about faculty

By Christopher Marcisz, Berkshire Eagle Staff

Friday, September 08 [2006]
WILLIAMSTOWN

Williams College anthropology professor David Edwards spent much of the spring and summer of 2001 painstakingly building an archive from photos and videos of Afghanistan — a place he'd spent his career studying.

A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as war geared up against al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts there, The New York Times published a news story about Edwards' archive. The next day, Edwards had about 50 voice mails from news outlets, ranging from "Nightline" to "60 Minutes," to all the networks.

"That right there changed my life," he said. "I was a specialist in a topic no one really cared about. And suddenly, everyone cared about it."

For some scholars, the attacks brought the subjects of their lives' work into intense and broad public scrutiny. The spotlight has presented a mix of opportunities and frustrations.

Interest at a young age

Edwards' interest in Afghanistan began when he was young, when his grandmother sent him a postcard from Kabul as she traveled around the world. He rememberd her description of sitting on a hotel balcony and watching as a camel caravan unloaded all night in a marketplace below.

His interest was confirmed when he traveled there after college. It was one of the few places left on Earth to study nomadic cultures, and it presented a unique opportunity to explore the complex social and ethnic mix at the crossroads of several great civilizations.

But what made it appealing — the rugged, timeless swirl of peoples and cultures — also made it a difficult place to work as an anthropologist whose research requires close work in the field.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, Edwards watched as many of his peers gave up working and studying in such adverse conditions. He gravitated to Afghan refugees in areas bordering Pakistan to conduct his field work.

Paths cross on Sept. 11

On Sept. 11, Edwards was in the midst of digitizing and cataloging an archive of images that were stored in Peshawar in Pakistan, and was collaborating on the project with several Afghans who had come over to help with the work. One of them was heading home, awaiting a flight at the Newark International Airport, when the terrorists' planes struck the World Trade Center towers. He was briefly detained by the FBI, and Edwards had to vouch for him.

The echoes of the attacks not only affected his field of study, but his personal life as well. He would become friends with the Goodrich family of Bennington, Vt., who lost their eldest son, Peter. He was on United Airlines Flight 175, which was crashed into the south tower.

Peter's childhood friend, Rush Filson, of Williamstown, was serving in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan, and told the family about the poor shape the schools were in. The Goodriches decided that would be how they would honor their son's memory.

They sent an e-mail to Edwards, who was in Afghanistan at the time. He said he was skeptical at first.

"I'd seen a lot of well-intentioned humanitarian projects flounder," he said, noting the unique difficulties the region presents.

But Sally Goodrich, Peter's mother, was persistent. And with Edwards' help and connections, they were able to open a school for girls last March in Logar province.

Edwards had also had been planning to make a film using archival material he had gathered through the years about the country. But with Afghanistan now open again to outsiders since the American ouster of the Taliban, he saw an opportunity to explore the present moment in Afghan history.

The final result was "Kabul Transit," a film he produced with Gregory Whitmore, which premiered earlier this year at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Country at the forefront

Edwards said that Afghanistan has drifted in an out of American consciousness in recent decades: From the original burst of interest immediately after the Soviet invasion — which led to a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 — to feminist groups' opposing the Taliban regime in the 1990s.

"Afghanistan has periodically gone from obscurity to the center of attention and back to obscurity," he said. "There is no place like that."

And while the work has been frustrating and often distressing, he said it has been a good opportunity.

"I've had a courtside seat at the development of the central issues of our times," he said.

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