An Afghan Dancing Boy

[JesusA (imported)]

In 1979 I received a small NSF grant to purchase a series of 25 ethnographic films, the Faces of Change series, for my university. The grant also sent me to a week-long workshop with the filmmakers, where they each provided background on the five cultures that the films depicted and ways that the films might be used in class (a Hong Kong fishing village, a Taiwan rice-farming village, Cattle herders in Kenya, a potato-farming village in Bolivia, and Aq Kupruk, a market town in northern Afghanistan).

Louis and Nancy Dupree spent a day with our small group detailing life in the Afghan town where they had conducted anthropological fieldwork over many years and had spent six weeks with a film crew in 1972. They provided additional background beyond what was in the films. One of the scenes in the film An Afghan Village showed a performance by a dancing boy in front of an appreciative audience of men and boys. Louis Dupree’s comment about the performance was that the most unusual thing about the scene was that the dancing boy, who looked to be in his teens, had NOT been castrated. He observed that in the past, most dancing boys were castrated, but that it had become less frequent over the period that he had been doing field research in the country.

A 1953 article about the area noted that, when tenant farmers were otherwise unable to pay their annual rent to the landowner, they might pay with one of their young children, who would then belong to the landlord and become part of his family. It was normal for young boys given as rent payments to be castrated to live in the household with the women and girls of the landowner’s family.