M. Jamil Hanifi is currently employed as an independent scholar. His long standing research interests have focused on the anthropology and history of Afghanistan. He was in fact born in Afghanistan, in Sorkhab, Logar Province. He obtained his Ph.D in Anthropology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, in 1969. He earned his M.A. in Political Science, from Michigan State University, in 1962. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Social Science, from Michigan State University, in 1960. He is fluent in Farsi/Dari, and Paxtu. He also has reading ability in Arabic, Russian, Tajiki (in Cyrillic), and Urdu. At present he is an adjunct researcher in the Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University and he teaches at Lansing Community College. He was formerly a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University, from 1969 to 1982. His research has been partially supported by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, in the period from 1982 to 2006. He is the author of the Historical and Cultural Dictionary of Afghanistan (1976) and numerous articles in journals and encyclopedias. You can read more about Jamil here and here. He joined this blog in July of 2009.

Jamil’s specialization on this blog is Afghanistan. The following is a list of the articles he has published here:

• What Caused the Collapse of the State Infrastructure of Afghanistan?

• Editing the Past: Colonial Production of Hegemony Through the Loya Jerga in Afghanistan

• Interrogating Conventional Wisdom about Terrorism

• Engineering Division, Instability, and Regime Change with Naheed, Neda, and Allah

• Questions for Military Anthropology

• Anthropology and the Representation of Migrations from Afghanistan

• The Killing Fields of Marja

• Taleban–Not Taliban

• Causes and Consequences of the Destabilization of Afghanistan

• Is TIME’s Afghan “cover girl” really a victim of mutilation by the Taleban?

• The Loaded Goat: Revisiting Pine Cone Anthropology in Afghanistan

• The ‘Dirty Secrets’ that Purify a Dirty War: A Colonial Tale of Dancing Boys, a Journalist, and the Human Terrain System in Afghanistan

• Holy Mother of Israel

• American Educated Afghans and the Destruction of Afghanistan by the United States: The Case of Zal Khalizad

• An Alternative Approach to Afghanistan

• The Heroic People of Egypt

• The U.S. War of Terror in Afghanistan

• Peace Corps and Afghanistan

• Vending Distorted Afghanistan Through Patriotic ‘Anthropology’

• “Take It Easy on U.S. Imperialism”: Theocratizing the Middle East

• Drones and the Production of Terror in Afghanistan

• Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, or the “Top Thinker” in the World Scouting for the Empire in Afghanistan

• Distorting Theory and Misreading Society in Afghanistan

• Pamphleteer Anthropology and the Production of Knowledge about Afghanistan

• Book Review: Afghanistan Post–2014—Misreading Afghanistan’s Crypto-coloniality