Farid Zareie

With several generations of Afghans having lived through decades of war, the echoes of war exceed the ruins and destruction of the material world, leaving traces in the form of psychic and unconscious wounds. Alongside death, suicide, and disappearance that haunt life and shape the conditions of living, episodes of sudden collapse-paralysis, muteness, or seizure-without detectable neurological cause have become a striking form of suffering. Often categorized as psychogenic illness or psychosomatic disorder, such collapse marks conditions in which the boundaries between psychic, corporeal, and historical suffering become difficult to sustain.

This project explores the psychic and corporeal demands of living when death is held in abeyance -neither arriving nor receding, but persisting as a condition under which life must be sustained. Through ethnographic fieldwork among Afghans in Sweden, it traces how experiences of war, loss, and displacement are lived and sensed in body and psyche, including forms of collapse and withdrawal associated with Resignation Syndrome. Moving across domestic, therapeutic, religious, and communal settings, the research attends to how suffering, death, and endurance are encountered through clinical, familial, and Islamic vocabularies and practices. Two questions guide the inquiry: What does it mean to live with histories of destruction that cannot simply be relegated to the past? And how do people orient themselves to the past as displacement transforms the conditions through which memory, suffering, and loss are lived and transmitted?