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 mark conditions in which war persists as the very medium of life. This project explores how collapse registers 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. With ethnographic fieldwork in Herat, Afghanistan, I will trace how collapse is lived and sensed in body and psyche, how it is encountered in clinical settings and beyond, and how people respond to its demands. Two questions guide this research: What does it mean to live when war saturates existence and destruction remains ongoing rather than past? And how do people orient themselves to the past amid war’s reconfiguration of memory and transmission?