Mountstuart Elphinstone

Abstract

During 1809, Mountstuart Elphinstone and his team of researchers visited the Persianate "Kingdom of Caubul" in Peshawar in order to sign a defense treaty with the ruler of the kingdom, Shah Shuja, and to collect information for use by the British colonial government of India. During his four-month stay in Peshawar, and subsequent two years research in Poona, India, Elphinstone collected a vast amount of ethnographic information from his Persian-speaking informants, as well as historical texts about the ethnology of Afghanistan. Some of this information provided the material for his 1815 (1819, 1839, 1842) encyclopaedic "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" (AKC), which became the ethnographic bible for Euro-American writings about Afghanistan. Elphinstone's competence in Farsi, his subscription to the ideology of Scottish Enlightenment, the collaborative methodology of his ethnographic research, and the integrity of the ethnographic texts in his AKC, qualify him as a pioneer anthropologist—a century prior to the birth of the discipline of anthropology in Europe. Virtually all Euro-American academic and political writings about Afghanistan during the last two-hundred years are informed and influenced by Elphinstone's AKC. This essay engages several aspects of the ethnological legacy of AKC.