Based on fieldwork conducted in 2000, this paper examines the role of music in two sites of Afghan settlement in exile, Peshawar (Pakistan) and Fremont (California). Interpreting the data in terms of recent research on music and migration the paper argues that Afghan music in Peshawar serves to maintain links with the past, while in Fremont there is the emergence of a new kind of modernized Afghan music, which is bound up with the construction of a new Afghan-American identity. The new music is now feeding back to Afghanistan itself, showing that new cultural performances created and constructed in exile may end up as models shaping cultural practices at home.
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John S. Baily (2005) studied this question.
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