Popular representations of Pakistan's North-West Frontier have long featured simplistic images of tribal blood feuds, fanatical religion, and the seclusion of women. The rise to power of the radical Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan enhanced the region's reputation as a place of anti-Western militancy. Immersed in the lives of the Frontier's villagers for more than ten years, Magnus Marsden's evocative study of the Chitral region challenges all these stereotypes. His exploration contributes much to understanding religion and politics within and beyond the Muslim societies of southern...

Popular representations of Pakistan's North-West Frontier have long featured simplistic images of tribal blood feuds, fanatical religion, and the seclusion of women. The rise to power of the radical Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan enhanced the region's reputation as a place of anti-Western militancy. Immersed in the lives of the Frontier's villagers for more than ten years, Magnus Marsden's evocative study of the Chitral region challenges all these stereotypes. His exploration contributes much to understanding religion and politics within and beyond the Muslim societies of southern...

Despite the long and intimate history of engagement along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's North-West, this area and its relationship to the world remains poorly understood in the West's popular imagination. Through the construction of a collage of historical narratives and intense ethnographic encounters, Marsden and Hopkins argue that the simplistic stereotypes and tropes that all too often masquerade as knowledge about the Frontier not only conceal a more complex reality, but are also a source of the problems that local and international actors alike face there. Not some...

Written by anthropologists and historians with long-standing research experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as expertise in one or more of the region's languages, each chapter explores varying yet interconnected dimensions of the region's culture, society and politics over a broad span of history and their relevance to wider debates about the dynamics shaping this and other comparable 'frontier' spaces. The parallels the authors make cross temporal, as well as spatial boundaries and, in doing so, open up theoretically innovative lines of scholarly enquiry about the...

Trading Worlds is an anthropological study of a little understood yet rapidly expanding global trading diaspora, namely the Afghan merchants of Afghanistan, Central Asia and Europe. It contests one-sided images that depict traders from this and other conflict regions as immoral profiteers, the cronies of warlords or international drug smugglers. It shows, rather, the active role these merchants play in an ever-more globalized political economy. Afghan merchants, the author demonstrates, forge and occupy critical economic niches, both at home and abroad: from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia,...