An extended new Preface and a new Epilogue written after the
fall of the Taliban in 2001, place The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan,
originally published in 1979, in the context of a vastly changed
world. The original book describes the cultural and ecological
adaptation of the nomadic Kirghiz and their agriculturalist neighbors,
the Wakhi, to high altitudes and a frigid climate in the Wakhan
Corridor, a panhandle of Afghanistan that borders Pakistan, the
former Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China.
The new Preface challenges the assumption that the root cause
of terrorism is religious. Shahrani asserts that the problem of
terrorism is fundamentally political and is historically linked
to the inappropriate model of the centralized nation-state introduced
to Afghanistan by colonial regimes.
The differing responses of the Kirghiz and Wakhi to the Marxist
coup are discussed in the new Epilogue. Shahrani has closely followed
the flight of the Kirghiz to Pakistan in 1978 and their eventual
resettlement among resentful Kurdish villagers in eastern Turkey
in 1982. The ethnographic documentation and analysis of the transformation
of Kirghiz society, politics, economics, and demography since
their exodus from the Pamirs offers valuable lessons to our understanding
of the dynamics and true resilience of small pastoral nomadic
communities.
M. Nazif Shahrani, an Afghan anthropologist, is chair of the
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University.
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