Overview

Beyond Swat readdresses Fredrik Barth's seminal work Political Leadership among Swat Pathans, and the reactions it sparked, in relationship to contemporary developments in Swat and the wider Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier region. It explores the relevance of these scholarly debates to understanding the key dynamics affecting the region and its people today. 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 Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier, the nature of Islamic militancy, its connections to ethnicity, class and transformations in the nature of state power, and, more generally, the relationship between anthropology and history.

Full Product Details

9781849042062

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Reviews

'Easily readable and enjoyable, this book offers fresh and theoretically rich perspectives on a number of concerns that go well beyond Swat. - Exemplary.' - Marta Bolognani, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol.

Author Information

Benjamin Hopkins is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University, author of The Making of Modern Afghanistan, and co-editor, with Magnus Marsden, of Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. Magnus Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology with Reference to South and Central Asia, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He has spent 15 years conducting research in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. His publications include Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier (2005) and, as co-editor with Benjamin Hopkins, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier.

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