Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier

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.