M. NAZIF SHAHRANI, The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). Pp. 302. $22.50 paper

Extract

Since the late 19th century, modern nation-states have sought to fix pastoral nomadic societies through various policies of settlement and sedentarization. One of the most basic has been the transformation of open and permeable frontiers into closed borderlands. While many writers have assumed that the inevitable fate of nomads is to become settled and converted into agriculturalists, a few rare voices have called attention to the resilience of pastoral ways. In this respect, the work of M. Nazif Shahrani has been pioneering. In his classic The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War (originally published in 1979), Shahrani suggests that in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan there has been no clear progression from nomadic to settled or urban life and that “both nomadization of agriculturalists and sedentarization of nomads has always occurred” in marginal environments (p. 221). While the closing of frontiers in late-19th- and early-20th-century Central Asia imposed dire limits on the Kirghiz, bringing them territorial loss and severing their socio-economic ties with Chinese and Russian Turkistan, they were nevertheless able to remain herders by moving to the high altitudes of the Afghan Pamir, “the roof of the world” (bam-i dunya).