Fragments of the Afghan Frontier * By Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden

In explaining the central theme of the book, the authors point out how the Afghan Frontier has been mythicized and fictionalized in the writings of Churchill, Kipling and scores of other writers who claimed a first-hand experience of the place as agents in various capacities. Afghanistan has spurred a plethora of literature in the social sciences. This study promises to solve the riddle of the Frontier region in an entirely different way. It would not have been possible without the distinctive collaboration of a historian and an anthropologist, further distinguished by their opportunity to look at the region over a number of years as well as during short periods of fieldwork. Stepping away from the stereotype, this book explores the ways in which states and their officials as well as the region’s people themselves confront its cultural, religious, political and ethnic heterogeneity. The heterogeneity is what the colonial state sought to regulate, by drawing boundaries between its people, setting up military bases, and dealing with local norms in the idiom of the colonists’ own limited understanding of the ground realities. The anthropological approach brings out the interface of the rigid exogenous divisions imposed upon people whose lives are built around, and out of, a remarkable diversity of cultural and political influences and interactions.