Summer, Slides, and the Swat valley

This week, my daughter Anna has worked for me, scanning old slides. The ambition is to dig out some treasures from these age-old slide-boxes with pictures from various corners of the world, and put them to work. The above is an example. This is an image from the upper parts of the Swat valley, the election campaign of fall-1990, and the convoy heading towards us are supporters of Nawaz Sharif (who won). In recent months, politics in Swat has been fought with unpeaceful means, and this week we have had reports indicating that the final victory of the Pakistani army was not that final after all. Swat also hosted the Norwegian world-famous anthropologist Fredrik Barth, whose 1959 book on ‘Political Leadership amongst the Swat Pathans’ still figures on many a reading list (including the one of David Kilcullen, chief strategist at the Pentagon, and author of ‘The Accidental Guerilla’, OUP 2008). One of my Swati acquaintances, a local entrepreneur (pharmacy; antiques; fish farming...), from a prominent landholding family of landowners, remembered the tall aristocratic anthropologist from far away, on whose lap he sat as a small kid. His father had been one of Barth’s key informants. I take it for granted that my entrepreneurial friend, with his prominent familybackground, was one of the first to have been driven out as Taliban groups took control of the valley. It will be quite a while before I will be able to go back to find out.

But, I am now taking a couple of weeks of vacation (till 2nd August). Infrequent blogging to be expected.