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CHAPTER 6

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF VIOLENCE
R. LINCOLN KEISER

PROBLEM 6 How do societies give meaning to and justify collective violence?

Watching television, reading newspapers, and going to see the latest summer blockbuster movies could lead to the conclusion that violence is endemic to the human condition. It would seem that people are born to be violent and that the proclivity to commit violence must have been hardwired into our very being through the course of human evolution. But although genetic makoup affects behavior, there is much about human violence that is not explained by genetics. Violence is not the same everywhere. Both the meanings and interpretations given to violence and the form violence takes vary across cultures and societies and through time.

Still, many Americans assume that violence is violence wherever it is found. For example, after reading a piece I wrote in Natural History about blood feuding in Thull (Keiser 1986), a Kohistani community located in the mountains near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a woman asked me if it was safe to travel in that area. I had begun this particular piece with the following excerpt from my field diary:

I had then gone on to say that you cannot live in Thull for even a day without becoming aware of the pervasiveness of organized violence. Men own specially made fighting knives, axes, clubs, walking sticks designed to double as stabbing spears, automatic pistols, revolvers, bolt-action rifles, updated versions of 19th century British cavalry carbines, and Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. One even finds bolt-action versions of the AK-47 designed and produced by the local arms industry. The sounds of Thull reflect its weaponry; rifle shots fill the air day and night. Religious authorities almost succeeded in stamping out singing and drumming; gunfire became the music of Thull in their place.

Unfortunately, the woman who called concluded that the people of Thull have a penchant for chaotic violence and must be bloodthirsty beasts. But such attitudes are a mistake. Kohistanis interpret violence differently than we do, and this interpretation affects how violence is played out in their communities. Americans traveling in the mountains of Kohistan have nothing to fear from Kohistani blood feuding (although they have a lot to fear from Kohistanis' belief that Christians, Jews, and any other kind of non-Muslims are fundamentally selfish, untrustworthy, evil people). Differences in the way Americans and Kohistanis interpret violence are rooted in history and in culture, not in genetics.

Thull is a community of roughly 6000 Muslims located in the uppermost reaches of the Panjkora Nralley. A traveler cannot find a more remote community in Dir Kohistan. Dir District, of which Dir Kohistan is a part, is a section of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. Chitral borders it to the north, Swat to the east, Afghanistan and Bajour to the west, and Malakand to the south. The community lies along some 40 kilometers of river valley. It includes a core village, 15 satellite districts, and 28 summer pastures areas.

Getting to Thull is not easy. The road leads across the Indus River to the foot of the Hindu-Kush Mountains, then climbs the switchbacks of Malakand Pass to Chakdarra. Near here a small contingent of British soldiers (including the young Winston Churchill) fought 6000 native tribesmen in the Yusufzai uprising of 1901. From Chakdarra the road winds up the Panjkora Valley to Dir Town, the market and administrative center for Dir Kohistan. The road is paved to Dir Town, but Thull lies some 40 miles beyond, at the end of a dirt road that is impassable in bad weather. The main settlement lies at approximately 7000 feet. The community owns roughly 40 kilometers of territory along the upper reaches of the Panjkora Valley, including land for fields and summer pastures.

Those hazarding the trip to Thull find a bleak, but nonetheless beautiful, landscape at journey s end. Houses cluster at the foot of towering peaks that reach as high as 15,000 feet, and others are scattered here and there on lonely outcrops and hidden plateaus. Crags brood over land littered with smashed boulders, severed by swift-running streams, and periodically shattered by the growing pains of mountains whose convulsions occasionally approach the top of the Richter scale. Throughout the valleys and mountains, humans cultivate thin, sandy-colored soil where the terrain permits, and they pasture their herds on fairway-smooth meadows bordering the Panjkora's edge and strewn high among mammoth evergreen forests.

The Panjkora Valley widens within the confines of Thull's boundaries, thus permitting the cultivation of land adjacent to the river's edge without a complex system of stone terrace walls and irrigation channels. Most fields, however, are located away from the river on mountain slopes, where the terrain requires extensive terracing. The builders carefully fit stones together to construct most terrace walls. According to local traditions, the walls date back some 300 years to pagan times.

Thull enjoys relatively plentiful rain and snow. Snow sometimes accumulates to six feet at the valley floor, and at much greater depths in the mountains. Runoff from melting snow provides a major source of the Panjkora's water. The high mountain peaks wring moisture from the air throughout the early spring, and so much precipitation falls in some years that the Panjkora ravages the land with spring floods that destroy fields and wash away houses, livestock, and even people. In late summer, monsoon rains provide an additional source of moisture, drenching the land. Nature provides so little rainfall from May to mid-August that crops growing in fields away from the Panjkora require periodic watering from irrigation channels.

The people of Thull make their living by farming and herding. Traditionally, women took primary responsibility for cultivating corn and other crops in fields located near permanent settlements, while men herded goats, cattle, water buffalo, and sheep. The herdsmen of Thull practice vertical transhumance: the animals are pastured on land near the permanent settlements during winter and are taken to the high mountain pastures for summer. When potatoes were introduced as a cash crop some 20 to 30 years ago, the division of labor changed, and men took on the primary responsibility for organizing the cultivation of that crop. Men now dominate the agricultural dimension of subsistence as well.

The ethnographic literature on mountain communities in Pakistan and l Afghanistan poses intriguing questions about blood-feud violence. Among the tribes of Indus Kohistan, a region bordering the Indus River to the east of Swat Kohistan, intracommunity political relationships are organized around institutionalized revenge and highly complex notions of personal honor. In contrast, the value of maintaining communal harmony is generally unquestioned among many of the tribal communities located in the higher valleys to the west of the Indus, and such harmony is a potent force in organizing politics within those communities.

Initially, I planned to focus my research on these differences by studying a community that forbade blood feuding. Thull looked like a good field site because earlier reports indicated that the people who lived there generally settled their internal disputes without bloodshed. I was really surprised to find organized vengeance (mar dushmani, or death enmity) entrenched in Thull. Further research revealed that the obsession with death enmity that warps contemporary social relations in Thull developed in the last few decades. Before then, most fights had been between descent groups, whose members share common descent from a named ancestor, and had not involved deadly weapons. Death enmity between descent groups was seen as having the potential to ultimately destroy the community, so village leaders worked to settle disputes peacefully and punished those who seriously threatened village peace. Now, in contrast, most fights are between individuals or between adversaries supported by various kinds of allies. Enemies attempt to kill one another to avenge personal injury, and no rules limit the use of weapons.

I could find no statistics on the number of murders committed in the community in recent years, although the leader of Thull's small contingent of police told me that revenge killings averaged two per month during his tenure. Shaking his head, he declared that the people of Kohistan were among the most lawless in Pakistan—and that the men of Thull were the most lawless in all of Kohistan.

This change poses interesting questions. How can we account for the appearance of dushmani¹ such a short time ago? Part of the answer lies in the relationship between Islamic ideology and men's sense of their personal integrity. However, organized violence must be understood as a process in time with a contemporary structure that resulted from a history of social and cultural transformations. The story begins 400 years ago.

Based on what we know of contemporary non-Muslim tribes in the area, social organization during the pre-Islamic period probably focused on independent communities consisting of a core village surrounded by a few satellite settlements.² Each community was divided into groups of people tracing descent from a common ancestor through the male line only. These descent groups were exogamous, meaning that men within each descent group married women from different descent groups. Looking at it from a male point of view, this is an exchange of women between patrilineal descent groups. Such exchanges organized intergroup relationships. Gommunity political organization centered on relationships among descent groups. Political decisions were made in councils of descent group representatives, and membership in descent groups provided individuals with their primary source of political support.

Women did not seclude themselves, as they do now, and relationships between men and women were relatively free and open. The sexual purity of women was not a basis for judging a man's honor. This is not to say that disputes over women were not politically volatile. Wife stealing was probably a major source of internal political conflict, as accounts of contemporary nonMuslim tribes show. Nevertheless, even though wife stealing was an attack on a husband's rights, it did not involve his personal integrity. Consequently, men could peacefully settle such cases, more often than not, by paying fines and compensation. Moreover, because wife stealing took place between descent groups, it struck at important political alliances built on ties of marriage Paternal relatives of both opponents in such disputes generally pressed for their peaceful settlement in order to maintain these alliances.

Leadership institutions and political values in the pre-Islamic period probably reflected the general insecurity in the region. Communities drew their leaders from descent group elders chosen ad hoc for the specific problem at hand. These leaders considered maintaining village peace through the nonviolent resolution of internal disputes to be one of their most important duties Had the disputes not been settled, factionalism would have dangerously weakened the community's ability to deal effectively with external threats.

Village peace was an important political value in many pagan societies in the eastern Hindu-Kush. Among the Kom tribe in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, for example, people so valued village harmony that elders forced disputants to settle their differences peacefully. The Kom recognized that uncontrolled violence posed a serious threat to their continued existence. Hence, community leaders expelled murderers and confiscated their property (Robertson 1896:439-442). No rules precluded immediate vengeance, but those who chose to accept compensation instead of exacting revenge received high praise from their fellows. Barth (1956) reported that similar customs were followed in the Kohistani communities east of Dir in the Swat District, making it probable that Kohistani communities in Dir treated murder and revenge in a similar manner during the pre-Islamic period. Even today in Thull, lamo aman, village peace, is a respected value, and to be called aman pasand, peace lover, is a compliment. Descent-group elders still negotiate dispute settlements, although their efforts in murder cases often fail.

The members of non-Muslim tribes recognized the legitimacy of some retaliatory vengeance murders. Among the Kom, for example, men directed retaliatory vengeance at members of surrounding tribes. For example, Kom tribesmen raided neighboring communities belonging to the Pathan ethnic group in retaliation for their allegedly killing members of the Kom tribe (Strand, personal communication, 1975).

Today, there is sometimes dushmani between Kohistani communities as well as between individuals. The Kohistani villages of Kalkot and Birikot, which are located on the Panjkora River just west of Thull, have a relationship of enmity going back 15 years. Because of it, 15 men have lost their lives.

ln all probability, organized vengeance formed a part of the social order in pre-Islamic Kohistan, although it was not related to honor based on the sexual purity of women and it was limited to intercommunity relations. Intracommunity peace was critical for survival in an environment where force often decided political differences between tribal settlements. Networks of alliance and hostility among communities provided a degree of order in an otherwise anarchical situation.

The cultural values, concepts, and ideas basic to organized vengeance in contemporary Thull were probably introduced at the same time Muslim missionaries converted the Kohistanis to Islam in the 16th century. They set processes of change in motion that ultimately resulted in a new and unique Kohistani sociocultural system. This system is neither logically consistent nor tightly structured. It could not be, since it is the product of multiple and contradic-tory forces interacting in complex ways through time.

It appears likely that the core of Kohistani social organization and culture remained generally unchanged immediately after conversion of the Kohistanis to Islam. As late as 1954, according to Barth, seclusion did not organize women s lives in the Kohistani communities in Swat east of Thull, and both men and women enjoyed free and open relationships (1956:66). Similarly, informants in Thull stated that the rules of strict purdah (the stringent seclu-sion of women} now in force are recent innovations that appeared only in the last few decades.

Barth's male informants stated no preference for marrying any category of women, and in particular expressed no preference for marriage with close paternal cousins (1956:66). This differs considerably from the current assertion that marriage to paternal cousins is not merely a preference, but that it is strict-ly adhered to. It also unquestionably represents a change from strictures against marrying within descent groups in force during the pre-Islamic period.

Initially, politics within Kohistani communities probably remained un-changed as well. In the unstable conditions that continued after the Kohistanis converted to Islam, the political unity of communities remained crucial to sur-vival. Consequently, organized vengeance within communities was too threat-ening to be permitted. Nevertheless, forces of social and cultural change set in motion by contact with nearby Pathan communities (the dominant ethnic group in the Northwest Frontier Province) and conversion to Islam increas-ingly affected patterns of organized vengeance in Kohistan, just as events in the outside world continued to modify the political milieu in which Kohistani communities existed.

India became a crown colony of the British Empire in the mid-1800s. As Britian secured control of India, Russia advanced into central Asia, incorporating many formerly independent states into the Russian Empire. Tension between the British and Russians soon developed. The British government saw the Russians as a threat to their control of India, and much British colonial policy in India in the last half of the 19th century was designed to halt the Russian advance. In particular, the British saw controlling the state of Chitral, located in the far northwest corner of india, as critical in stopping the Russian threat. Troops and supplies had to go through the state of Dir to get to Chitral.

A Pathan chief in southern Dir conquered Dir Kohistan in 1888, and his successors, known as nawabs, succeeded in subjecting Thull and her Kohistani neighbors to the vagaries of their rule. Throughout the days of British rule, maintaining a friendly government in Dir strong enough to pro-tect the road to Chitral was a cornerstone of British colonial policy in the Northwest Frontier. As long as the nawabs protected the road and allowed the British Army to use it, the British government was satisfied. Consequently, the British provided the nawabs with arms, subsidies, specially arranged meetings with the British Viceroy, and carte blanche to rule as they saw fit.

The rulers of Dir built their political policy on twin pillars: loyalty to British rule, and a tenacious adherence to pakhtunwali, the traditional code of the Pathans, which includes honor, revenge, hospitality, and giving protection to all who ask (even sworn enemies). Unlike the rulers of neighboring Swat who pursued a policy of social and economic development, the nawabs of Dir strove to maintain Dir as a patrimonial state. They neither adopted nor developed any kind of formal legal code to regularize their rule, instead governing by arbitrary decrees. They constructed few roads. The highway linking Dir to Chitral was the only notable exception, since the British insisted that they build it. Consequently, most Kohistani communities in Dir remained physically isolated and at least partially quarantined from political, ideological, and economic developments outside the district. Finally, in order to weaken potential opposition, the nawabs actively encouraged local strife. At the same time, they suppressed armed conflicts between the comrnunities of Dir and Chitral at the demand of their British patrons.

The nawabs' policies effected particular cultural changes in Thull. In order to promote contention within communities, the nawabs encouraged blood vengeance by levying light fines for murder while at the same time advocating the idea that injured parties retaliate rather than accept compensation They instituted this policy under the guise of promoting badal, revenge, which was a key idea in pakhtunwali.

Nevertheless, institutionalized vengeance did not become an important element in Kohistani social relations, though Kohistanis came to recognize badal as an important value. There are several reasons for this. Most importantly, badal contradicted aman pasand, the indigenous Kohistani value of village peace. It also contradicted the way prestige and leadership operated Leadership in Thull depended on possessing aizzat, prestige, which, among other things, required a man to have good relationships with other men in the community. Peacefully settling one's disputes helped maintain good relations. If a man continually refused to settle disputes peacefully, troubled relations often resulted, lessening his prestige and weakening his ability to lead. Members of descent groups chose leaders who would represent their interests, and they suspected that a man who was generally unwilling to forego personal revenge might further his own ends at the expense of the group Hence, countervailing forces compelling men to make peace tempered the power of badal. Though vengeance became an accepted value in Kohistani culture, it was only one of many often-contradictory forces, which partially explains why it did not result in widespread dushmani.

Honor is an important part of religious belief in Kohistan and is thus imbued with religious sanctity. The people of Thull are Muslims, and their religious faith is central to their sense of self. Visitors to Thull see mosques (Muslim places of worship) everywhere they look; I counted 18 and was never certain I had found them all. The mosques range from simple wooden platforms along the road and next to the river to ornately decorated buildings situated at the center of settlement clusters. Unlike villagers who live in the plains beneath Malakand Pass, who construct concrete mosques, men in Kohistan build mosques primarily of wood and stone. The roof of the community's central mosque located in the core settlement rests on gigantic wood columns covered with carved geometric figures.

Near the central mosque is the large, low, one-story house of one of the most influential religious leaders in Thull, a learned Muslim scholar who teaches Islamic faith in the local primary school. He wields considerable power in community affairs because of his reputation for religious learning and piety. The building's large, flat roof, called torwalo shan (Torwal's roof) after its original builder, provides a site for tovvn meetings and serves as a constant reminder of the political vigor of Islam. Indeed, Islam lies over, under, in front of, behind, around, and beyond society and culture in Thull; nothing escapes its sway.

Everywhere and in all eras, people have creatively adapted religious teachings to fit their particular cultural circumstances. Thull's version of Islamic ideology does not determine what its people do in any mechanical fashion. Instead, it possesses the power to help shape action. In many instances Islam culturally defines meaningful options. Sometimes it weights options differentially so that people pay prices and/or obtain rewards for choosing to act in particular ways. It also corners people, severely limiting their options to the extent that their behavior appears almost predetermined. No matter how people act in Thull, Islam always affects the consequence of their choices. Finally, Islamic beliefs play a crucial role in how men conceptualize their own personal integrity and thus create and release powerful emotions that propel people toward courses of actions despite personal costs.

I once asked a Kohistani friend to name the most important parts of Islam. He answered, "The Kalima³, prayer, fasting, and faith." These four features make up the heart of Islam in Thull, although other characteristics are also meaningful to Kohistanis.

God in Thull does not resemble a distant father who sees his children only on Sunday mornings, Christmas, and Easter. In Thull, God is part of everyday reality, and his name, Allah, is a regular part of formal greetings, casual conversations, and even most arguments. His relevance is overwhelmingly clear to everyone. Allah does not take the appearance of a loving parent, but instead appears as an imperious ruler who demands that his subjects unconditionally submit to his will. Fundamentally, Islam means submission as well as peace, with the implication that one achieves peace by submitting to God's will.

Submitting to God's will involves embracing iman, Islamic faith, which includes belief in angels, God's omnipotence and oneness, and a day of judgment. Muslims believe that God sent a series of prophets to spread his message on earth, and that Mohammed was the last one because he brought the perfect truth to mankind.

Kohistanis understand that their Muslim faith is a particular kind of gift from God. God gives ghrairat (honor in the sense of personal integrity) to all Muslim men at birth. No one can gain it by his actions, but anyone can lose ghrairat by failing to protect it. With few exceptions, protecting ghrairat requires taking revenge. Kohistanis believe that Muslims must protect God's gift by taking vengeance at appropriate times, or they are not meeting their obligations to him. Kohistani notions of iman thus inject vengeance into constructions of Muslim identity and help create social and cultural contexts that incubate death enmity.

For example, keeping the fast during the month of Ramazon (called Ramadan in the western Muslim world) is an important part of religious faith according to Muslim preachers, and no one admits publicly to breaking it. Accordingly, accusing anyone of failing to fast constitutes a serious charge that can lead to fighting, bloodshed, and even murder. Ramazon should be a time of prayer and a time for contemplating one's obligations as a Muslim. The pace of life changes dramatically. A kind of tense stillness hovers in the air. Men's speech and movements become slow, studied, and controlled, and a faint threat of violence continually lurks beneath the surface. Hunger and thirst create volatile tempers, and contemplating one's faith involves embracing one's obligations for vengeance. Everyone in Thull knows that Ramazon is the season for revenge.

Islam in Thull differs from the more orthodox fundamentalism found in other parts of the Muslim world as a result of a special set of accretions. These elements of Islamic ideology focus on death enmity and mold it in specific ways. Kohistanis have competed with their politically powerful Pathan neighbors for centuries. Accordingly, the peculiar nature of Pathan Islam made a deep and lasting impression on Kohistani culture. As stated earlier, Pathans differentiate themselves from surrounding people by strictly adhering to a tribal code of conduct called pakhtunwali. At its core lie four obligations: to commit vengeance, to provide hospitality, to give refuge to anyone asking for it (even a mortal enemy), and to treat a fallen adversary who sues for peace with generosity. Pakhtunwali and Islam interconnect in Pathan culture in an ambiguous way. Most Pathans claim that their common ancestor converted to Islam at an early date, allegedly becoming one of the first of Mohammed's converts. Consequently, most Pathans see themselves as archetypical Muslims, believing their way of life to be fundamentally and profoundly Islamic. At the same time, Pathans set themselves above other Muslims by strictly adhering to their distinctive code of conduct. Some Pathans will occasionally admit that pakhtunwali ostensibly makes them poor Muslims because orthodox Islamic teaching does not recognize it. Nonetheless, they declare everything Pathan to be Islamic almost by definition. An educated Pathan graduate student attending a major American university argued for the Islamic quality of Pathan culture, saying in the same breath, "No. Of course pakhtunwali is not Islamic. But yes, it is Islamic."

Kohistanis borrowed the essential features of pakhtunwali over the last 300 years of contact with the Yusufzai, the dominant Pathan tribe in Dir. Taking revenge, providing hospitality, giving refuge, and being generous to a fallen enemy became accepted rules of behavior in Thull. No Kohistani ever claimed to follow pakhtunwali, for one must be Pathan to do that. Nevertheless, Kohistanis accepted the rules of pakhtunwali as integral to Islam because they accepted the Pathan claims to be archetypal Muslims. Friends unhesitatingly told me that because the Koran (the holy book of God) and the Hadith (the holy prophet's sayings) prominently displayed these rules (which, of course, they do not), following them demonstrated Muslim piety. Revenge, consequently, became a defining characteristic of their Muslim identity.

Preachers in Thull also admonish men to control their women. The way women act directly affects ghrairat, men's gift of personal integrity from God. A woman must never walk outside her husband's (or father's) house without a proper escort, preachers proclaim. A woman must never speak to an unre-lated man. No man's direct gaze should fall on another man's wife or daugh-ter. Women (men, too, but especially women) must not sing or dance! partic-ularly at weddings. Finally, women should always comport themselves with modesty to protect their sharam (shame), hiding, controlling, minimizing, and completely denying their sexuality if possible. Men who allow their women freedom become baghraitman (men without integrity). So do those who refuse to retaliate violently against anyone purposely threatening their women's shame.

Which particular women's shame puts a man's integrity at risk varies with the situation. This factor alone intensifies death enmity in the community. Wives, daughters, and sisters always posses the power to endanger men's integrity. A man's vulnerability can extend to other women under a variety of situations. For example, the men who owned the house where I lived always guarded my research assistant's wife with their rifles whenever she left our compound. They knew she needed little protection, since only a minimal threat to her physical safety existed. But because she lived in their house, any attack on her shame by men outside the household, even a simple stare, threatened their integrity. By guarding her, they guarded themselves.

Men's vulnerability to attacks on women's shame can stretch beyond the household. Once I asked a friend to arrange a visit to a Kohistani house in the neighboring Swat valley for a group of American teachers traveling through Pakistan under the auspices of the Fulbright program. After we finished our obligatory tea and left the house, a woman in the group asked one of the Kohistani men to have his picture taken with her. Unfortunately, Kohistanis interpret such actions as explicit sexual invitations, and the man attempted to embrace her. Visibly shaken, she asked me to tell my friend, but I refused, knowing the potential for deadly violence. Three days later, after we returned to Thull, I did tell my friend. He immediately demanded to know the name of the culprit. He had arranged the visit, so he was responsible for the women in the group; his personal integrity was at risk. "Why didn't you tell me this immediately? I should have given the man an instant gift of bulletsl Tell me who he is now, so I can kill him! He has made my ghrairat bad." Fortunately, I did not know the man's name.

Configurations of moral values were not the only forces inhibiting the development of dushmani during the nawabs' reign. Ecological relation-ships as well as the nawabs' refusal to build roads were also relevant factors. During the nawabs' rule, alpine herding and agriculture formed the basis for subsistence in Kohistan. In the winter, herd owners kept goats and cattle in special quarters in or near permanent settlements, while in the summer they took their anamils into the mountains to gaze on the rich grass found in high alpine meadows. Men generally did the herding, while women cultivated maize in the fields surrounding the permanent settlements. While subsistence necessitated both herding and cultivation, herding also provided cash income Men walked to surrounding market centers in order to sell the cheese and ghee (butter) produced in the mountains.

Herding was a chancy operation at best. Disease, accidents, and sudden changes in weather common in high mountains often decimated the herds. In the past, Kohistanis raided herds in Chitral to recoup animal losses. After the nawabs incorporated Thull into Dir, however, raiding Chitral became uneconomical because the nawabs harshly punished raiders at the insistence of the British. Consequently, conflicts within the community significantly increased. Disputes over stray animals and arguments about animal theft became common, and strife turned inward.

Increased conflict did not lead to dushmani. The reason lies partly in the nature of descent group organization and the rules distributing rights to pasture. The people of Thull divide into three large patrilineal descent groups, each of which splits into various subgroups. The larger groups owned important ceremonial functions, which no longer take place, and often opposed one another politically during the era of the nawabs. When disputes erupted between subgroups of different larger groups, other subgroups often became involved through ties of common patrilineal descent.⁴ Hence, the potential existed for disputes between subgroups to grow until large numbers of people were involved. On occasion, fights involved most of the men in the community.

Rules allocating pastures, however, reduced the acrimony of conflicts. Summer pastures in Thull are divided into distinct units, each with a particular name and well-defined boundaries. Thull allocates these units to herding groups for a one-year period. Each herding group is composed of subgroups whose members come from all three descent groups. Thus, the people who herded together—who had comrnon rights to pastures and common interests in protecting these rights—were often the same people who opposed one another in descent group disputes.

This created a classic system of crosscutting allegiances. Resolving conflicts in loyalties through settling disputes dovetailed with the value of maintaining village peace. Despite the increase in intracommunity contention, dispute settlement mechanisms operated successfully because moral values and political and economic interests favored settling conflicts.

The nawabs' failure to build an extensive road system had two consequences for inhibiting the growth of dushmani. First, it physically isolated the Kohistani communities. Thull and her neighbors inhabit a high mountain valley that was connected to the rest of Dir only by narrow, treacherous footpaths during the time of the nawabs. People found communicating with distant settlements difficult in the best of weather and impossible when snow or mudslides blocked the mountain tracks. As a result, the nawabs' representatives could not visit Kohistan much of the time, which left power in the institutions of the indigenous political system. Public assemblies continued to make political decisions, and lineage leaders continued to mediate disputes on the basis of local custom and morality. Thus, the institutions for dispute settlement remained largely intact even though Thull was part of Dir.

Even more important, the lack of roads limited economic development, which in turn limited the amount of cash individuals could accumulate. Consequently, few Kohistanis could purchase rifles. Clubs, knives, stabbing spears, and slings were the most common weapons in Kohistan during the era of the nawabs. Using these weapons required men to get close to an intended victim, making it difficult to kill him. Consequently, disputes that escalated to violence did not usually result in murder. Opponents could peacefully settle such disputes because they did not arouse the same violent emotions as murder cases. Even in murder cases, men were often (although not always) willing to accept compensation because they found retaliatory killing so difficult to carry out successfully.

Following the breakup of British India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947, Pakistani officials assumed administrative duties in the Northwest Frontier Province. At first the nawab maintained control over internal affairs in Dir. But when tension developed between the nawab and Pakistani officials over his opposition to social and economic development, the government forcibly deposed him and assumed direct administration of the district in 1965. A new era marked by far-reaching change began.

The Pakistani government immediately embarked on an ambitious program of social and economic development. Government agencies built a large, modern hospital complex in Timargara, Dir's administrative center. They constructed schools, administrative offices, medical clinics, and police posts throughout the district, even in the most remote mountain regions. Government construction crews began work on an extensive network of roads to link hitherto isolated villages with the rest of the country. A bus company initiated service to Kohistan after workers completed an unpaved road connecting Thull to Dir Town, and travel outside Thull became comparatively easy. Rural electrification and the establishment of a national television channel made it possible for Kohistanis to watch reruns of Kojak and Trapper John, M.D. in hotels in Dir Town. Crews strung telephone lines in many parts of the district. And mar dushmani swept through the network of social relationships in Thull like the flu in January.

Why did dushmani become focally important in Thull social relations at the same time the government integrated the community into a modern state, implemented an educational system, and instituted programs of economic development? The answer lies in understanding how dushmani evolved in the context of changing external political conditions.

The most important external change was the construction of a transportation system linking Thull with the rest of Pakistan. During the nawabs' reign, subsistence in Thull had depended on a balance between alpine herding and agriculture. The road changed that. The rapid and inexpensive trucking of produce to market centers throughout Pakistan made potatoes an economically viable cash crop. It permitted farmers to cultivate more land by letting them import artificial fertilizer. Manure for animals had previously been the sole source of fertilizer, so the number of livestock in the community had limited the amount of land farmers could cultivate. Accordingly, the economic base in Thull shifted from a system balanced between herding and cultivation to one weighted in favor of the cultivation of potatoes as a cash crop, a transition manifested by several changes. First, the proportion of men actively engaged in herding significantly decreased after the road was built. Herding was no longer the primary source of cash income for many families, although they continued to keep four or five goats and a few head of cattle. A significant minority of men now own only a few goats, although everyone owns more than enough land for subsistence requirements. An increased proportion of land came under cultivation as herding decreased in economic importance. Farmers converted privately owned early spring pastures to more financially lucrative potato fields when they became less dependent on natural fertilizer. Few of the adult men who continued to maintain large numbers of animals remained personally active in summer herding, preferring instead to hire shepherds from other communities.

These changes nurtured dushmani in two ways. First, crosscutting ties weakened when the proportion of men actively involved in herding diminished. Maintaining good relations with members of one's herding unit became less important for the many men no longer involved in herding activities, even though the system of allocating pastures remained virtually unchanged. As crosscutting ties lost their potency in maintaining peaceful relations, dushmani began to flourish. Second, the change to an economic system based on cultivating potatoes as a cash crop coupled with an increased number of fields significantly increased the amount of money in the community. The money supply expanded even more as a result of large-scale timber exploitation, which was the main reason the government built the road in the first place. Not only did timber contractors hire local men as wage laborers, but the government also paid royalties on the timber to the community as a whole.

With increases in wealth, the number of firearms owned by members of the community increased as well; even poor men could buy rifles. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains," as Humphrey Bogart's character quipped in the movie The Big Sleep. Although this comment is perhaps a bit ethnocentric when applied to Thull, it seems appropriate nevertheless. Timber royalties and potato earnings made purchasing guns easy, and men acting out emotions framed by ghrairat and sanctified by iman turned their newly purchased rifles on neighbors in a gluttony of death enmity.

The construction of the road to Thull and the establishment of regular bus service led to more than economic change. Changes in cultural values were crucial in instituting organized violence in the network of social relationships in the community. After bus service to the outside world became available, an ever-increasing number of Thull's religious leaders traveled to Mardan and Peshawar to study with noted Pathan scholars and teachers in centers of Islamic learning. These religious leaders brought back new concepts of honor and different notions about women that helped trigger the eruption of dushmani. Innovative ideas regarding the concept of iman acted as the catalyst.

Iman has two distinct but related meanings: faith, and gift or blessing from God. Iman as faith distinguishes Muslims from Kafirs—people who have shown defiant ingratitude by their refusal to accept God's word and become Muslims. Kafirs are by definition cruel, immoral human beings. Iman as God's gift saves Muslims from being Kafirs and thus from a life of evil and depravity. What constitutes iman is subject to interpretation. All Muslims interpret iman to include the oneness of God and his omnipotence, the existence of special messengers who have brought God's word to mankind at various times, the existence of angels, and the belief in a day of judgment.

For many Muslims, iman also includes belief in the sanctity of saintly individuals and their power to mediate between God and man. Saint cults were an important part of Islamic beliefs and practices in Thull before the road to Kohistan was built. The belief in saints became heresy, however, following the indoctrination of Kohistani religious leaders in fundamentalist schools of Islamic theology that denied the existence of humans with special access to God. Religious scholars returned to their communities armed with fundamentalist theology to campaign against the belief in saints and to purify Kohistani Islam. Today there are no shrines to saints in Thull, and Kohistanis believe that mushriks (believers in saints) are little better than Kafirs.

Religious leaders also opposed music and dancing, especially at weddings, and preached that secluding women was necessary to maintain men's ghrairat. This became especially important for dushmani because it personalized the connection between male honor and the sexual purity of women. Situations demanding deadly retaliation increased.

Once the road linked Thull to Islamic centers of learning, ghrairat soon replaced the belief in saints as part of Islamic faith. Today, Kohistanis consider it a critical aspect of iman. Defining ghrairat as crucial to iman made taking vengeance a serious religious obligation, thus creating a fertile environment for dushmani.

The concept of ghrairat is closely related to badal (revenge), and when the ghrairat code became intertwined with faith, revenge became fundamental to a Muslim man's identity and self-respect. English speakers often translate both ghrairat and aizzat as honor, but these concepts have distinct meanings in Kohistani thinking. Ghrairat is perhaps best understood as honor in the sense of personal worth, integrity, or character. It is natural, a part of iman, and, therefore, a gift from God (in fact, God's most valuable gift). Every Muslim man is born with ghrairat; a man can lose it only by failing to protect it. Other people can pollute a man's ghrairat in the same way that stepping in manure pollutes one's shoe. ~

Protecting ghrairat depends on following a clearly defined code of conduct. A man must provide his wives and daughters with appropriate food and clothing to the degree his wealth allows. He must never permit his wives and daughters to speak with men who are not closely related. He must never eat or exchange friendly conversation with the enemy of a close paternal kinsman, and he must always attack anyone who sullies his ghrairat. A husband's or father's ghrairat is sullied if another man stares at his wife or daughter, reflects light from a snuff box mirror on his wife or daughter, proposes intimacy with his wife or daughter, looks through a camera at his wife or daughter, flees or attempts to flee the community with his wife or daughter, or has illicit sexual relations with his wife or daughter. The murder of a close paternal kinsman (father, brother, son, father's brother, or father's brother's son), verbal abuse, theft, and assault also pollute a man’s ghrairat and require vengeance.

Aizzat is best translated as honor in the sense of prestige. In contrast to ghrairat, aizzat is artificial since the community rather than God awards it. Aizzat depends on personal accomplishments and defines the men of worth in the community; it fluctuates with an individual's fortune. One measures aizzat by the adab (respect) accorded by others. Wealth, education, piety, and elected position all merit respect and thus confer aizzat. Although a baghrairatman (one without ghrairat) would not be given the respect necessary for aizzat, losing aizzat does not affect ghrairat. If a man loses his elected position or his wealth, he loses aizzat, but his ghrairat is unchanged.

Political honor contrasts with moral honor in Thull. Aizzat is political and thus primarily involves politicians actively competing for power. Hence, it is vital to self only for men with political or social ambitions. Ghrairat, in contrast, is moral, a quality definitive of Muslim identity for all men, and it is relevant, potentially at least, to most male social relations. The pollution of ghrairat calls for revenge, so revenge too is potentially relevant to most male relationships.

Kohistani self-respect has been rooted in Islam for centuries. Consequently, men often cast aspersions on opponents in terms of the Muslim-Kafir distinction, each accusing the other of kafirano kar karant (acting like a Kafir). Such accusations often lead to violence and even murder. Any act considered an attack on ghrairat arouses particularly strong passions which are usually expressed through violent retaliatory actions because it strikes at the core of a man's self respect, his identity as a Muslim.

Ghrairat requires men to always be wary and ready to kill in order to protect their integrity. Men who may have inadvertently or deliberately acted in ways that can be interpreted as polluting another man's ghrairat must be constantly vigilant to stay alive. Hence, ghrairat creates a sea of potential enemies and places each man squarely in the middle. That tension is pervasive in male social relationships and acid indigestion a common medical complaint should surprise no one.

Ghrairat not only encouraged dushmani, but the rules defining attacks on ghrairat also created linked sequences of reciprocal murders. If, for example, a man killed another man for shining a light on his wife, then that murder cleansed his ghrairat. But the killing polluted the ghrairat of the murdered man's close paternal kin, requiring them to kill in return. Consequently, men developed relationships of dushmani both easily and often. Once developed, these relationships were difficult to end. The blood feud had come to Thull in full force.

Genetic explanations do not work well in explaining blood feud violence in Thull. Blood feuding developed only recently in that community, and it developed within a historical context shaped not by the genetic makoup of the inhabitants, but rather by economic change and political modernization. It can best be understood as the result of two interrelated developments: the transition to an ideological system in which honor became critically important, and the transition from a subsistence system based on herding and cultivation to an economic system built on timbering and cash-crop agriculture. Linking honor to Muslim faith injected revenge into religion and made taking revenge critical to men's self-respect, while economic development made the spread of modern firearms possible. Together they encouraged and perhaps even required organized vengeance within the community. The people of Thull give meaning to and justify violence through the interaction of historical, cultural, ecological, and political variables, which are systematically interrelated. They are all parts of the same puzzle.

Ahmed, Akbar S.
1983 Religion and Politics in Muslim Society. Cambridge Cambridge university Press. A study of Islam, honor, and politics among the waziris, a Pathan tribe located in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.

Barth, Fredrik
1956 Indus and Swat Kohistan. Oslo Forenede Trykkerier. The classic study of Kohistani social organization and culture in the Indus and Swat valleys.

Biddulph, John
1971 [1880] Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh. Graz, Austria: Akademische, Druck-u. VeHagsanstalt. An early account of Hindu-Kush tribal communities, including Thull, by a colonel in the British Army.

Edwards, Davld B.
1996 Heroes of the Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Contains an excellent account of honor and blood-feud violence among the Safis, a Pathan tribe located in Afghanistan across the border from the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.

Jettmar, Karl
1961 Ethnological Research in Dardistan. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105(1):28. A useful summary of ethnographic research in Dir, Swat, and Indus Kohistan prior to 1961.

Keay, John
1979 The Gilgit Game. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. A historical account of British explorers in the Hindu-Kush Mountains during the 19th century.

Keiser, Lincoln
1986 Foul Shots and Rifle Fire. Natural History 95(9):8-14. An account of Kohistani pickup basketball as shaped by Kohistani cultural val-ues and economic change.

1991 Friend by Day, Enemy by Night. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A study of blood-feud violence in the Kohistani community of Thull.

Robertson, Sir George Scott
1896 Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush. London: Lawrence and Bullen, Ltd.