Peristan as here defined runs from the province of Nuristan and the Pashai districts in northeastern Afghanistan, to the edge of Kashmir, including the districts of Chitral, Dir Kohistan, Swat Kohistan, Hunza, Gilgit, Chilas and Indus Kohistan, all in northern Pakistan. Peristan is inhabited by a variety of peoples, speaking some twenty different languages. With the sole exception of Burushaski (spoken by the Burusho of Hunza), all these languages belong to the Eastern branch of the Indo-European family. What all these people have in common is their historical cultural background, which is the subject of this book: until the 1500's, they all had pre-Islamic cultures belonging to the kind that has been styled "Kafir", an Arab-Persian word meaning "pagans".

MAP

Pre-islamic Peristan was divided, according to the authors, in five distinct geo-cultural regions

With a polytheistic religion of archaic rites and sexual symbolism, a political ideology of egalitarianism and redistribution, an early iron age technology, an economy of herding, raids and small scale farming, the Kafirs had something of the American Indians and something of Homeric Greece: they are the only instance in the Indo-European world in which archaic, pagan cultures like those of the origins have survived through the millennia down to the present. Starting from the 16th century, Islam slowly began to penetrate Peristan and convert its inhabitants until, at the arrival of the British in the late 19th century, only present-day Nuristan and some valleys of lower Chitral, were still unconverted. Nuristan was conquered by Abdur Rahman, ruler of Afghanistan, in 1895, and converted within a few decades, while the Kalasha of lower Chitral remain unconverted to this day.

Curiously, this whole cultural area has been largely ignored not only by anthropologists and historians, but also by Indo-Europeanists, who would find here a rich lore of symbols, rites, myths and institutions whose comparative analysis could bring a lot of light on the past of the Indo-European world. The importance of Peristan for the early eastern Indo-European world is comparable to that of the Caucasus (a region of comparable size and complexity) for the western Indo-Europeans. Yet the available literature on Peristan is fragmentary, largely non-specialist and often hard to come by, while much of the research of the second half of the 20th century has never been published in English. This book, therefore, fills in a large gap: it provides a precious introduction to the area, based on field research and an extensive study of the written sources (see Bibliography), that can be of great use not only to Indo-Europeanists and students of the Middle-East and Central Asia, but to anybody concerned with such broad anthropological issues as the economics of gift, tribute and market, or the dynamics of myth and history in oral traditions, the politics of acephalous societies, the development of early states, the mutual interpretation of cultures.

Where is Peristan?