Chi ha inventato la democrazia? Antropologia politica fra Afghanistan e Pakistan

This work is a study of precolonial political systems in the Hindu Kush-Karakorum area (Peristan), based on field work carried out over a span of thirty years. The study is based on an original theoretical framework, contrasting two opposite models of political systems and defining new models of reciprocity and redistribution. This framework is applied to the analysis of interacting political and religious changes in the whole region, before proceeding to focus the research on the district of Chitral and the neighbouring Bashgal valley. After a synthetic description of the political and administrative organization of the former principality of Chitral, attention is drawn to the political structures of the non-muslim Kalasha people of southern Chitral and to the basic cultural categories that underlie them. There follows an analysis of the politics and economics of the pre-islamic cultures of the Bashgal valley and the changes they have incurred over a period of two centuries until the times of the recent Afghan wars down to the present. The epilogue is an excursion on the subject of political change in human history, which applies the theoretical categories previously tested through the ethnographic inquiry. The work includes an Appendix on ethnohistory and history writing on the area of Chitral.