World Cultures

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri's extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

Today, the majority of the world's Christian population lives in the Global South. This textbook offers in one volume a compact and vivid overview of the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America since 1450, focussing on diversity and interdependence, local actors and global entanglements.

Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations--that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how--faced with frontiers--they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.