The Piruzai of Afghanistan
A Visual Ethnography
Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper
This book is a priceless treasure! It makes you see Afghans and Afghanistan in vivid colours with their humanity and generosity of spirit shining brightly, rather than the monochrome news coverage of their sad predicament today.
Mukulika Banerjee, Author of ‘The Pathan Unarmed’. Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics
In the early 1970s Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper spent a year living with the Piruzai, pastoralists and farmers in northern Afghanistan. They joined the Piruzai in the spring pastures, trekked with Piruzai families, their camels, horses, sheep, goats and dogs, to the high mountains of the Hazarajat in the summer and returned with them to their farmlands in the autumn. And they took hundreds of photographs.
This book reproduces 380 of those photos, most in colour. It is a visual ethnography of the beauty of the people they met and the landscape in which they lived and travelled. The pictures are an evocation of a time of peace before the country was engulfed in nearly fifty years of war, and an historical record of the lives of people who have since had to cope with great tragedy and whose relatives and descendants have been major actors in more recent events.
This book is also a work of art. The landscapes are simply spectacular. But equally striking are the pictures of family groups, of people working and the intimate portraits of women and men and children. All too often Afghans have been stereotyped for other people’s political purposes, but here you meet warm, clear-sighted individuals who can laugh at themselves and are kind, curious and wise about others.
This book is published by the authors in association with The White Horse Press.
With its personalised commentary and beautiful images of people and landscape, this precious book captures the essence of a remarkable pastoral nomadic culture now lost.
Veronica Doubleday, Writer and Musician. Author of ‘Three Women of Herat’
The authors are pillars in the ethnography of Afghanistan. In Afghan Village Voices, they gave us a chance to hear their interlocutors directly. In The Piruzai of Afghanistan, we can now see them. A striking visual journey into an ill-understood part of the world. A great homage to the Piruzai
Chihab El Khachab, Author of ‘Making Film in Egypt’. Visual Anthropologist, University of Oxford
This deeply moving book and its beautiful photographs will be widely read and result in much-needed reflection on the injustices inflicted on Afghanistan’s people and environments over the past half century and more.
Magnus Marsden, Author of ‘Beyond the Silk Roads’. Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex
THE AUTHORS
Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper studied and taught anthropology at School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her book Bartered Brides is a classic ethnography of the Piruzai. She retired early from teaching to retrain as an artist at Central St. Martins. She has had solo exhibitions of her paintings, prints and photographs at Linacre and Wolfson Colleges in Oxford, the Central Library in Manchester and SOAS in London.
Richard Tapper is emeritus Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, and has done field research in Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. He has published widely on tribal organization and history, pastoral nomadism, Iranian cinema and the anthropology of food. This book is a companion volume to Richard’s Afghan Village Voices, a remarkable compilation of stories, drawn from a hundred hours of tape recordings in which the Piruzai speak for themselves.
15th August 2025
ISBN 978-1-917813-00-6 (HB) – £40
eISBN 978-1-917813-01-3 (eBook PDF) – £20